Imagine the meeting between Messi and his former team-mate Luis Suárez, or with Dani Alves, the first time they met after Argentina won the World Cup. Handshakes, pats on the back and laughter. This is how Vladimir Putin greeted Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) weeks after the Saudi leader ordered the death of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“That’s how it’s done! Well played, Muhammad!”.
We can assume that if the dictators met today, just days after Putin ended the life of the martyr Aleksei Navalny, they would greet each other with the same effusiveness. The weapons of political persuasion of the Russian Tsar and MBS are identical. When power is at stake, terror is the first choice. Assassins of the world, join us.
But international sport, in its infinite wisdom, differentiates between the two. It punishes Russia, which expels it from the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup, but rewards Saudi Arabia, an oil empire on the way to becoming the circus of sport, including the 2034 World Cup.
OK, it’s true. Russia invaded a country, while Saudi Arabia only dismembers or decapitates internal opponents, machine-guns “illegal” immigrants at borders, and fires missiles at Yemen with Israel-like gusto at Gaza.
But let’s see. Perhaps the time has come to impose boycotts more rigorously, right? In which other countries could I touch them?
We’ll start with the most obvious. In Israel, for infanticide, to begin with. In Syria, for having killed 600,000 people in ten years, with Russian help. In Iran, because of the violence it sponsors in the Middle East and the systematic oppression of women. In China, where a million Uyghurs have been interned in concentration camps for being Muslims (grave silence from MBS and the ayatollahs of Tehran, by the way). And in North Korea, for… Well, for whatever you want.
In fairness, another candidate should be the United States, home of the next World Cup. Because of the enormous amount of weapons they supply to Israel and Saudi Arabia and, as a retrospective punishment, for the invasion of Iraq, so many horrors are sprouting in this region forgotten by Allah.
And Spain, what? Yes, agreed, you cannot compare the suffering caused by the current Spanish Government with that of the countries I have just mentioned. But if we were to take the word of its opponents as a reference, there would indeed be reasons to consider the expulsion of Spanish sport from international competitions. The main opposition party, the PP, and its spiritual allies in Vox have accused Pedro Sánchez and his ministers of being, among other things, “autocrats”, “despots”, “psychopaths” and “caudillists”. Oh, and to promote “apartheid”.
For elementary consistency, the PP and Vox should be the first to call for a sports boycott against Spain as a warning to the Sanchista regime, like the black South African parties back in the day against the white racist regime.
As for Catalonia, the representatives of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee would have it even easier. Not only the opposition politicians, but also at least one venerable Spanish judge consider that the Catalan lands harbor nests of terrorists under the command of politicians comparable to the leaders of ETA, the IRA or Hamas. The doubt would be whether to extend the boycott beyond Catalan players such as Lamine Yamal or whether to include foreigners who have sold their souls to Barça or Girona, such as the Polish Robert Lewandowski and the Ukrainian Artem Dóvbik.
There will be those who will say – I understand – that I am going too far in moral purity. That if we continue on the path I propose, we will have to say goodbye to sport as a global spectacle. Well no There is a way out. Let all those identified by the international authorities as lepers go to play in the professional leagues and circuits of Saudi Arabia. Let them enjoy the sports boom in the desert. Better paid than ever, they’ll be happy as long as they can close their eyes every time they come across a public beheading or a prison where men and women are jailed for sending tweets that don’t like Tsar Vladimir Putin’s colleague, the magnificent and munificent Muhammad bin Salman.
