This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.
This is the longer version of this article (C1 for B2 readers). It has more research, more data and more voices from the classroom. If you prefer shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary, there is a B1-B2 version of this article here with the same argument, the same classroom quotes and the same question at the end.
A woman in one of my groups flew to Qatar to look at the skyline. All those gleaming towers you see in the brochures, lit up against the desert at night. She got there, stepped outside, and discovered she couldn’t walk to them. No footpaths. No pavements. No way to cross the city on foot at all.
“I wanted to walk to see all the high buildings, and I couldn’t,” she told the room. “It’s a waste.”
I’ve thought about that line for a week now, because it’s the whole story in miniature. The gap between the picture and the place. The brochure said world-class city; the pavement said get back in the car. And the World Cup, the Olympics, the whole glittering circus of mega-events, lives precisely in that gap. Spend enough money and you can make anywhere look magnificent for three weeks. Whether anything underneath actually got better is a different question entirely.
Here’s the thing, though. Every article you’ll read about this points the camera in the same direction: at the host. Qatar’s labour camps. Russia’s stadiums. And now, in 2026, Trump’s America and its border policy. The host is always the villain, and there’s always a fresh one.
I want to turn the camera around. I want to point it at the stands. Because the more I taught this topic, the more I became convinced that the real hypocrite in this story isn’t the country spending the billions. It’s us, the people watching, complaining, and watching some more.
So here’s the plan. I’ll show you the research and the numbers nobody checks. Then I’ll tell you what I actually think. You’re under no obligation to agree.
Key Vocabulary — What the Words Actually Mean
soft power | getting others to want what you want through attraction, not force | weiche Macht, Soft Power
sportswashing | using sport to improve a damaged national reputation | Sportswashing, Imagepflege durch Sport
to launder (a reputation) | to make something dirty look clean and respectable | reinwaschen, schönfärben
the spotlight effect | the way global attention exposes a host’s flaws as much as its strengths | Scheinwerfereffekt
fragile legitimacy | approval that looks solid but collapses under pressure | brüchige Legitimität
to backfire | to produce the opposite of the intended result | nach hinten losgehen
What the Words Actually Mean
Let’s start with the vocabulary, because the vocabulary is where the argument hides.
Soft power is a term coined by the political scientist Joseph Nye: the ability to get what you want by attraction rather than coercion. You don’t threaten people into liking you; you make cooperating with you look pleasant. A country builds soft power with its culture, its universities, its films, and, increasingly, its stadiums. The friendly version of the story says a World Cup is bridge-building. You open your doors, the world comes in, everyone leaves a little fonder of you.
Sportswashing is the cynical version of the same act. The word was popularised around the 2015 European Games in Azerbaijan, and it describes using sport to launder a reputation, to scrub the blood off the brand. The accusation is simple: a state with a human-rights problem buys a tournament, the cameras show palm trees and fireworks instead of prisons and protests, and the world’s memory politely resets.
So which is it? Does it work? The uncomfortable answer is: sometimes. Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index tracks exactly this kind of perception, and Qatar climbed from 31st in 2020 to a peak of 21st in 2024 after hosting. Saudi Arabia rose from 26th to 18th over a similar stretch. By the numbers, the spending moved the needle.
But scholars have spotted a counter-mechanism, and it’s the most interesting idea in this whole debate. They call it the spotlight effect, or the paradox of fragile legitimacy. Hosting a mega-event is like switching on a giant magnifying glass. The light you wanted to flatter you also exposes everything you’d rather hide. During Qatar 2022, image gains depended heavily on what the media chose to cover, and human-rights reporting wiped them out. German panel research from 2023 found no lasting improvement in Qatar’s image at all. The spotlight you bought to make yourself look good is the same spotlight that can make the whole project backfire.
A woman in one of my groups put the question better than any textbook I’ve read: the debate, she said, “is not about whether sport influences perceptions, it clearly does, but whether that influence promotes meaningful progress or improves appearances.” Looking good, or doing good. Hold onto that, because we’re going to need it.
Key Vocabulary — The Numbers Nobody Checks
to conflate | to wrongly merge two separate things into one | vermengen, durcheinanderbringen
legacy infrastructure | roads, metros and buildings meant to outlast the event | bleibende Infrastruktur
white elephant | a costly thing that’s more burden than benefit | Fehlinvestition, nutzloser Prestigebau
the kafala system | a sponsorship system tying migrant workers to one employer | Kafala-System, Bürgschaftssystem
wage theft | illegally withholding pay a worker has earned | Lohnraub, vorenthaltener Lohn
a step up | an improvement on a previous, worse situation | eine Verbesserung, ein Aufstieg
The Numbers Nobody Checks
You’ve probably heard that Qatar 2022 cost around 220 billion dollars. It’s the figure everyone quotes, and it’s almost entirely misleading.
The direct tournament cost, the eight stadiums, came in at roughly eight billion. The Qatari organising committee’s own chief executive said as much. The other 210 billion or so paid for Qatar National Vision 2030: the Doha Metro, the airport expansion, the port, the roads, an entire new city. That programme was adopted in 2008, two years before Qatar even won the bid. Most of it would have been built whether the football came or not.
This matters more than it sounds, because the two figures get conflated constantly, and the confusion runs in a useful direction. Quote the giant number and the “doing good” defence inflates automatically: look at all this legacy infrastructure the tournament left behind! Except the tournament didn’t leave most of it behind. The country was building it anyway. The football just stood in front of it for the photo.
And the question my Qatar-visiting professional kept hammering was: legacy infrastructure for whom? She’d seen it. There were highways and there were buildings, but there was no way to walk between them. “There were some playgrounds for children,” she admitted, “but for walking there was nothing.” Infrastructure built for cars and commerce, photographed as if it were built for people.
Then there’s the human cost, which has to be handled precisely, because the loudest version of it is also the least accurate. You’ll have seen the figure of 6,500 deaths. That number is real, but it is a cumulative, all-cause tally of South Asian migrants in Qatar over an entire decade, covering old age, traffic accidents, illness, everything. It is not 6,500 people dying on World Cup building sites. The official figure for stadium-linked deaths is 37, of which 3 were classified as occupational, and that official figure is itself contested, because the state largely declined to investigate sudden cardiac deaths among young men working in extreme heat. Both numbers mislead in opposite directions. The honest position sits in the uncomfortable middle.
What’s not in dispute is the kafala system that bound workers to a single employer, the wage theft, the recruitment fees that left men in debt before they’d lifted a single brick. That happened. Reforms have been passed and patchily enforced.
And here’s the one question I want to put on the table and then deliberately leave unanswered, because it’s the question the outrage almost never asks. Qatar’s minimum wage for those workers was about 275 dollars a month, plus housing and food allowances. For a worker coming from a region where the baseline was closer to 140, was that grim, dangerous job still a step up from what home offered? You can argue it both ways, and you should. On one side: a real increase in cash, sent home to families who needed it. On the other: comparative advantage doesn’t excuse coercion, debt bondage and unsafe conditions, and “better than home” is the oldest excuse exploitation has. I’m not going to resolve that for you. I’m only going to note that the people making the most noise are usually the ones who never get anywhere near asking it.
One more thing nobody checks: the morning after. FIFA’s capacity requirements force hosts to build stadiums their countries can’t fill once the circus leaves town. Brazil 2014 built an arena in Manaus, deep in the Amazon, with no top-flight club to use it. South Africa 2010 and Russia 2018 left venues that bleed public money in annual subsidies. The polite term is white elephant: a monument that costs more to keep than it could ever return. Qatar designed one stadium out of shipping containers so it could be taken apart afterwards. The dismantling was delayed. Of course it was.
Key Vocabulary — Even the Referee Is Bent
vested interests | groups who profit from keeping things exactly as they are | Eigeninteressen, Interessengruppen
a slush fund | a secret reserve of money for bribes or dishonest deals | schwarze Kasse, Schmiergeldkasse
an indictment | a formal legal charge of a serious crime | Anklage, Anklageschrift
to buy your way in | to secure something through bribery rather than merit | sich einkaufen, sich den Weg freikaufen
a cautionary tale | a story told as a warning | eine Warnung, ein abschreckendes Beispiel
to tolerate | to put up with something you disapprove of instead of acting against it | dulden, hinnehmen
Even the Referee Is Bent
If you want to feel clean about your outrage, FIFA will talk you out of it within a paragraph.
This is an organisation with a documented quarter-century of vested interests and corruption. In 2015, the United States Department of Justice unsealed a 47-count indictment describing a 150-million-dollar bribery scheme; Swiss police raided a luxury Zurich hotel and led officials out in handcuffs. A senior official admitted taking bribes connected to South Africa’s hosting. When an internal investigator produced a 350-page ethics report, FIFA published a 42-page summary that conveniently cleared everyone, and the investigator resigned in protest. This is the body that runs the tournament you’re being asked to feel morally superior about.
And before any of us in Europe gets too comfortable, look at the host everyone holds up as the good example. Germany 2006, the “Sommermärchen”, the Summer Fairy Tale, is the model soft-power story. It genuinely changed how Germans felt about waving their own flag, and it gave the world the open-air “Fan Fest” that every tournament has copied since. A real, warm, measurable win.
Then the twist. In 2015, reporting revealed a 6.7-million-euro slush fund moving through a Swiss law firm before the vote that awarded Germany the tournament. In June 2025, a Frankfurt court convicted the German football association of tax evasion over how that money was later disguised. Now, careful here: the courts did not prove the vote itself was bought; investigators couldn’t rule it out but lacked the evidence. What’s proven is the conviction for tax evasion. But even the cleanest host on the wall turns out to have had its hand somewhere near the till. Nobody bought their way in with a clear conscience.
So what does outrage achieve against all this? Historically, almost nothing. The 1980 Moscow boycott didn’t shorten the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan by a single day. The diplomatic boycotts of Beijing in 2008 and 2022 changed precisely no state policy. Even the famous case people reach for, apartheid South Africa, is more complicated than the myth: the sports boycott mattered, but it worked slowly and indirectly, sensitising opinion and clearing the path for the economic sanctions that actually did the heavy lifting. Sport on its own has a remarkably poor record of forcing anyone to change.
Which leaves us with a corrupt referee, a rigged history, and a long list of boycotts that achieved nothing but punishing the athletes. A proper cautionary tale. And yet the tournament gets bigger every cycle. We keep tolerating it, the way we tolerate a great many institutions we know to be rotten. Hold that thought too.
Key Vocabulary — The Hypocrisy Is in the Stands
hypocrisy | condemning in others what you permit in yourself | Heuchelei, Doppelmoral
to perform outrage | to display anger for show rather than to act on it | Empörung inszenieren
selective indignation | being outraged only when it’s convenient | selektive Empörung
complicit | involved in wrongdoing, even passively | mitschuldig, mitverantwortlich
supply chain | the full network that makes and delivers a product | Lieferkette
to opt out | to choose not to take part | sich ausklinken, nicht mitmachen
a counsel of despair | advice that amounts to giving up | ein Rat zur Resignation
The Hypocrisy Is in the Stands
So here’s what I actually think, and you can take it or leave it.
One concession is hard to avoid: the spotlight exposes, and then the world moves on. Qatar took its three weeks of bad press in 2022 and normalised within the year. Tourism held. Investment held. Saudi Arabia was handed 2034 essentially unopposed. The spotlight, it turns out, exposes without punishing. It shines, we gasp, and then we change the channel.
Which means the uncomfortable truth is simpler and worse: sportswashing works because we let it, and outrage is the cheapest thing we own. We complain about labour camps and corrupt federations, and then we watch the matches, book the flights, buy the jersey, and hand over the money. We tolerate FIFA the way we tolerate the United Nations: knowing more or less exactly what it is, and using it anyway because the alternative is inconvenient.
And the hypocrisy that should keep us up at night is our own. I’m typing this on a phone assembled in a factory I would be genuinely upset to tour. There’s a decent chance my t-shirt came down a supply chain I would never dare inspect. The global numbers here are not small: the International Labour Organization estimates nearly 28 million people in forced labour, and the G20 imports something north of 468 billion dollars a year in goods flagged as high-risk for it, electronics and garments leading the way. The same public that wept over Qatari building sites keeps right on buying. I include myself in that. I’ll happily lecture you about selective indignation while wearing the evidence of my own.
That’s the complicity nobody wants to look at, and it’s exactly why pointing only at the host is so comfortable. It keeps the spotlight pointing away from the stands.
Which brings me, carefully, to 2026. The loudest story this summer is the host: the United States, a travel ban, fans from qualified nations locked out, a Somali referee named Omar Artan turned back at Miami airport on an unverified security allegation his own government disputes, FIFA’s president handing the US president a freshly invented “Peace Prize” and pledging millions to a fund tied to his administration. The easy article writes itself: America is the new villain.
I’m not going to write it. Not because I’m defending any of it, but because I genuinely don’t think it’s my job, or yours, to sit in judgement on another democratically elected government’s border policy. Every border policy on earth is controversial by definition. The travel ban, for the record, was signed in June 2025 and expanded that December, before the tournament, and applies whether there’s football or not. It’s worth getting the dates right, because the dates are what stop this from being a cheap shot.
Trump’s America here is exhibit Z, the latest in a very long line, and that’s all it is. It’s simply the newest instance of the same cycle we saw with Qatar: the outrage flares, the cameras roll, and within a year or two we will all have forgotten and got back to our comfortable lives. Watch it run live this summer. Then notice you’re standing in it.
Now, the most important bit. The argument so far can be misread as stop caring, consume, shut up, and that’s the opposite of what I mean.
If you genuinely boycotted, if you turned the television off, skipped the travel, bought no jersey, planted no flag, and actually paid a price for your principle, then this article isn’t aimed at you for a second. You’re the one person it spares. I have nothing but respect for the reader who means it.
My target is the armchair critic who wants to perform outrage and collect the moral credit, without the cost of a single sacrifice. To that reader I’d say what I said to the rooms, and what I’ll keep saying: care honestly. Either pay the real price of your principles, or stop pretending you have them. That’s it. That’s the whole demand. Care enough to make it cost you something, or be honest that you won’t.
And if you won’t? That’s allowed, too. Because, let’s face it, it’s just a ball people kick around for fun, and some smart bloke figured out how to make money out of it. There are a thousand better ways to spend a summer evening. Ride a bike. Go for a swim. Watch a film, for heaven’s sake. That’s what I did for the first few matches, and the sky did not fall. This year the games kick off so late that you’ll have no trouble finding a beer garden where the football isn’t blaring in your ear while you sit with a quiet evening beer and watch the light go. Genuinely recommend it.
Read quickly, this can look like a counsel of despair: the world’s rotten, so give up and consume. It’s the opposite of that. Ayn Rand had a line I keep coming back to: contradictions don’t exist, and whenever you think you’re facing one, check your premises, because one of them is wrong. The contradiction here is the person who watches, buys, travels, and performs disgust through their own narrow, protected little window. Check that premise. You don’t get all four. You get to genuinely opt out, or you get to enjoy your summer. Pick one honestly and I’ll happily buy you that beer.
Either really switch it off, or enjoy the game and spare us the performance.
Your Move
Forget the vocabulary drill this week. The challenge is a conversation.
Find someone whose opinion you respect and try arguing the unpopular side of this in English: that the outrage is cheap, that the spotlight forgives, that we are all a little complicit. You don’t have to believe it. The point is to practise holding an uncomfortable position under pressure, in your second language, without flinching. That’s where real fluency lives, in the messy middle of an argument you can’t fully win. You’ll fumble a few sentences. Good. That’s acquisition doing its job.
I’m far from innocent here, by the way. I’ll lecture a whole room on honest principles and still can’t reliably get my German articles right after nearly twenty years. Der, die, das remain a daily act of optimism. We’re all performing competence we don’t quite have. The trick is to keep going anyway, and to be honest about the gap.
This article grew out of a week of teaching the same question across two groups. The companion three-level lesson (B1, B2 and C1, with the reading, the vocabulary and the full discussion task) is published alongside it. If you want to run this argument with your own team, that’s where to start.