Liverpool FC Manager Jurgen Klopp’s Qatar Media Criticism Rewrites History

Liverpool FC boss Jurgen Klopp has had enough of being asked about the World Cup in Qatar.

Although the Reds boss’s reservations about holding the tournament in Qatar are well known, ahead of the club’s clash with Tottenham, Klopp decided the time had come to switch focus to the event itself.

“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” he told the media in his typically assertive tone.

“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,” he added.

The German coach wasn’t done there, he wanted, as he has a habit of doing, to flip the attention or responsibility for this moral conundrum on the people behind the cameras; the journalists.

“You more than I, let it happen 12 years ago,” he told a reporter.

They responded by reminding Klopp that the media had done more to expose the human rights issues than most.

However, Liverpool FC’s manager refused to accept this point.

“But not then, not then,” he replied.

The exchange continued with the pair debating whether the soccer community or the media held more responsibility.

Perhaps we can forgive Klopp, who was in Germany managing Borussia Dortmund at the time, for not recognizing that the premise of his argument, that the media had not done enough 12 years ago, was not accurate.

British journalism can be accused of a lot of things, but that criticism is unfair.

‘The evil of the media’

Rewind the clock over a decade, to the FIFA deliberations for who would host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup, and it was journalists who were being attacked.

According to Andy Anson, the chief executive of the failed England World Cup 2018, shortly before members of the executive committee began casting their votes ex-Fifa president Sepp Blatter, had spoken about the “evils of the media.”

This wasn’t a generalized statement, the former leader was responding to very recent investigations by British outlets.

Just three days before the vote took place, a BBC documentary was broadcast which made a host of allegations about bribery and corruption at FIFA. The Panorama show, titled Fifa’s Dirty Secrets, also made a range of claims about the bidding process for hosting the World Cup.

That expose came hot on the heels of a series of powerful articles by British newspaper The Sunday Times, based on undercover footage that allegedly showed executive committee members selling World Cup votes.

At the time, these investigations were not welcomed by large parts of the soccer community in England. The country was attempting to woo FIFA as part of a bid to host the 2018 tournament.

So concerned were they about the impact of these stories, Anson met with the BBC’s most powerful executive Mark Thompson ahead of the broadcaster and labeled it “unpatriotic.”

Gary Lineker, a representative of the English soccer community on the 2018 bid team, publicly criticized the national broadcaster for releasing something so critical of FIFA that close to the bidding.

“The one thing I was unsettled by was the timing of this week’s Panorama program, coming just a few days before the decision is made,” he wrote at the time.

“It was difficult to understand. It doesn’t affect the quality of the bid itself, but it does affect people’s emotions.”

If anything this demonstrates just how willing British journalists were “at the time” to put their neck out and demonstrates how Klopp’s assertion “nobody did anything” is not accurate.

The problem was not that the media didn’t use its power to sound the alarm, it was that the reaction to it was the opposite, this scrutiny was considered antagonistic.

Or as Vyacheslav Koloskov, a lobbyist for the Russia bid, was reported to have said at the time, British journalists “are provoking members of the committee.”

Interestingly Klopp suggests he would watch “an old documentary about the whole situation,” presumably created by journalists or media of some kind.

Rather than trying to place blame, it might benefit the Liverpool manager to read about one of the rare instances where the soccer community was inspired by investigative journalism.

Last year, I spoke to Tromsø IL midfielder Ruben Yttergård Jenssen who felt compelled to officially call for a tournament boycott after reading an article by the British newspaper The Guardian about the conditions of the workers building the stadiums.