Why French cities are refusing to show World Cup games on giant public screens

The World Cup begins next month in Qatar. France is the defending champion, but French cities have decided not to show the games at public gatherings to protest Qatar’s record on human rights.

Why French cities are refusing to show World Cup games on giant public screens

A MARTINEZ, HOST:

The FIFA Men’s World Cup, the most widely watched sporting event on the planet, begins November 20 in Qatar. France is the defending champ, but many French cities are refusing to broadcast the games on giant public screens. NPR’s Eleanor Beardsley tells us why.

(CHEERING)

ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: When France beat Croatia to win the 2018 World Cup held in Russia, a hundred thousand fans went wild back in Paris under the Eiffel Tower in an official fan zone. But this year, Paris and other French cities like Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Lille and Marseille say they won’t promote the World Cup in public fan zones to protest Qatar’s human rights and climate violations.

ERIC PIOLLE: My name is Eric Piolle, and I’m the mayor of Grenoble.

BEARDSLEY: Grenoble’s mayor says his city wants no connection to a World Cup where more than 6,000 workers died building stadiums that are air-conditioned. He says the canceling of fan zones is raising public consciousness.

PIOLLE: We had the same year Winter Olympics and the World Cup in a place where you should not have large events, for both human rights and environmental reasons.

BEARDSLEY: Piolle is referring to the Beijing Winter Olympics, where the snow had to be manufactured, and for the first time the World Cup changed seasons, moving from summer to late fall due to Qatar’s intense heat.

PIOLLE: We see here a momentum where even people connected to sport and to football start to say that we cannot continue like this.

BEARDSLEY: Jean-Baptiste Guegan is a specialist in geopolitics and sport. He says the mostly leftist and green mayors doing this are talking a noble game, but their actions will have no impact whatsoever on Qatar.

JEAN-BAPTISTE GUEGAN: (Through interpreter) The reality is these fan zones are very expensive at a time when inflation and the price of electricity is skyrocketing. They’re also extremely difficult to secure, so it suits to cancel them.

BEARDSLEY: Guegan notes that Paris officials boycotting the Qatar Cup are often the very ones asking for tickets to see Paris Saint-Germain, a team owned by Qatar. But he admits the World Cup choice of Qatar does pose a huge problem for the sports world. Not a single board member of the International Football Federation, or FIFA, that chose the country in 2010 remains. They all left amidst unrelated corruption scandals.

JEAN COLOMBE: (Speaking French).

BEARDSLEY: “It’s too late now,” says Jean Colombe. “We should have boycotted before and said we refuse to go to Qatar.” But Lonni Lombi says this debate has made him think.

LONNI LOMBI: (Speaking French).

BEARDSLEY: “When you learn how many people died building these stadiums, you feel revolted,” he says. “It’s not possible. It seems that money comes before everything.” And Lombi says that takes all the joy out of the World Cup.

Paris points to environmental concerns and Qatar’s human-rights record in joining giant-screen

PARIS (AP) — Paris will not broadcast World Cup matches on giant screens in public fan zones amid concerns over violations of the human rights of migrant workers and the environmental impact of the tournament in Qatar.

It follows similar moves by other French cities, even as France enters the World Cup as the defending champion, having topped Croatia in the final of the 2018 tournament, hosted by Russia. Some other European teams or federations are also looking at ways to protest.

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Pierre Rabadan, deputy mayor of Paris in charge of sports, told reporters in the French capital that the decision against public broadcasting of matches is due to “the conditions of the organization of this World Cup, both on the environmental and social level.”

He said in an interview with France Blue Paris that “air-conditioned stadiums” and the “conditions in which these facilities have been built are to be questioned.”

Rabadan stressed that Paris is not boycotting the soccer tournament, but explained that Qatar’s “model of staging big events goes against what [Paris] wants to organize [as host of the 2024 Olympics].”

The move comes despite the city’s big-spending football club, Paris Saint-Germain, being owned by Qatar Sports Investments.

“We have very constructive relations with the club and its entourage, yet it doesn’t prevent us to say when we disagree,” Rabadan said.

Denmark is staging its own protest: Its team jerseys at the World Cup will include a black option to honor migrant workers who died during construction work for the tournament. And several European soccer federations want their captains to wear an armband with a rainbow heart design during World Cup games to campaign against discrimination.

A growing number of French cities are refusing to erect screens to broadcast World Cup matches to protest Qatar’s human-rights record.

The mayor of Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights, cited allegations of rights abuses and exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar as the reason for canceling public broadcasts of the World Cup.

“It’s impossible for us to ignore the many warnings of abuse and exploitation of migrant workers by nongovernmental organizations,” Jeanne Barseghian said in a statement. “We cannot condone these abuses, we cannot turn a blind eye when human rights are violated.”

And then, there’s the impact on the environment, Barseghian said. “While climate change is a palpable reality, with fires and droughts and other disaster, organizing a soccer tournament in the desert defies common sense and amounts to an ecological disaster,” she said.

Arnaud Deslandes, a deputy mayor of Lille, said that by canceling public viewing of matches, the northern city wanted to send a message to FIFA about the irreparable damage of the Qatar tournament to the environment.

“We want to show FIFA that money is not everything,” Deslandes told the Associated Press in an interview.

As for residents’ reactions to the city’s decision, he added: “I have yet to meet a person in Lille who was disappointed by our decision.”

The gas-rich emirate has been fiercely criticized in the past decade for its treatment of migrant workers, mostly from south Asia, who were needed to build tens of billions of dollars’ worth of stadiums, metro lines, roads and hotels.

Qatar has been equally fierce in denying accusations of human-rights abuses, and has repeatedly rejected allegations that the safety and health of 30,000 workers who built the World Cup infrastructure have been jeopardized.

Qatar has also said that it is mindful of environmental concerns and has committed to offsetting some of the carbon emissions from the World Cup events through creating new green spaces irrigated with recycled water and building alternative-energy projects.

Environmental activists across France have supported the cancellation of public broadcasting in fan zones because outdoor viewing of the Nov. 20–Dec. 19 tournament would use energy that the country has been storing for winter.

In the southwestern city of Bordeaux, authorities cited concerns with the energy cost associated with outdoor public broadcasts in the winter cold. The French government is calling for a sharp 10% reduction in the country’s energy use to avoid the risk of rationing this winter amid tensions with supplier Russia over the war in Ukraine.

“We are trying hard to save energy,” Bordeaux mayor Pierre Hurmic told the AP. He added: “It doesn’t make sense to roll out the red carpet to such a costly event in terms of energy and the environmental impact.”

Qatar media hits back at Europe's World Cup 'rights' attacks

Doha: Qatar’s tightly-controlled media on Monday stepped up an offensive against European criticism of the Gulf state’s human rights record ahead of the World Cup, on Editorials and cartoons in recent days have lambasted “smear campaigns” about Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers, women and the LGBTQ community.

Qatari football fan cheers for his team

Some French cities have said they will not allow public screens to be put up to show matches in a rights protest. Al Sharq newspaper prominently showed a cartoon with the World Cup surrounded by arrows symbolising the criticism that Qatar has faced

“Let’s stop smear campaigns and cooperate for a World Cup that unites peoples,” it added. Al Sharq ran an interview with Lakhdar Belloumi, a former Algerian international considered to be one of the best Arab football players of all time, who said “malicious campaigns will not discourage Qatar”. An editorial in the paper on Sunday hit out at the “lies, rumours and slander” written in Europe about Qatar’s World Cup preparations.

It said there was a “systematic conspiracy” by media in many European countries over coverage of workers’ rights in Qatar, “while this media has forgotten the miserable conditions experienced by workers in Europe.” “We find that this miserable media creates a story every time a country from outside the old continent hosts the tournament,” said Al Sharq.

In a commentary for the English-language website Doha News, artist Ghada Al Khater wrote: “Forgive me for doubting such intentions of European countries, who have for the past decade stood and watched as migrants fleeing conflict, devastation and poverty … drown to the bottom of the Mediterranean.”