A vice president of the German soccer federation is calling for a boycott of the upcoming World Cup in North America this summer. Mexico, Canada, and the United States will host the 104 matches, beginning June 11.
Oke Göttlich, president of Bundesliga club St. Pauli and one of the German federation’s 10 vice presidents, told a German newspaper, “the time has come” to “seriously consider and discuss this” (a boycott).
Why, you might ask? Perhaps you needn’t ask.
Göttlich said: “As organizations and society, we’re forgetting how to set taboos and boundaries, and how to defend values. Taboos are an essential part of our stance. Is a taboo crossed when someone threatens? Is a taboo crossed when someone attacks? When people die? I would like to know from Donald Trump when he has reached his taboo, and I would like to know from Bernd Neuendorf and Gianni Infantino.”
Who is dying? Who is being “attacked”? What “taboo” is being “crossed”? What “taboo” is Donald Trump reaching for? I’d suggest that Herr Göttlich stop making statements in a language in which he is not proficient.
Methinks dear Otto is off his meds again.
Neuendorf (president of the German Football Association, DFB) and Infantino (president of FIFA) are not going to commit professional suicide and refuse to participate in what’s described as the biggest sporting event on the planet.
By almost every major metric — viewership, global reach, and social engagement — the FIFA World Cup is widely considered the biggest sporting event in the world. More than five billion people will tune in to watch one of the 104 matches, including 1.5 billion who will watch the championship match.
Germany, a perennial favorite to win the tournament, is not going to boycott the World Cup. The soccer-crazy Germans would erupt in anger, causing a political earthquake that any politician who dared support a boycott would feel.
“What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic Games in the 1980s?” Göttlich asked. “By my reckoning, the potential threat is greater now than it was then. We need to have this discussion.”
It’s curious that Herr Otto mentioned the 1980 Summer Olympics that Russia hosted. At the same time that 65 nations boycotted the games, there were more than 80,000 Russian troops in Afghanistan.
You have to be brain dead to compare the boycott of the Olympics because of the unprovoked aggression of the Soviet Union in 1980 to Trump’s empty threats to invade Greenland in 2026.
There’s a sidebar to the story about dear Otto and his German leftist friends in Hamburg, where his St. Pauli club plays.
Hamburg-based St. Pauli is known for mixing sport with politics near the the city’s red-light district, and particularly its left-wing stance. The club’s famous pirate skull-and-crossbones symbol was first carried by squatters who lived nearby and later popularized by fans who identified as punks.
Göttlich dismissed the suggestion a boycott would hurt St. Pauli’s national team players, Australia’s Jackson Irvine and Connor Metcalfe, and Japan’s Joel Chima Fujita.
“The life of a professional player is not worth more than the lives of countless people in various regions who are being directly or indirectly attacked or threatened by the World Cup host,” he said.
There’s also the inconvenient fact that the 2022 World Cup was held in one of the most oppressive societies in the world. Qatar. Many of the venues were built using workers from the Kafala system, which critics described as a form of modern-day slavery.
Workers were legally tied to their employers and could not change jobs or even leave the country without their “sponsor’s” permission. Employers routinely seized workers’ passports upon arrival, to prevent them from leaving.
Until reforms were made late in the process, workers needed a government-approved “exit permit” signed by their employer to return home.
The Guardian reported in Feb. 2021 that at least 6,500 migrant workers lost their lives working on the World Cup venues. Qatar initially claimed only 37 deaths were directly linked to stadium construction, only 3 of which were “work-related.”
Officials were accused of misclassifying heatstroke or exhaustion-related deaths as “natural causes” (such as “cardiac failure”) to avoid paying compensation to families. Indeed, the soccer players were given 15 minute “cooling breaks” during the games while the workers were forced to work in the extreme heat in order to keep to the construction schedule, which by 2021 was seriously behind.
Where was Otto Göttlich then? Probably too busy cheering for his national team to bother seeing the bodies of poor migrant workers lost to real breaking of “taboos.”
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