The 2022 World Cup felt like a lifetime away when 14 of the 22 members of Fifa’s executive committee voted in their infinite wisdom to award Qatar the hosting rights for the tournament in Zurich, Switzerland, back in 2010. So we’ve had an entire 12 years to try to get our heads around that decision, as well as coming to terms with the prospect of a World Cup final taking place a week before Christmas day.
For football fans it will, then, be a November and December like no others, 64 games in 29 days, starting with the hosts against Ecuador on November 20th. That will be the first of 17 – count them – consecutive days of games before we finally get a rest on December 7th, allowing us restock the freezer.
Fifteen of those days will feature four games, starting at 10am, 1pm and 4pm in the afternoon, and 7pm in the evening (all Irish times).
RTÉ will show every one of them live, including the final group games which will be played simultaneously – their News Channel will broadcast the one not shown on RTÉ2. Joanne Cantwell, Peter Collins and Clare MacNamara will be RTÉ’s main presenters through the tournament, with plenty of familiar faces, among them Liam Brady, Richie Sadlier and Didi Hamann on punditry duty.
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The BBC and ITV, meanwhile, have done their usual divvying up of the fixtures, with the BBC showing two of England’s group games live – their opener against Iran and their third against Wales. ITV will show the middle one, against the United States, so for those who believe in the ITV “jinx” prepare for a repeat of the States’ shock victory over England at the 1950 World Cup. (Since 1996 England have won around 63 per cent of their major tournament games when they were shown live by the BBC, compared to just 22 per cent when ITV broadcast them. That sound you hear is Gareth Southgate gulping).
Between them the two British channels have hired half the planet’s retired players as pundits, regulars Alan Shearer, Rio Ferdinand and Micah Richards teaming up once again with the BBC’s chief presenters, Gary Lineker and Gabby Logan, while over on ITV Roy Keane will renew acquaintances with his old pals Ian Wright and Gary Neville, Mark Pougatch the channel’s main host.
Neville, of course, is double-jobbing at the World Cup, having signed up – a touch controversially – with Qatari broadcaster beIN Sports where Arsene Wenger, Ruud Gullit, Alessandro Del Piero, John Terry and our very own Jason McAteer will be among his colleagues. Whether Richard Keys and Andy Gray facilitate Neville’s vow to highlight Qatar’s human rights abuses while working for beIN …. eh, we’ll see.
But this World Cup presents a tricky challenge for its broadcasters who, on the one side, will have folk telling them to stick to the football, and, on the other, will be urged not to allow the hosts use the month as a “sportswashing” PR job that glosses over Qatar’s human rights record.
Gianni Infantino, the current Fifa president, and Fatma Samoura, the association’s secretary general, have already implored the competing nations and their players – and, presumably, the broadcasters – to “focus on the football” and not engage in “handing out moral lessons to the rest of the world”.
Plenty of the game’s aristocracy concur with that sentiment, among them former World Cup winner Uli Hoeness who responded to criticism of Bayern Munich’s sponsorship deal with Qatar Airways recently by pointing out that “Bayern Munich is a football club – not Amnesty International.”
But even those broadcasters who might beg to differ with such a take, and who feel an obligation to combine their football coverage with reporting on life in Qatar for its less fortunate residents, could find it all a bit of a challenge.
Initially the Qatari government said that it would only grant permits to broadcasters who agreed not to produce reports that might be “inappropriate or offensive to the Qatari culture [and] Islamic principles”, and while that condition was later removed it will still be forbidden to film at “residential properties, private businesses and industrial zones …. government, educational, health and religious buildings”.
As the Guardian pointed out, “that is likely to make it difficult for them to investigate reported abuses, such as the mistreatment of migrant workers, or to conduct interviews on subjects people may be reluctant to discuss in public, such as LGBTQ+ rights”.
It will, then, be interesting to see what consequences there might be for any World Cup broadcaster that chooses to disregard those rules in pursuit of coverage of human rights issues.
Most of the pundits, though, will probably like to stick to football.
“I feel sometimes it’s a bit rich seeing different parts of the world hammering Qatar . . . people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”, as Shay Given put it at RTÉ’s launch of its coverage. “I just want to talk about the football and the excitement of a World Cup . . . that’s not me brushing it under the carpet.”
Fifa, you can be sure, would like the broadcasters to brush everything but football under the carpet.
The World Cup line-ups
RTÉ
Presenters: Joanne Cantwell, Peter Collins and Clare MacNamara.
Pundits: Liam Brady, Richie Sadlier, Didi Hamann, Shay Given, Damien Duff and Kevin Doyle.
Commentators: Darragh Maloney, George Hamilton, Des Curran, Adrian Eames and John Kenny.
Co-commentators: Ray Houghton, Ronnie Whelan, Stephen Kelly, Kenny Cunningham and Áine O’Gorman.
BBC
Presenters: Gary Lineker and Gabby Logan.
Pundits: Alan Shearer, Rio Ferdinand, Micah Richards, Jermaine Jenas, Alex Scott, Danny Gabbidon, Ashley Williams, Ian Rush, Vincent Kompany, Pablo Zabaleta, Didier Drogba, Laura Georges, Jurgen Klinsmann, Mark Schwarzer and Gilberto Silva.
Commentators: Guy Mowbray, Steve Wilson, Jonathan Pearce and Steve Bower.
Co-commentators: Martin Keown, Karen Bardsley, Clinton Morrison, Danny Murphy, Dion Dublin, Peter Schmeichel, Robbie Savage, James Collins, Maz Farookhi, Jayne Ludlow, Stephen Warnock, Jermaine Jenas and Danny Gabbidon.
ITV
Presenters: Mark Pougatch, Laura Woods and Seema Jaswal.
Pundits: Ian Wright, Roy Keane, Gary Neville, Karen Carney, Graeme Souness, Joe Cole, Eniola Aluko, Nigel De Jong, Nadia Nadim and Hal Robson-Kanu.
Commentators: Sam Matterface, Clive Tyldesley, Jon Champion, Seb Hutchinson, Joe Speight and Tom Gayle.
Co-commentators: Lee Dixon, Ally McCoist, John Hartson and Andros Townsend.
