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      Rainbow Armbands Are Flash Point for Qatar World Cup

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      An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.LONDON — FIFA and World Cup organizers came under pressure on Wednesday from a group of European soccer federations who said they planned to have their captains wear armbands with a rainbow heart design as part of an anti-discrimination campaign during international matches and at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.The group of European soccer federations, which includes the World Cup contenders England, Germany and France, joined forces on Wednesday in announcing their intention to have their captains wear the armbands, which feature a so-called One Love design that is similar in design — but not identical — to the well-known Pride flag that serves as a symbol for the gay rights movement.One Love ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜In a statement against discrimination and for diversity, @Manuel_Neuer will wear a special captain’s armband for our upcoming Nations League games and during the World Cup in Qatar ©️ pic.twitter.com/fiORl1Nu0t— Germany (@DFB_Team_EN) September 21, 2022
      The Dutch soccer federation, which has played a leading role in the campaign, said eight European teams that have qualified for Qatar would take part, and that two others would wear the armbands in coming national team matches in a European competition, the Nations League. The group of national federations includes the teams of Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Wales, Sweden and Switzerland.The announcement is the latest front in a rift between soccer governing bodies and nations competing in Qatar who have faced sustained pressure from fans, human rights groups and others to take a stand against the Gulf country’s laws against homosexuality and the treatment of the hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers who helped the tiny emirate prepare for the Middle East’s first World Cup.Read More on the 2022 World CupA New Start Date: A last-minute request for the tournament to begin a day earlier was only the latest bit of uncertainty to surround soccer’s showcase event.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.The armbands have not yet been approved by soccer’s governing body, FIFA, which has strict rules on how teams can be dressed at the World Cup, and on the insertion of politics and social issues onto the field of play. The decision by the federations to apply public pressure highlights the fine line that competing teams — as well as FIFA and its sponsors — are trying to navigate in balancing the demands of their fans and human rights groups while not upsetting Qatar, a conservative Muslim nation and the tournament’s host.“Wearing the armband together on behalf of our teams will send a clear message when the world is watching,” the England captain Harry Kane said in a statement.The armbands’ design, while using rainbow colors, stops short of matching the more common Pride flag. Qatari officials have long said that all fans are welcome at the monthlong tournament in November and December, but security officials there also have warned supporters not to travel with the rainbow flag for their own safety, and it remains unclear how same-sex couples will be treated when it comes to policing and accommodations.For FIFA, the armbands are merely the latest lightning rod for a tournament that has stirred controversy and disquiet since Qatar was first awarded hosting rights in December 2010. Earlier this week, the Polish captain Robert Lewandowski, the reigning FIFA player of the year, accepted an armband in the colors of Ukraine’s flag from the Ukrainian soccer great Andriy Shevchenko that he said he would carry with him to Qatar.Poland was among the European nations that said they would not play against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in February. FIFA eventually banned Russia from playing international soccer, a decision that led to its elimination from the World Cup qualification playoffs.FIFA managed to fend off an appeal of the ban from Russia by arguing that it could not organize the World Cup if a large number of teams refused to play the country. The same strength-in-numbers rationale may have been behind the decision by the group of Europeans nations to have their captains wear the rainbow armbands.“Football is there for everyone and our sport must stand up for the people across the world who face discrimination and exclusion,” said Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, who captains his national team. “I am proud to be sending out this message with my colleagues from the other national teams. Every single voice counts.”England’s soccer federation also announced that it would be lobbying to strengthen migrant-worker rights in Qatar, and expressed its support for compensation to be paid for any injuries and deaths during the construction phase of the World Cup. That desire stopped short of an effort from several human rights groups who are urging FIFA to create a $440 million compensation fund for workers.Felix Jakens, an official with Amnesty International in Britain, said English soccer officials should specifically push for a “fund for abused workers and the families of those who’ve died to make the World Cup happen.”Human rights groups have claimed that more than 6,000 workers have died in construction projects related to the World Cup. Qatari World Cup officials have put that number at three, limiting their responsibility to those who died specifically building stadiums for the event. More

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      Chile Loses Appeal Seeking Ecuador’s Place in World Cup

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      A FIFA panel reaffirmed an earlier decision dismissing Chile’s claim that its rival fielded an ineligible player. Chile plans one last appeal.Chile failed Friday in its latest attempt to have its South American rival Ecuador thrown out of soccer’s World Cup, another setback in a high-stakes campaign that threatened to alter the field for the sport’s showcase championship only two months before the tournament’s opening match.An appeals committee at soccer’s governing body, FIFA, rejected Chile’s newest claim, agreeing with an earlier decision by a disciplinary panel to reject the contention that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player in several qualification matches. The FIFA appeals panel provided few details on how it reached its decision, though it said the fact that the player, Byron Castillo, holds permanent Ecuadorean citizenship as justification for siding with the original verdict in the case.Chile contends that Castillo, a 23-year-old defender, was not only born in Colombia but also that he is three years older than stated on the documents used to identify him as Ecuadorean.Chilean officials said they would make one final attempt to overturn the decision, and strip Ecuador of its place in the tournament, by appealing to the final arbiter of sports disputes, the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.The fight over the eligibility of Castillo, who plays professionally in Mexico, has for months generated uncertainty over Ecuador’s place at the World Cup, which opens in November. One of four qualifiers from South America, Ecuador is scheduled to face host Qatar in the tournament’s opening game on Nov. 20.Chile, which filed the appeal that also required Peru’s federation to make a submission, has for weeks fought a public battle to denounce Ecuador and Castillo. Under FIFA rules, fielding an ineligible player could result in a forfeit of any match in which that player took part.Read More on the 2022 World CupLavish Spending: No expense has been spared in putting on a show in Qatar. But the tournament is a feeling that money can’t buy, our soccer correspondent writes.A New Flash Point: An effort by European soccer federations to highlight gay rights with rainbow armbands during the World Cup could force a collision between FIFA rules and social campaigns.United States: The American men’s soccer team has cycled through strikers during the qualifying period. It needs to settle on one before heading to Qatar.Brazil: As the team begins its quest for a sixth World Cup, it appears to have the resources needed to succeed — though Neymar still shoulders much of the load.Ecuador finished fourth in South America’s qualifying competition, claiming one of the continent’s four automatic places in the World Cup. But Chile had demanded that Ecuador forfeit the eight qualification games in which Castillo appeared, and that its opponents in those matches be granted three points per game. That outcome, Chilean officials had calculated, would rearrange the qualifying results in South America and lift Chile into fourth place, and into the World Cup, at Ecuador’s expense.To support its claim that Castillo should not have been allowed to play for Ecuador, Chilean officials scoured public records and social media posts and hired media consultants in Europe to keep attention focused on its case, and its claims. Chile’s federation, meanwhile, sent to FIFA registry documents, including birth certificates and other evidence — even paperwork that, it said, proved where and when Castillo was baptized.Only days before the appeal hearing, Chilean officials also secured an audio recording from a 2018 investigation in which Castillo appeared; in it, the player seemed to confirm details of his early life in Colombia. That recording was then published by news media.A FIFA disciplinary committee had rejected the claims against Castillo and Ecuador in June, but the organization’s rules allowed Chile to make its case anew to an appeals body. The hearing took place via video conference on Thursday but Castillo did not take part even though he had been required to join.“The footballing world heard a player who helped Ecuador qualify for the FIFA World Cup admit he was born in Colombia and that he gained an Ecuadorean passport using false information,” said Jorge Yungue, the general secretary of the Chilean soccer federation. “No wonder he refused to participate.”“What does it say about appeal committee that, confronted with all this, still they fail to act?” he added in a statement that confirmed Chile’s intention to go to CAS.Castillo’s background has been shrouded in questions for several years. A wider investigation into player registrations in Ecuador looked into hundreds of cases and resulted in punishments for at least 75 youth players found to have falsified records. Wary of a mistake that might jeopardize Ecuador’s World Cup hopes this year, officials from its national soccer federation had held off on selecting Castillo for the senior national team until this year.Two years ago, in fact, the president of a special investigation commission convened by the federation appeared to suggest Castillo was Colombian, something that Chilean officials said they had substantiated. Ecuador’s federation finally selected Castillo for the national team after his nationality was recognized and formalized by judicial bodies in that country.For FIFA, the lingering case has been an additional burden as it grapples with ongoing concerns about the preparedness for Qatar to stage the World Cup. It got an assist from Ecuador in August, when the country’s soccer federation agreed to a request that its game be moved a day earlier so that Qatar could play in the tournament opener on a day free of other matches. More

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      How an Afghan Soccer Player Escaped the Taliban and Began a New Life

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      .interactive-content { max-width: none; width: 100% !important; } .g-topper { background-color: rgb(20, 20, 20); position: relative; width: 100%; } .g-topper .g-background { height: 100vh; position: sticky; top: 0; width: 100%; } .g-topper .g-background img, .g-topper .g-background video { height: 100%; -o-object-fit: cover; object-fit: cover; opacity: 0; position: absolute; top: 0; transform: translate3d(0, 0px, 0px); width: […] More

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      Soccer’s Return to Ukraine Is Marred by Broken Contracts and Bad Faith

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      European soccer offered support to Ukrainian teams when Russia invaded the country. Now, as rivals bargain shop in wartime, one top club says the sense of solidarity is gone.Like his fellow chief executives at soccer clubs across Europe, Sergei Palkin of the Ukrainian team Shakhtar Donetsk spent weeks this summer negotiating player trades.He and Fulham, a team newly promoted to England’s Premier League, settled on a fee of about $8 million for Manor Solomon, Shakhtar’s Israeli attacker. Then Palkin agreed to accept a payment around double that amount from Lyon, in France’s Ligue 1, for another of Shakhtar’s foreign-born stars, the 22-year-old Brazilian midfielder Tetê.The deals were a financial lifeline for Shakhtar: They would deliver a vital cash infusion to club accounts battered by war with Russia in exchange for valuable talents who, in some cases, no longer wanted to play in Ukraine.But just when the contracts for the deals, and others, were about to be signed, world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, announced that it had extended a regulation allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian clubs to temporarily go elsewhere without penalty. The rule — created in March as an interim measure when Ukraine’s season was suspended — would now remain in place for the entire 2022-23 season, FIFA said.And with that, both Lyon and Fulham informed Palkin that they were scrapping the multimillion-dollar deals the sides had discussed. Instead, they would take the players for nothing.“They just talk about the football family,” Palkin said. “But in real life there is no football family.”The Shakhtar chief executive Sergei Palkin.Bradley Secker for The New York TimesA Lyon spokesman said the club disputed Palkin’s recounting of events, but declined to provide details. Fulham declined to comment.Both teams abided by the rules, but the incidents — and others — have left Palkin frustrated and angry. In July, Shakhtar announced plans to sue FIFA for $50 million — the value, it says, of deals that vaporized when the rule allowing players to break their Ukrainian contracts was extended.The situation is a far cry from the widespread messages of solidarity with Ukraine from soccer’s leaders and rival teams in the days and weeks after Russia’s invasion began in February. Instead, Palkin says he has been left with a distaste for the way some in the soccer community have treated Ukrainian clubs like Shakhtar. Shows of support and kind words have been replaced by broken promises and the poaching of players and youth prospects, all of it, in his view, driven by the oil that lubricates the industry: money.The State of the WarZaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant: After United Nations inspectors visited the Russian-controlled facility last week amid continuing shelling and fears of a looming nuclear catastrophe, the organization released a report calling for Russia and Ukraine to halt all military activity around the complex.Europe’s Energy Crisis: European leaders are pushing through economic relief packages to soften the blow of soaring costs tied to the war. In Germany, officials are trying a range of measures to alleviate the crisis, including extending the lives of two of the country’s last nuclear reactors.Russia’s Military Expansion: Though President Vladimir V. Putin ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, he seems reluctant to declare a draft. Here is why.Relying on Old Tech: Russia’s new cruise missiles and attack helicopters appear to contain low-tech components, analysts found, undercutting Moscow’s narrative of a rebuilt military that rivals its Western adversaries.Lyon, for example, recently offered to pay Shakhtar 3 million euros, or about $3.01 million, for the permanent transfer of Tetê, Palkin said — less than one-fifth of what Shakhtar believed it had agreed on as a fee for him earlier this summer. Palkin turned down the offer.“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It’s peanuts. It’s not respectful from FIFA or the clubs.”FIFA said its position of allowing foreign players under contract with Ukrainian teams to play elsewhere temporarily is better than the alternative: players’ unilaterally breaking their contracts. But while there appears to be no sign that the war is ending, there is now also little likelihood that many of the players will ever return to their Ukrainian clubs.When Shakhtar takes the field on Tuesday for its first game on Ukrainian soil since last December — part of the long-delayed restart of the country’s top league — very little will be the same beyond the team’s familiar burnt orange colors. For the first time in two decades, a team known for stocking its roster with imported stars will be almost exclusively Ukrainian. There will be no fans at the stadium in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and Shakhtar’s latest temporary home, for the match against Metalist 1925. And the players from both teams will have gone through drills of what to do in the event they hear the air raid siren while they are on the field.Nothing is normal, Palkin admitted, but for the sake of Ukrainian soccer, the games must be played. If the season does not start, he said, some soccer clubs in the country would probably fold.Two clubs are already gone from the 16-team league: F.C. Mariupol and Desna Chernihiv, which both announced they their withdrawals ahead of this season. Chernihiv, near the border with Belarus, has been battered by Russian forces, and Mariupol, a southern port city, is now under Russian control. The city, besieged for weeks, has been described by the United Nations as the “deadliest place in Ukraine.”Even in other cities, though, signs of war will be hard to avoid. Palkin said the threat of a Russian attack on matches cannot be discounted.“They can target anything in Ukraine,” he said of the Russian military and its allies in the war. Shakhtar will play its games in Kyiv and Lviv, the city where, at the start of the war, the club helped pay to convert the soccer stadium it had been using into a shelter for refugees.Families living inside the Arena Lviv, which will host some of Shakhtar’s matches when Ukraine’s top soccer league opens its delayed season this week.Mauricio Lima for The New York TimesShakhtar also will play in Europe’s top club competition, the Champions League, but those games will be held in Warsaw because European soccer’s governing body, UEFA, has barred Ukraine from hosting international games as a safety precaution.Shakhtar officials had proposed playing the Ukrainian league games outside the country, too. But the government overruled the idea, deciding that live games, even in empty stadiums and in the comparatively safer western part of the country, would serve as an important prong of the propaganda war.“Ukrainian sports and the will to win on all fronts cannot be stopped!” Ukraine’s sports minister, Vadym Gutzeit, wrote on his Facebook page last week. His post, heralding the return of the Ukrainian Premier League, outlined a list of protocols that must be followed at each game, including evacuation plans, fixed shelters no more than 500 meters, or about 1,640 feet, from each stadium, and a script for stadium announcers in the event that air raid sirens sound: “Attention! Air alarm! We ask everyone to follow us to the shelter!”While Gutzeit’s post highlighted the extraordinary conditions in which soccer will return to Ukraine, it also underlined why many players were not eager to return and take part.Palkin said about 10 players from Shakhtar’s under-19 team had refused to return to Ukraine, where a youth league is also being organized. “I understand them,” he said. “I can’t guarantee they will be safe.” More

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      World Cup Worries Mount With 100 Days (Give or Take) to Go

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      A last-minute request to change the tournament’s start date is only the latest bit of uncertainty surrounding soccer’s showcase event.At a flashy ceremony on Nov. 21 last year, some of Qatar’s most senior officials, including the Gulf nation’s prime minister, joined the FIFA president Gianni Infantino, top soccer executives and invited guests for a celebration. They gathered on Doha’s corniche, the sweeping promenade that hugs the city’s shimmering waterfront, to unveil an ornate countdown clock and to mark a milestone: the day they were celebrating was precisely one year before the opening of the 2022 World Cup.Infantino, who now resides in Qatar, offered exultant praise for his hosts. He said their preparations for the event — roughly $200 billion in investments since Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2010 — were beyond compare: So good, in fact, that Infantino, a veteran soccer administrator, declared that he had “never witnessed anything like what is happening here.”Infantino’s bullish language might now better describe something few in soccer have seen before: the state of uncertainty and rising concern that surrounds several elements of the tournament affecting fans, sponsors and broadcasters. Not least of them? The day the World Cup will actually begin.World Cup organizers this week made an unprecedented request to reschedule the start date of the tournament in order to give Qatar, as the host, pride of place in the opening match. They asked for a ruling by Thursday, only months before the tournament and a matter of hours before a series of events marking 100 days to kickoff is set to begin.FIFA President Gianni Infantino was asked only this week to approve a change to the World Cup schedule.Mohammed Dabbous/ReutersThe request to play the first match on Nov. 20 — a day earlier than previously announced — is expected to be approved. But moving the date of the opening game, and shifting the kickoff time of another match the next day, will disrupt plans made by teams, fans, sponsors and broadcasters and even the tournament’s marketing staff, which has spent millions of dollars buying advertising space around the world to mark the 100-day countdown to the World Cup — a day now cloaked in questions — in signage wrapping buses and taxis in major capital cities around the world. All of those campaigns, as of Thursday, could now launch with the wrong start date for the tournament.The late schedule change, though, is only the latest high profile question that is adding to a growing air of uncertainty, inside and outside Qatar’s World Cup organization, about the ability of the tiny gulf nation — the smallest ever to host the World Cup — to pull off a tournament for which organizers have had 12 years to prepare.Three months before the tournament, for example, Qatar has yet to unveil concrete plans about the kind of experience fans can expect during their visits, including what they will need to enter the country; where they will stay when they arrive; how the police will handle violations of Qatari laws about public behavior; and where and how fans will be able to consume alcoholic beverages in Qatar, a conservative Muslim country where the sale of alcohol is tightly controlled and where the public consumption of it is almost nonexistent.London cabs decorated to mark 100 days until the start of the World Cup. The date on the door, though, soon may be wrong.How the tournament — with more than one million visitors expected to visit — will be secured also still has not been articulated. Qatar has signed policing agreements with several nations, notably Turkey, which in January said it would be providing more than 3,000 security personnel, including riot police, for a tournament in which fans of the 32 competing nations — some of them bitter rivals — will rub shoulders for weeks in an area smaller than the state of Connecticut.Read More on the 2022 World CupA Last-Minute Change: Only months before the tournament, FIFA is considering a request for the event to start one day earlier, allowing Qatar to be featured in the first match.Chile’s Failed Bid: The country’s soccer federation had argued Ecuador should be ejected from the tournament to the benefit of the Chilean team. FIFA disagreed.Golden Sunset: This year’s World Cup will most likely be the last for stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo — a profound watershed for soccer.Senegalese Pride: Aliou Cissé, one of the best soccer coaches in Africa, has given Senegal a new sense of patriotism. Next up: the World Cup.Unofficially, Qatari officials have said the imported security officers will not be in direct contact with fans. But so far — and unlike for previous World Cups — scant detail on that matter, and several others, has been publicly available. Asked two days ago for clarification on questions about several World Cup topics, Qatari officials have yet to respond.There have also been concerns about accommodations, with delays in the release of rooms to the public and fans reporting a lack of availability on a portal reserved for ticket-holders, who are expected to be the only foreigners who will be allowed to enter Qatar during the monthlong World Cup. (This guidance, too, remains unclear as of this week.)Those who have managed to find accommodations, which can only be booked after fans have paid for tickets, have complained about high prices even in the rare cases where they have found availability.Ronan Evain, the executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella organization of fan groups, said the numbers of official fan groups traveling to Qatar to support European teams most likely will be significantly lower than for the last World Cup, which was held in Russia. The defending World Cup champion France, in one example, expects only 100 fans to attend as part of its official supporters group.Other fan groups, Evain said, are considering flying in and out of Qatar for matches because they have concluded doing so would be cheaper, and easier, than staying in Qatar. Germany’s fan club has already said it will be commuting to games from Dubai. “I don’t think they realize how problematic their accommodation situation is,” Evain said. “The whole system to book accommodation is so unclear ticket-holders are reluctant to book.”At the same time, representatives of some participating teams are discovering that finding space for players to socialize outside of their hotels in such a small geographic area has been an issue. “I don’t know if they get out of the hotel, they will be surrounded with thousands of fans,” said Iva Olivari, the team manager for Croatia.“I cannot tell you exactly what we are facing,” she added. “We will have to deal with it when we get there.”Warning: World Cup timing is, for now, not set in stone. Mustafa Abumunes/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor FIFA’s partners, the continuing uncertainty has been an unrelenting challenge. The last-ditch plan to change the tournament’s start date in particular will create chaos for the plans crafted months in advance by sponsors, according to Ricardo Fort, the former longtime sports marketing head at Coca-Cola.“They invited and confirmed hospitality guests, booked flights and hotels, and contracted with all necessary logistics,” Fort wrote in a Twitter post. “Imagine changing it all!”Officials in Qatar’s organizing committee have by now gotten used to such last-minute and sometimes inexplicable revisions to plans that were months in the making. In 2019, for example, staff members who had prepared a detailed marketing and communication plan to announce the opening of what was to be the al-Wakrah stadium were stunned to discover — only minutes before the country’s emir arrived to open the venue — that he had taken to social media to say it would instead be called the al-Janoub stadium.At other times, Qatar and its ambassadors have been their own worst enemies. Asked on a call with reporters last year about how many migrant workers have died on construction projects, a question that organizers have faced since work first began on World Cup projects almost a decade ago, Nasser al-Khater, the chief executive of the organizing committee, appeared to guess at the number before being corrected by a staff member. In April, World Cup officials had to provide clarifications after a senior security official told a reporter that rainbow flags, a symbol of gay rights, could be seized from fans for their own protection.To help tell its story, Qatar also enlisted — at great expense — a group of former soccer players, most prominent among them David Beckham, the former England captain. But despite receiving millions of dollars to bless Qatar’s World Cup project with his fame, Beckham has proved to be a reluctant advocate, preferring to attend events only when the news media is not present. Beckham has never said publicly why he signed up to endorse the tournament, and his spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.This week brought a new crisis over the tournament’s start date. FIFA’s secretary general, in the letter sent to top soccer leaders requesting the change, said FIFA had assessed the commercial and legal effects of moving Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador forward one day and “determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposal.”Some fans, though, will be left disappointed. In addition to shifting Qatar’s game, FIFA also proposed moving the time of a game between Netherlands and Senegal set for the original opening day, Nov. 21, to an evening kickoff from its original afternoon start.Martín Bauzá, a New Yorker, said that would mean he could no longer use the tickets he has bought for the Netherlands game, because he also has tickets for the United States-Wales match that begins an hour after it ends. And he probably will not be the only one grumbling.“I would imagine it would cause a few headaches for broadcasters,” said Graham Fry, chairman of IMG’s production unit, a veteran of major event coverage.“They would have already planned programming for that day, scheduled previews for the World Cup,” he added, noting such decisions often must be made months in advance.Another issue of direct interest to many fans — the plan to serve alcohol at the World Cup — has still not been articulated, despite months of discussions and even though one of FIFA’s biggest partners is Budweiser, which expects its products to be available to supporters across World Cup sites.The most recent proposal, which has yet to be made public, is for beer to be sold after the security check outside stadiums but not inside the stadiums themselves. Fans also will be able to drink at fan parks, but at the moment that privilege will only be available at certain times of the day. Which times? World Cup organizers still have not said. More

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      FIFA Seeks Late Changes to Qatar World Cup Schedule

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      In a letter sent only months before the tournament, organizers have requested that the World Cup start one day earlier and allow Qatar, the host nation, to feature in its first match.Qatar has had 12 years to plan for the World Cup. Now, with the first games of the tournament just over 100 days away and the intricate match schedule announced months ago, organizers have requested changes that would make the event start a day earlier so the host nation can have a featured place in the opening game.In recent years, the World Cup host nation has appeared in the tournament’s first match, as the headliner in the monthlong event’s elaborate opening ceremony. But this year, in a break with that tradition, organizers took the unusual step of scheduling Qatar’s first game as the third of four matches on a busy first day of competition on Nov. 21.Now a proposal to move Qatar’s game to Nov. 20 has been sent to the most senior officials of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body and the organizer of the World Cup. Those officials, a group that includes the leaders of soccer’s six global confederations and the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, will decide whether to approve it.It is unclear why organizers — and FIFA — had not originally planned for Qatar to play in the tournament’s opening game, a stage reserved for every tournament host since the World Cup was staged in Germany in 2006. Before then, the defending champion was customarily granted the honor of opening the tournament.“It has been a longstanding tradition to mark the start of the FIFA World Cup with an opening ceremony on the occasion of the first match featuring either the hosts or the defending champions, a factor that is considered to have significant value from a ceremonial, cultural and commercial point of view,” FIFA wrote in a letter to members of the bureau that was reviewed by The New York Times.The Lusail stadium, the largest of the eight arenas built or renovated for the World Cup, is set to host 10 matches, including the final.Pawel Kopczynski/ReutersIn addition to changing the date of Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador, the proposed adjustment would affect another match set for the tournament’s opening day: Senegal’s game against the Netherlands, which would be moved out of its afternoon time slot into an evening window.Planning for the Qatar World Cup has been bumpy. Granting the hosting rights to Qatar eventually required FIFA to move the event to the Northern Hemisphere’s winter because the searing summer temperatures in the Gulf were deemed to pose a potential health risk to players, officials and the hundreds of thousands of fans expected at the tournament.The switch has upended the soccer calendar, leading to an unprecedented midseason interruption to the European league season and other competitions around the world. Negotiations with clubs — furious about the weekslong disruptions to their league schedules and television contracts — resulted in the tournament’s being played in fewer days (28) than any other event since it was expanded to 32 teams in 1998.“As the tournament approaches, the FIFA administration is now fully aware of the various sporting, operational, commercial and legal implications of this uniquely compressed schedule,” FIFA wrote in its letter.FIFA told officials that it would like them to approve the change by Thursday evening European time.The sudden push to change the date of the opening game has only added to concerns about Qatar’s readiness to stage the World Cup. Already fans are complaining about a shortage of accommodations and a lack of clarity over the consumption of alcohol during the tournament.Should the switch of the opening match be approved, overseas ticket-holders who had planned to attend would face the potential challenge of changing their travel plans and rebooking hotel rooms, and any players competing in European leagues — Ecuador at times has more than a dozen — would have one fewer day to travel and prepare.The plan has already caused disquiet among ticket holders, with the proposed changes making some combinations of games all but impossible for visitors to attend. New York-based Martín Bauzá told The Times he had secured tickets for the game between Senegal and the Netherlands and the United States opener with Wales later that day. FIFA switching Senegal’s game to the later slot means he would not be able to attend both games, with the second game starting an hour after the first ends.“I did purchase Senegal/Netherlands specifically because of the time difference between matches and in accordance with the FIFA ticket rules that require 4 hours between matches (i.e., cannot purchase tickets to back to back matches) which is now the scenario I will have to deal with,” Bauzá said in a message.World Cup organizers said they had consulted with Qatar and the soccer associations of the two affected teams before proposing the change. Its letter suggested neither national team objected to the change.Separately, a FIFA appeals committee is considering an appeal by Chile to throw Ecuador out of the World Cup over accusations that Ecuador had fielded an ineligible player. Several Ecuadorean players based in Europe would only have six days to prepare for the tournament, fewer than any others involved in the World Cup.“The FIFA administration has assessed the commercial and legal implications of the proposal — including the impact on contractual commitments across media rights, sponsorship, and ticketing and hospitality — as well as the impact on traveling fans, and has determined that any risk is sufficiently outweighed by the value and benefits of the proposals,” FIFA said in the letter. More

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      Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini Acquitted of Fraud in Swiss Trial

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      Blatter, the former president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, and Platini, his onetime ally, were charged over a $2 million payment that prosecutors had labeled a bribe.Sepp Blatter, the former president of FIFA, and his onetime ally Michel Platini were acquitted of fraud on Friday in the latest attempt by Swiss prosecutors to win a conviction in a sprawling, seven-year investigation into corruption at the highest levels of world soccer.The trial, held in the southern Swiss city of Bellinzona, was related to a $2 million payment arranged in 2011 by Blatter, who led world soccer’s governing body for 17 years, to Platini, a former France player who was at the time the president of European soccer’s governing body and a potential heir to Blatter as the most powerful executive in the sport.Prosecutors had labeled the payment a bribe, saying that it was made around the time Blatter was standing for re-election. Blatter and Platini denied wrongdoing; they have long maintained that the money was owed to Platini for work done over several years.NEW | Ex FIFA supremo Sepp Blatter hails “victory” after being acquitted of fraud here in Switzerland pic.twitter.com/DjtYtARANY— Dan Roan (@danroan) July 8, 2022
      In a statement after the verdict, the court said that while there were “many well-founded suspicions” before the case was brought to trial, the versions presented by Blatter and Platini of what had occurred created “serious doubts” around the case made by prosecutors.And in another embarrassing blow for the Swiss authorities, the court ruled that Blatter and Platini were entitled to payment of about $20,000 for what it described as a moral injury. The court said Platini waived the payment, but that both men also would receive payments for their legal costs.A smiling Blatter was engulfed by news media as he left the courthouse. He raised both arms in the air, reminiscent of a gesture he used frequently during his days as FIFA president, to declare victory.“I am a happy man,” Blatter said, before thanking the judges. “They have analyzed the situation and they have explained why both of us haven’t done anything.”The criminal charges of fraud, criminal mismanagement and forgery against Blatter and Platini came after a multiyear investigation into the $2 million payment, which came to light in 2015 after prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice revealed corrupt practices at FIFA dating back at least two decades.The American investigation resulted in the arrest and conviction of dozens of powerful soccer officials and marketing executives on charges that included racketeering, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Blatter was not among those charged at the time, and while he has for years been the subject of various investigations, the fraud allegations over the payment to Platini marked the first time that he had actually been indicted on criminal charges.The failure to prove the charges against Blatter and Platini, though, shined yet more light on failures by the Swiss justice system to win convictions in cases related to the FIFA scandal. Swiss authorities had with great fanfare raided FIFA’s offices in 2015, shortly after the Justice Department unsealed its sweeping indictment outlining decades of corruption at soccer’s governing body, and Swiss prosecutors claim to have opened dozens of separate investigations into the organization’s activities.So far, however, they have successfully prosecuted only one former FIFA official, a banker and a Greek television executive. None of those defendants have faced prison sentences.The $2 million payment to Platini came as Blatter faced a strong challenge for the FIFA presidency from a Qatari billionaire, Mohamed bin Hammam, who at the time was head of soccer in Asia. Blatter and Platini both said that the money was a belated payment related to work that Platini, the captain of France’s 1984 European Championship-winning team, had done for Blatter after he was elected FIFA president for the first time, in 1998.Michel Platini outside court before the verdict. He said the ruling came “after seven years of lies and manipulation.”Arnd Wiegmann/ReutersDuring the trial, Blatter told the court that the money was part of a “gentlemen’s agreement” that he had made with Platini, who had agreed to advise him in return for about $1 million a year. The payment of the money would come “later,” Blatter said of their agreement.“When Mr. Blatter asked me to be his adviser, he asked me what salary I wanted,” Platini later testified. “I was surprised that he asked me this question and I said to him, ‘I want a million.’”Blatter, 86, and Platini, 67, had faced as much as five years in prison if convicted.Both men were eventually barred from the game by FIFA’s disciplinary system, though their original bans were later reduced on appeal. Those were to have expired in October, but a new suspension, imposed on Blatter on different grounds, took effect when it ended, meaning that he will be barred from the game until 2028, when he will be 92.After the verdict, Platini said that justice had been done “after seven years of lies and manipulation.”He has previously taken aim at the current FIFA management led by his former deputy, Gianni Infantino. Infantino vaulted from a place-holder candidate for FIFA’s presidency to its leader when Platini first faced accusations in 2015 and after Blatter resigned in the wake of the Justice Department investigation and arrests.Platini suggested that he would continue fighting to clear his name; he filed a criminal complaint against Infantino in April. “In this case, there are culprits who did not appear during this trial,” he said. “Let them count on me, we will meet again. Because I will not give up and I will go all the way in my quest for truth.”Blatter may be headed back to court, too. He faces the potential of another trial after the Swiss authorities informed him in June 2020 that he had been labeled an “accused person” in case involving the suspected misuse of funds after loaning $1 million to a soccer official in the Caribbean.That official, Jack Warner, has been fighting extradition to the United States after being named in the Justice Department’s indictment. More

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      In Qatar’s World Cup Summer, the Mercury Rises and the Clock Ticks

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      DOHA, Qatar — The sun comes up before 5 a.m. and immediately puts the entire city on convection bake. By lunchtime, the temperature has finished its methodical climb up the scale, from unusual through uncomfortable to unbearable and then, finally, to unhealthy. The wind off the bay offers no relief; in June in Doha, even the summer breeze blows hot.This was to be the summer the World Cup came to Qatar, an idea that seems as preposterous now as it did a dozen years ago, when the tiny Gulf country, let’s just say, acquired the hosting rights to soccer’s biggest championship. FIFA’s own evaluators had labeled a summer World Cup in the Gulf as “high risk,” and a single morning’s walk this week confirmed that assessment. Still, for years, Qatari organizers promised to deliver what they had proposed, whatever FIFA asked: new stadiums, new hotels, new cooling technologies, a new frontier for soccer.Organizers, of course, eventually came to their senses, or at least to that one sense that lets humans differentiate hot from sun’s anvil hot, and in 2015 moved the tournament to the winter. The past week, though, offered a glimpse of what might have been.Peru fans seeking shelter from the sun in the Souk Waqif, top, and a rare sight on the streets of Msheireb in midday: humans.Over eight days, Qatar hosted three intercontinental playoff games that determined the final two teams in the field for this year’s World Cup: Australia and Costa Rica. Like so many of the marquee events hosted in Doha in recent years, the matches were a chance for Qatar to test-drive its facilities, its infrastructure and its tolerance for all the disparate guests.How did that glimpse into the future look this week? Both reassuring and incomplete, depending on one’s perspective.Five months from the World Cup’s opening match, Qatar appears to have gotten the big things right. Seven of the eight air-conditioned stadiums built or refurbished for the World Cup have hosted matches, and the largest (and last) will have its first test events in the coming months. All but one of the arenas are reachable by one of the three gleaming new subway lines that speed under and through the capital, and work continues on office towers, apartment blocks, roads and sidewalks every day. Even with so much ready to go, though, to see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a place that is a work in progress rather than a completed vision.Some Peru fans from California took their own World Cup trophy to Qatar. Their team, alas, won’t be going.World Cup messages dot plazas and open spaces across Doha. Qatar bid for a summer event, but will host in the winter instead.Peru brought the most fans of any country playing this week, a raucous army more than 10,000 strong, but every morning it was possible to walk long city blocks without seeing a soul. Many residents and visitors emerged only in the evening, to sip coffees, to stroll the parks and green spaces and to wander the Souk Waqif, the capital’s rebuilt marketplace — filling its tables, disappearing into its warren of stalls and shops. But even as the locals, the Qatari families and South Asian workers, pulled out their phones to snap photos and record videos of those fans enjoying this place they probably never thought they’d visit, one couldn’t help but feel that none of them could yet be sure what November would bring.Organizers expect that more than a million fans overall will enter Qatar during the World Cup — 32 cheering sections, just like Peru’s, but neutrals, too, all of them crowding the same spaces, competing for the same hotels and cafe tables, all waving their own colors and carrying their own hopes.The stadium in Lusail, Qatar’s largest venue, is equipped with individual cooling vents under each seat.A new turf field growing under artificial light at Lusail; different blends of grass are installed depending on the season.Questions persist about where all those guests will sleep, eat, shop and drink. Cruise ships and tent camps may help with that first problem, which remains the biggest unanswered question for fans and organizers. Qatar’s decision to require those attending the World Cup to have proof of a ticket purchase to enter the country or book a hotel room could help keep the numbers down. Saudis and Emiratis who love soccer could pour across the border to bring those numbers right back up. But the tournament also is four full days shorter than its predecessors in Brazil and Russia; if it turns into a chaotic mess, then at least it will be a shorter one.There are still a few months to sort out the final details, to find the room and rent the buses and the boats, for Qatar to produce the smooth-running showpiece it promised, to flex all that shiny new soft power.The heat? That’s so low on Qatar’s list of concerns that officials and engineers now dismiss it with the wave of a hand. Anyone who has spent time in the Gulf in the winter, they will tell you, knows the mercury drops into the 80s by then, and it is cooler at night. Could that lower the temperature, literally and figuratively, in the fan zones and elsewhere? Maybe.The World Cup stadium in Lusail is decorated with collages of photographs of the workers who built it.For others, the preparations rarely stop. Outdoor work is prohibited in the heat of the summer day.On game days it won’t have to. The stadium air-conditioning systems functioned as advertised all week; on Monday, during Australia’s shootout win over Peru, blowers and vents built into the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan stadium cooled the match to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius), even though it was still well over 90 degrees outside the stadium’s open roof and swirling metalwork shell.In a few months, the last and most elaborate system built into the 80,000-seat showpiece stadium in Lusail, which will host 10 matches, including the final, will get its final tests. The engineer who designed it promised this week that it would work. He had, he noted with a laugh, done the calculations himself.To see Qatar this summer, so close to its big moment, is to see a work in progress rather than a completed vision. More