The final tournament of the football World Cup, starting in Qatar, is perhaps the first of such tournaments, where football itself is so far in the shadow of the very fact of holding this tournament in Qatar.
There is no logic in this - the country in the Arabian desert has never been the least bit football or sports in general. It is impossible to play football there in the summer because of the extreme heat. It is not very convenient to get there from different parts of the planet. And so on and so on. But the football final will take place there! And there are three main reasons for this - money, money and more money!
It cannot be said that money does not play an important role in sports. A lot of money is needed to hold competitions and train athletes. Therefore, tournament organizers and heads of clubs and federations like to involve sponsors, who in return get the opportunity to advertise their products.
This scheme worked successfully for several decades - from the mid-seventies of the last century until the new millennium. Until the money from sponsors for sports officials was not enough. More and more large sports tournaments began to be financed not by business corporations, but by dictatorial regimes that did not and do not spare budget money without expecting a profit. Such was the Olympic Games in Beijing, such was the previous world football final in Russia, such is the current one!
But this Qatar is not enough! Maddened by stupid billions, the local emir decided to finally destroy the world sports order according to which athletes from different countries compete for victory. For this, there is a mass sport in these countries, the best representatives of which defend the country's honor on the international stage. There is no such sport in Qatar. Local federations simply buy athletes from all over the world, grant them citizenship and expose them to international tournaments. Look - representatives of Qatar are currently among the winners and runners-up of almost all summer competitions. If this continues, Qatar will become the winner of the Winter Olympics, having bought wholesale the best skiers, ice skaters, hockey players...
Will you say that this is absurd, that it cannot be so? And isn't it absurd to hold the world football finals in November-December, for which the seemingly eternal calendar of European football competitions was broken? I really wish it would all pass like a bad dream and everything would return to the good old days. But will it be so? To begin with, this bad dream should be survived by determining the football world champion in the arenas built in the middle of the desert.
So far, there is only one piece of good news - the Qatar national team will not claim the championship title yet. As well as more than two dozen other teams who perceive the very fact of getting to the World Cup as a success. I wouldn't be surprised if most of them aren't too eager to go further than the group stage. Why sweat in the heat when the contenders for the title are well known to everyone? So there will be nothing to watch in the first three weeks of the competition. Unless one of the favorites does not pass the group tournament, which is quite likely. Because the best national teams in the world are made up of players from the leading European championships, interrupted on the way to travel to Qatar.
France, the reigning world champion, and Brazil, where the art of promoting their own footballers has reached unprecedented proportions, are considered the main contenders for the football "crown". Potentially, these teams are really the strongest, but they have another problem - too many high-class players, among them a bunch of capricious "stars" who are not sure what and when they can duck. This gives chances to the teams of the "second echelon" - Spain, Argentina, Germany, England. Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands, which under certain conditions are able to compete for the highest title. Everything will depend on the condition of their players when they arrive in Qatar and how motivated they will be.
Almost certainly one, or even two, of the above-mentioned favorites could leave behind the quarterfinals of the sensational teams that are in every finals tournament, and whose success lives only a few weeks before the first loss. Think of the Croatia team of 2018, who were virtually unopposed against France in the final match, having overachieved without it.
I venture to predict that the world champion should be sought among teams that not only have high-class football players, the favor of fortune and referees, but also a real ambition to be the first. According to this criterion, the circle of applicants is narrowed down to the familiar Brazil, Argentina, Germany, England, France and Spain. There would still be Italy if they had not lost the qualifying tournament. As for the new names, it is not worth waiting for their appearance at the world finals for a long time. All footballers who are at least slightly capable of something are well-known and everyone has their own price. And it is unlikely that it will change after the tournament in Qatar.
And finally, apart from the obvious challenges of the extreme timing of the tournament and its venue, there is one more. This is a war that is ongoing in Ukraine, and at any moment it can spill over into other states. So far, the factor of this war has affected the final tournament of the World Cup only by the absence of the team of the aggressor country. And, I repeat, anything can happen. I remembered too well the program for the match between "Dynamo" and "Ingulets", which I signed for printing on the evening of February 23 this year...
Mykola Nesenyuk