November 7 – Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has had enough of being asked about the World Cup in Qatar. At a news conference, he lashed out at the media for not raising the issues over Qatar when it mattered, but admitted that “we all let it happen”.
The German coach, whose team defeated Tottenham on Sunday, has previously voiced his reservations about staging the World Cup in the Gulf nation, but at a press conference, Klopp suggested that journalists should be held more responsible for the tournament going ahead in Qatar than the actual football community.
“You more than I, let it happen 12 years ago,” said Klopp. “You are all journalists. You should have sent the message but you didn’t write the most critical articles about circumstances that were clear.”
“It’s a tournament, it’s there, and we all let it happen and it’s fine because 12 years ago nobody did anything then. We cannot change it now.
“There are wonderful people there and it’s not at all that everything is bad. It’s just how it happened was not right in the first place. But now it is there, let them play the games, the players and managers.
“Don’t just put Gareth Southgate constantly in a situation where he has to talk about everything. He is not a politician, he is the manager of England. Let him do that.”
Coaching at Borussia Dortmund in Germany, Klopp will have been less aware of a series of stinging Sunday Times articles and Panorama’s FIFA’s Dirty Secrets episode which detailed allegations of corruption in the bidding process and executive committee members selling World Cup votes. However, some media have done more than football’s stakeholders to shine a light on the many problems in Qatar.
Klopp however dismissed that. He said: “But not then,” he insisted. “How is it possible at that time that it was just a story about it happening? It was already clear what would happen and then you follow it up with, ‘Oh yes, it is difficult to build a stadium in Qatar and it is 50 degrees’. It’s impossible for humans to be out there doing hard physical work. There were plenty of chances in the next three or four years to say the process was not right and a lot of people took money for the wrong reasons.”
The Liverpool boss however was correct in suggesting that there was a lack of scrutiny in 2010, when Qatar were awarded the World Cup, in terms of the host nation’s human rights record and labour laws.
“I watched an old documentary about the whole situation, about when it got announced that Russia and Qatar are the places for the next World Cups,” said Klopp.
“I think it was the first time in history they announced two in one go. We all know how it happened and that we can still let it happen, with no legal thing afterwards. Now it is open, now everybody knows, but still it was hidden and you think: ‘How can that all happen?’ It was 12 years ago. It’s nothing to do with Qatar. They won the World Cup and now it is there. But in the moment you put it there, all the things that followed it up were clear. And the people who were involved at that time should have known.
“Later on we talk about human rights in terms of the people who have to work there in circumstances that are, let me say it nicely, difficult. We couldn’t play the World Cup there in the summer because of the temperature and there was not one stadium in Qatar, or maybe one. So you have to build stadiums. I don’t think anybody thought about that on that day, that somebody has to build them. It’s not like Aladdin with his wonder lamp and ‘Boom, there’s a new stadium’.”
Klopp’s wider point that players and coaches however should be allowed to get on with the show without facing any questions is controversial. Last week, FIFA president Gianni Infantino issued a letter to the 32 World Cup finalists in which he advocated a ‘shut up and play’ policy.
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