After an exhilarating 120 minutes of football followed by a nail-biting penalty shoot-out, Lionel Messi finally got his moment – the one he’d been dreaming of his whole life.
At long last, the best footballer of all time in the eyes of many had the one medal missing from his glittering collection, having ended Argentina’s 36-year wait for the World Cup crown with victory over France.
Going back through the highlight reels, the scenes of previous World Cup trophy lifts have been iconic, moments etched in the history books forever.
Diego Maradona (1986) and Zinedine Zidane (1998) both donning the blue and white colours of their nations, Pele in 1970 in the famous yellow of Brazil, and Bobby Moore four years earlier in England’s famed red strip at Wembley Stadium. Moments burned into the minds of millions across the globe.
But as Messi walked up to collect his long-awaited prize at the Lusail Stadium, it wasn’t his legendary number 10 shirt on show. The blue and white of Argentina was hidden after the emir of Qatar put a black bisht (traditional Arab cloak) around his shoulders. FIFA president Gianni Infantino stood beside him, smiling and clapping during this surreal scene.
Miguel Delaney’s new book States of Play
Qatar 2022 was unlike any other World Cup, and its final moments only served to solidify that point.
Miguel Delaney was in the press box that evening in Qatar. The Independent’s chief football writer had the idea for a book about sportswashing for some time, but it ended up becoming far more than that.
What began as a detailing of how the rich and powerful have taken over football developed into a comprehensive history of just how the game has reached this point, from the 1936 Olympics, to Roman Abramovich purchasing Chelsea in 2003, all the way to those four controversial weeks in Qatar.
“A must-read on how modern football works,” is how Ian Wright described it.
So in 2024, who really owns and runs football?
“There was a realisation that there were bigger forces influencing football that were worth further scrutiny, more than just what was happening on the pitch,” explains Delaney, in an exclusive interview with the Irish Independent ahead of the release of his new book, States of Play: How Sportswashing Took Over Football.
“I had been covering a few of the issues for a few years, like state ownership. There were a few moments that crystallised that there was really something bigger going on worth assessing, like PSG signing Neymar [in 2017 for a world-record €222m], Manchester City winning the treble in 2019, and the long build-up to the Qatar World Cup.
“Once it got into doing the book itself, you realise you can’t talk about the topic of sportswashing or influence without talking about the context and what football is at the moment – which I would see as a sport where there’s almost a contradiction. It is, by a distance, the most popular sport in the world, but that popularity is basically being distilled into a few clubs.
“It’s almost like a map of global capitalism, sucking up interest and money from everywhere and then distributing it very narrowly.
“If you stand back, what has football become? It’s essentially interests that are far more powerful than the game – be it states or capitalist interests – seeing this very popular thing and essentially looking to hijack it for their own ends, just looking to extract profit from it. There’s no concern for what the game is or its direction.
“Underneath it was the failure of football’s authorities to assess what was going on. You could see situations where more and more leagues were getting more predictable. Things like Bayern Munich winning 10 Bundesliga titles in a row [in 2022], that had never happened before in this era. So, a book about sportswashing really became a modern history of football.”
Delaney’s book, which spans 436 pages, traces roots back to the 1890s but largely focuses on events over the last four decades. Having worked as a football journalist across the globe for nearly 20 years, he explains how a lack of foresight from authorities was a major factor in how the game has ended up where it is today.
“There are so many big moments you can track,” says the Greystones native. “From Tottenham Hotspur being floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1983, to the Bosman ruling [in 1995], a huge one was Figo’s signing for Real Madrid [2000], and a key one in state interest was the creation of Pep Guardiola’s first Barcelona team. It was almost this vision of football, it didn’t just bring excitement, it brought adulation.
“Autocratic states looking to get into football saw that and wanted it. It was the fact that it all came together and there was really no vision from the game over what to do. Graham Kelly [FA chief executive 1989-’98] basically puts it as ‘we were guilty of a tremendous lack of foresight’. That’s almost the story of regulation in football.”
In the modern game, sportswashing is a term regularly thrown around, but Delaney says it goes far deeper than just a word.
“I do have a specific chapter on what sportswashing means, this highly disputed term,” he explains.
“At this point the word itself is almost a superficial shorthand for something that’s much more complicated. Really, it’s the political use of football by autocratic states with a lot of centralised power, with probably more money than any entities have ever had in history to be able to use, all for the purposes of sustaining the structure of those autocratic states.
“Sportwashing used to be as basic as you could get, just staging a tournament, like the 1934 World Cup under Benito Mussolini [Italian fascist dictator], the 1936 Olympics [in Nazi Germany], or the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The idea of staging events for political purposes really goes back to Roman games in the Colosseum.
“Then you suddenly saw Emirates plastered everywhere, Qatar Airways too. There was a natural leap from tournaments, to sponsorship, to buying clubs and now we’re on to the next stage where it’s almost trying to buy competitions as you can see with Saudi Arabia’s supercharging of the Saudi Pro League.
“Although it should be said, developing one’s domestic league is a legitimate goal in its own right, but there’s never been a league like this where it’s so integrated into state policies,” he says, as the state’s Public Investment Fund bought 75pc stakes in four of the league’s biggest clubs last year.
“The partnership they have with FIFA now is absolutely remarkable. It’s amazing that the global regulator, who is supposed to safeguard the future game, is intertwining themselves with an autocratic state like that which has its own interest.”
The mention of Saudi Arabia leads us on to the state that borders it in the Arabian Gulf, Qatar. For Delaney, that night in Doha is still fresh in the memory.
“That whole moment was sportswashing distilled,” he says, having been chief football writer at the Independent since 2017. “Messi winning the World Cup, it’s the equivalent of Muhammad Ali reclaiming the heavyweight title, one of these sporting stories that will go down in history.
“But in Messi’s moment of victory, the ruler of Qatar essentially envelops the moment. When I wrote about it I remember getting pushback at the time, about how the bisht shouldn’t be seen as a negative, and that’s true, it’s a garment that’s usually very honourable. But the problem, and this is almost the story of the entire book in a way, is that you can’t detach the garment from who gave it to Messi and why.
“If you look back in history, every other World Cup lift is just the colours of the national team but in this one it’s the bisht. So in 30 or 40 years’ time people will ask why he was wearing it. It immediately associates that moment with the emir of Qatar, that’s where it is so powerful for Qatar.
“As someone said to me during the writing of the book, Qatar is now being associated with potentially the greatest football story in history. Doha is associated with Messi in the same way the Azteca is associated with Maradona or Pele. You can’t buy that emotional power.”
While social media commentary is often a cesspit nowadays, Delaney’s reporting on the game’s important issues has also attracted some in-person criticism from supporters of state-backed clubs like City and Newcastle United.
“I have had incidents in airports, with fans pointing and tutting at me, ‘there he is, f**king Delaney’. I’ve had fans screeching at me about what I’m writing.
“I remember the day Newcastle got to the League Cup final last year. I was walking up Wembley Way, and heard a Newcastle fan beside me say, ‘there he is, f**king d***head’. On one level you can sort of understand it, all people want to do is go to the game like they have done for years.
“But suddenly they are being confronted with all these discussions on human rights and whether this team they just want to enjoy is morally compromised. So I can understand it from that point of view, but it’s that emotion that states are trying to appropriate.
“I do have sympathy for the fans who have screamed in my face, that some of the greatest days in their lives are being discussed in this way, but the job of a football journalist has to look at these issues for the reader, for the good of the sport and the good of society.”
