World Cup Diary | Day Three

Day 3: Argentina v Saudi Arabia, Mexico v Poland, Denmark v Tunisia, and France v Australia

Qatar have buyers remorse. Sources from Qatar have told The News Agents that: “Nothing good has come to us as a result of this.” Perhaps they could buy Manchester United?

And it wasn't the best day for the GOATs of the footballing world, one lost his job and the other was involved in the biggest shock in World Cup history.

Just another day in Qatar.

Day Two, as you know, saw security officers refusing entry to fans who were wearing items of clothing bearing rainbow symbols. Qatar finds rainbows scary. A tweet from a Qatari went viral on the topic: “As a Qatari I’m proud of what happened.” - pride – an interesting choice of word given the circumstances, he continued: “I don’t know when will the westerners realize that their values aren’t universal. There are other cultures with different values that should be equally respected. Let’s not forget that the West is not the spokesperson for humanity.”

There's a lot to unpack there. Central to his thesis seems to be the idea that persecution of LGBT+ peoples is a sort of, quaint quirk of the local culture, something of which to defend and be proud of. Perhaps this is a good point to remind you dear listener, if found guilty in Qatar of being gay, you could be sentenced to death by stoning.

Gay people can be found everywhere, and all the ones I know, quite enjoy not being persecuted for who they are. And while I can't be certain, I'm fairly sure that gay Qataris, might being who they are without fear of years in jail, or being tied to a post and hit with stones until they die.

Harry Kane didn't want to wear the One Love armband because he loves RuPaul's Drag Race and thinks that Qatar TV ought to be forced to show reruns on national television. The issue here is Universal Human Rights, something that the United Nations created a charter for in 1948. And it was not only the western world which agreed to basic human rights for all, several middle eastern countries, as well as Islamic nations also agreed. Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria and Turkey, all agreed that: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language..” etc.

Meanwhile, Belgium agreed to to FIFA's demand to not wear the shirts with LOVE on them.

Even the US Secretary of State was talking about the armbands. Never mind buyers remorse, Qatar paid 200 billion to be critised by basically everyone and tarnish the previously excellent diplomatic relations they had with the USA. And it's only day three.

Something else had happened overnight. Something quite strange.

The official capacity of the Qatar World Cup stadiums had officially grown by 12%. Now I know these migrant workers are battle-hardened by the conditions they've had to work in. But even for them, this seems like an almighty feat. How else to explain it?

Had the stadiums gorged themselves on the national dish of Qatar – machboos – and swelled overnight from the meat, aromatic spices and rice?

It's no coincidence the change has come after questions about the figures of official attendances being much larger than the capacity of the stadiums, despite a large number of visibly empty seats.

Now Qatar and FIFA are claiming that not only are all the empty seats full, but in fact the stadiums themselves are much larger than the look too. The Qatar slogan was “Expect Amazing” but I honestly never thought magical expanding stadiums and fans that look like empty seats would be on the agenda.

Maybe the orig...