The Audience Is Guilty

This is an opinion piece. I’m not telling you what to think. I’m asking you to think.

This is the shorter version of this article (B1-B2 readers). It has shorter sentences and simpler vocabulary. If you prefer more research, more data and more voices from the classroom, there is a C1 for B2 version of this article here with the same argument and the same question at the end.

A woman in one of my groups flew to Qatar to see the skyline. All those tall, shining towers you see in the brochures, lit up against the desert at night. She arrived, walked outside, and found she couldn’t reach 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 all week. It’s the whole story in one picture. The gap between the photo and the real place. The brochure says world-class city. The pavement says get back in your car.

The World Cup, the Olympics, all these huge events live in that gap. Spend enough money and you can make any place look wonderful for three weeks. Whether anything underneath actually got better is a different question.

Here’s the thing, though. Every article about this points the camera at the same target: the host country. Qatar’s labour camps. Russia’s stadiums. And now, in 2026, Trump’s America and its border rules. The host is always the villain, and there is always a new one.

I want to turn the camera around. I want to point it at the crowd. Because the more I taught this topic, the more I felt that the real hypocrite here is not the country spending the billions. It’s us, the people watching, complaining, and watching some more.

So here is the plan. I’ll show you the research and the numbers nobody checks. Then I’ll tell you what I think. You don’t have to agree.

Key Vocabulary — What the Words Mean

• soft power | getting others to want what you want through attraction, not force | weiche Macht, Soft Power

• sportswashing | using sport to improve a country’s bad reputation | Sportswashing, Imagepflege durch Sport

• to launder (a reputation) | to make something dirty look clean and respectable | reinwaschen, schönfärben

• the spotlight effect | when global attention shows a host’s faults as much as its strengths | Scheinwerfereffekt

• to backfire | to produce the opposite of what you wanted | nach hinten losgehen

Let’s start with the vocabulary, because the vocabulary is where the argument hides.

Soft power is a simple idea. It means getting what you want through attraction rather than force. You don’t threaten people into liking you. You make working with you look pleasant. A country builds soft power with its culture, its universities, its films, and, more and more, its stadiums. The friendly story says a World Cup builds bridges. You open your doors, the world comes in, and everyone likes you a little more.

Sportswashing is the dark version of the same act. The word became popular around the 2015 European Games in Azerbaijan. It means using sport to launder a reputation, to scrub the dirt off the brand. The idea is simple. A country with a human-rights problem buys a tournament. The cameras show palm trees and fireworks instead of prisons and protests. And the world quietly forgets.

So which is it? Does it work? The answer, annoyingly, is: sometimes. After hosting, Qatar climbed up the global “soft power” rankings. Saudi Arabia did too. By the numbers, the money worked.

But there is a catch, and it’s the most interesting part. Scholars call it the spotlight effect. Hosting a huge event is like turning on a giant light. The light you wanted, to make you look good, also shows everything you wanted to hide. During Qatar 2022, the news covered the human-rights problems, and the good image disappeared. The light you bought to look good is the same light that makes the whole plan backfire.

A woman in one of my groups said it better than any textbook. The real question, she said, is not whether sport changes how we see a country. It clearly does. The question is whether it brings real progress or just a better appearance. Looking good, or doing good. Hold on to that. We’ll need it later.

Key Vocabulary — The Numbers Nobody Checks

• to mix up (two things) | to wrongly treat two separate things as one | verwechseln, vermengen

• legacy infrastructure | roads and buildings meant to last long after the event | bleibende Infrastruktur

• wage theft | illegally keeping pay that a worker has earned | Lohnraub, vorenthaltener Lohn

• a step up | an improvement on a worse, earlier situation | eine Verbesserung, ein Aufstieg

• a white elephant | an expensive thing that costs more than it is worth | Fehlinvestition, nutzloser Prestigebau

You have probably heard that Qatar 2022 cost about 220 billion dollars. Everyone quotes that number. It is almost completely misleading.

The actual tournament, the eight stadiums, cost about eight billion. The rest, more than 200 billion, paid for a national plan called Vision 2030: a new metro, a bigger airport, a port, roads, a whole new city. Qatar adopted that plan in 2008, two years before it won the bid. Most of it would have been built anyway.

This matters, because people mix up the two numbers all the time. And the confusion is useful for one side. Quote the giant number, and the “doing good” defence grows on its own: look at all this legacy infrastructure the tournament left behind! But 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 there is a harder question: infrastructure for whom? The woman who visited Qatar had seen it. There were highways and tall towers, but no way to walk between them. Built for cars and business, photographed as if it were built for people.

Then there is the human cost, and we have to be careful here, because the loudest version is also the least accurate. You may have seen the figure of 6,500 deaths. That number is real, but it counts all deaths of South Asian workers in Qatar over ten years: old age, accidents, illness, everything. It is not 6,500 people dying on World Cup building sites. The official number for stadium deaths is much lower, around 37. That official number is probably too low, because Qatar didn’t properly check the men who died in the heat. The honest answer sits in the uncomfortable middle.

What is not in doubt is the wage theft and the recruitment fees that put workers in debt before they even arrived. That happened. The reforms since then have been weak.

And here is one question almost nobody asks. The minimum wage for these workers was about 275 dollars a month, plus housing and food. For a man from a region where the normal wage was closer to 140, was that hard, dangerous job still a step up from home? You can argue both sides, and you should. On one side: more money, sent home to families who needed it. On the other: “better than home” is the oldest excuse for exploitation, and it does not erase the debt, the danger, or the lies. I am not going to answer it for you. I just notice that the people shouting loudest never ask it.

One more thing nobody checks: the morning after. FIFA forces hosts to build stadiums their countries cannot fill later. Brazil 2014 built a stadium deep in the Amazon, with no big club to use it. South Africa and Russia left stadiums that cost millions a year to keep. The polite name for this is a white elephant: a building that costs more to keep than it could ever give back.

Key Vocabulary — Even the Referee Is Bent

• a slush fund | a secret pot of money used for bribes or dishonest deals | schwarze Kasse, Schmiergeldkasse

• a bribe | money paid secretly to make someone act dishonestly | Bestechungsgeld, Schmiergeld

• to buy your way in | to get something through bribery, not through merit | sich einkaufen

• a cautionary tale | a story told as a warning | eine Warnung, ein abschreckendes Beispiel

• to tolerate | to put up with something you don’t approve of, instead of acting | dulden, hinnehmen

If you want to feel clean about your anger, FIFA will talk you out of it in one paragraph.

This is an organisation with a long, documented history of corruption. In 2015, US prosecutors charged officials over a 150-million-dollar bribe scheme. Swiss police raided a luxury hotel in Zurich and led officials out in handcuffs. One official admitted taking bribes connected to South Africa’s hosting. This is the body that runs the tournament you are asked to feel morally superior about.

And before we in Europe get too comfortable, look at the host everyone calls the good example. Germany 2006, the “Summer Fairy Tale”, is the model soft-power story. It genuinely changed how Germans felt about their own flag. A real, warm win.

Then the twist. Reporting later revealed a 6.7-million-euro slush fund that moved through a Swiss law firm before the vote that gave Germany the tournament. In June 2025, a Frankfurt court found the German football association guilty of tax evasion over how that money was hidden. Careful here: the court did not prove the vote was bought. What is proven is the tax conviction. But even the cleanest host on the wall had its hand near the money. Nobody bought their way in with a clear conscience.

So what does anger achieve against all this? Almost nothing. The 1980 Moscow boycott didn’t shorten the Soviet war in Afghanistan by a single day. The boycotts of Beijing in 2008 and 2022 changed no policy at all. Even apartheid South Africa is more complicated than the myth: the sports boycott helped, but slowly, and only alongside the economic sanctions that did the real work.

So we have a corrupt referee, a dirty history, and a long list of boycotts that achieved nothing but punishing the athletes. A proper cautionary tale. And still the tournament grows every time. We keep tolerating it, the way we tolerate many things we know are rotten. Hold that thought too.

Key Vocabulary — The Hypocrisy Is in the Stands

• hypocrisy | criticising in others what you allow in yourself | Heuchelei, Doppelmoral

• to perform outrage | to show anger for the look of it, not to act on it | Empörung inszenieren

• complicit | involved in something wrong, even quietly | 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

So here is what I actually think. Take it or leave it.

One thing is hard to avoid: the spotlight shows the problem, and then the world moves on. Qatar took three weeks of bad press in 2022 and then went back to normal within the year. Tourism stayed. Investment stayed. Saudi Arabia got the 2034 World Cup with almost no fight. The spotlight, it turns out, shows the problem but never punishes it. It shines, we gasp, and then we change the channel.

So the uncomfortable truth is simpler and worse: sportswashing works because we let it, and anger is the cheapest thing we own. We complain about labour camps and corrupt officials. Then we watch the games, book the flights, buy the shirt, and hand over the money. We put up with FIFA the way we put up with the United Nations: we know more or less what it is, and we use it anyway.

And the real hypocrisy here is our own. I am typing this on a phone built in a factory I would hate to visit. There is a good chance my t-shirt came down a supply chain I would never dare to inspect. The numbers are not small: nearly 28 million people are in forced labour around the world. The same public that cried about Qatar’s building sites keeps right on buying. I include myself. I will happily lecture you about fake anger while wearing the proof of my own.

That is the quiet complicity nobody wants to look at. And it is exactly why pointing only at the host is so comfortable. It keeps the light pointing away from the crowd.

Which brings me, carefully, to 2026. The loud story this summer is the host: the United States. There is a travel ban. Fans from some qualified countries can’t come. A referee from Somalia was turned back at Miami airport, on a security claim his own government denies. The head of FIFA even gave the US president a new “Peace Prize”. The easy article writes itself: America is the new villain.

I am not going to write it. I am not defending any of it. I just don’t think it is my job, or yours, to judge another elected government’s border policy. Every border policy upsets someone. And the ban was signed in 2025, before the tournament, and applies whether there is football or not. The dates matter, because they stop this from being a cheap shot.

Trump’s America is simply the newest example of the same old cycle: the anger flares, the cameras roll, and in a year or two we all forget and go back to our comfortable lives. Watch it happen this summer. Then notice that you are standing in it.

Now, the most important part. The argument so far can sound like stop caring, just consume, be quiet. That is the opposite of what I mean.

If you genuinely boycotted, if you turned the television off, took no trip, bought no shirt, waved no flag, and actually paid a price for your principle, then this article is not aimed at you at all. You are the one person it spares. I respect the reader who means it.

My target is the armchair critic who wants to perform outrage and collect the moral credit, with no real cost. To that reader I say what I said to the rooms: care honestly. Either pay the real price of your principles, or stop pretending you have them. 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 fine too. Because, let’s face it, it’s just a ball people kick around for fun, and some clever bloke worked out how to make money from 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 start so late that you’ll easily find 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. I recommend it.

So you have two honest choices. You get to genuinely opt out of the whole thing. Or you get to enjoy your summer. What you don’t get is to watch, buy, and travel, and still perform disgust through your own narrow little window. 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.

Forget the vocabulary drill this week. The challenge is a conversation.

Find someone whose opinion you respect. Try arguing the unpopular side of this in English: that the anger is cheap, that the spotlight forgives, that we are all a little complicit. You don’t have to believe it. The point is to hold an uncomfortable position under pressure, in your second language. You will fumble a few sentences. Good. That’s acquisition doing its job.

I am not innocent here, by the way. I lecture whole rooms about honest principles, and I still get my German wrong after almost twenty years. Der, die, das: I still guess, every single day. We are all performing competence we don’t quite have. The trick is to keep going, 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) is published alongside it. If you want to run this argument with your own team, that’s where to start.