“Absurd” tournament: French cities forego fan zones and public viewing during the World Cup in Qatar.
Player stars like Kylian Mbappe or Karim Benzema have to be prepared for moderate enthusiasm from their fans. A month and a half before the World Cup, nobody in France is talking about the “Bleus” aiming for a third world championship title in Qatar. Rather, it is discussed whether fans do not become accomplices of a controversial event when they follow the tournament games.
The mayor of the wine city of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, said he felt he was an “accomplice” in an event “full of humanitarian, ecological and sporting absurdity”. Bordeaux is therefore refraining from public viewing in designated fan zones and from accompanying events.
Dissenting voices are rare
Last week, the city of Strasbourg also announced that it would not set up any large screens during the tournament. The construction of seven stadiums in Qatar’s capital Doha, which were not even sold out at the World Athletics Championships, is absurd. Strasbourg’s green mayor Jeanne Barseghian referred to the unexplained fatal work accidents of Asian immigrants. The liberal mayor of the champagne city of Reims, Arnaud Robinet, justifies his refusal of public viewing with the climate-damaging cooling of entire stadiums.
This week, the two largest French cities have also joined. The metropolis of Marseille does not want to encourage a tournament that is a “disaster” in every respect. The same opinion is shared in Paris City Hall, where tens of thousands have watched and celebrated the games of the “Bleus”. The left mayor Anne Hidalgo referred to the hard lot of the city workers and added that in December it was too cold for a fan zone anyway. In the meantime, provincial towns like Rodez have also joined the wave of boycotts.
Dissenting voices are rare. On Tuesday, individual football fans referred to the fact that the Paris-Saint-Germain team bus drove 2,000 kilometers empty to a Champions League game in Portugal – to bring the team from the airport to the hotel and stadium. This is also not ecologically exemplary.
The publicist Nabil Ennasri, author of a book on “The Mystery of Qatar”, considers the cities’ cancellations to be “hypocritical”. France has declared Qatar a strategic partner in the Gulf region and has sold the sheikdom fighter jets in exchange for oil supplies. To “sulk” during the tournament and then resume business is not politically coherent. President Emmanuel Macron has not yet commented on the wave of protests.
