Don’t expect Uefa to do the decent thing – football clubs need to boycott Russian opposition

Sporting boycotts work, and the one against Russia should have already begun

Spartak Moscow's players celebrate a home victory over Napoli in the Europa League last November (AFP/Getty)

At 11 o’clock on Friday morning, Spartak Moscow were drawn to play against RB Leipzig in the last 16 of the Europa League football tournament. The match in Moscow, on 17 March, has already been moved, by Uefa, to a “neutral” venue.

What should happen next is not complicated. RB Leipzig should refuse to play the match. And if there are consequences for RB Leipzig for doing so, the other 14 teams remaining in the tournament should also refuse to play their fixtures, until those negative consequences are overturned.

It is, obviously, not fair on football clubs to be expected to take moral leadership, and to arbitrate on world affairs. That should be the job of the associations who run the game, in this case, Uefa. But no one expects Uefa to act. Nor will they.

For what it is worth, in my journalistic career, I have covered two beats, politics and sports politics. Sports politics makes real politics look like a saintly procession. Politics remains generously populated by people there to serve noble causes. In the world of sports politics – the blazerati – it is very close to impossible to find a single soul with anything other than entirely malign intent.

Uefa has moved the Champions League final out of St Petersburg for the safety of fans and players. But it has done nothing about its vast sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the state-owned oil company created with the billions of dollars of oil and gas wealth that the late Boris Berezovsky connived to steal from the Russian people after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gianni Infantino, Fifa’s president, was asked yesterday in a press conference whether he would be returning the Order of Friendship medal that he flew to Moscow to receive from Vladimir Putin in 2019. He didn’t answer the question. Then he prevented anybody else asking about it.

The most important thing to say about sports boycotts, and sports sanctions, is that they work. When rugby and cricket teams refused for a long time to tour to apartheid South Africa, it is widely agreed that minds were changed. Economic sanctions impoverish people and, hopefully, put pressure on their corrupt leaders. But they can go on for years, decades, and the world quickly forgets about them.

Firstly, sporting boycotts do not fade from the public imagination. They are renewed with every round of missed matches. Secondly, sport arouses profound passions. A lot more people care about sport than they do about politics. Imagine the reaction were England to be banned from the World Cup.

There has already been no shortage of surprise expressed that Russian teams have not already been expelled from Uefa competitions. The surprise is misplaced. Whenever they are asked about such things, grand sporting bodies like Fifa and the International Olympic Committee make the same arguments. That they have more than 200 countries as members. Many of these countries are regularly in conflict with one another, and it cannot be a sports organisation’s job to arbitrate in these conflicts. It is for this reason that Fifa have for many years not allowed the England team to wear a poppy on their shirts on Remembrance Sunday.

With some regret, I agree with this view. To permit the humble poppy leads only to having to make impossible decisions about what other mementos might be permitted to be worn by other countries, that may commemorate far more recent and more emotionally volatile conflicts in, for example, the former Yugoslavia.

Secondly, they like to fall back upon the pious claim that they are above politics, that the entire point of what they do is to bring people together through sport. This also, is not unreasonable. In London in 2012, a North Korean official hung a gold medal round the neck of a South Korean gymnast. The great power of sport is that it can arouse immense patriotic passion, but it is, or at least should be, entirely peaceful.

But these arguments are a fig leaf, through which they try but fail to conceal their true concern, which is the accumulation of vast amounts of money, and which they know very well by now is a lot easier to come by where there are corrupt governments they can deal with.

In 2013, the now disgraced former Fifa executive Jerome Valcke made the notorious comment, “too much democracy can be a hindrance when organising a World Cup”. (Valcke was fired from his job a few years later, in the wake of Fifa’s corrupt executive committee – the one which awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia – being shut down by various international prosecutors. Valcke’s own prosecution is ongoing.)

Sporting administrators have pivoted towards the easy money for a very long time, and now they can’t pivot away from it. They are too deeply entangled with too many corrupt regimes who want them for propaganda purposes. The symbiotically parasitic relationship cannot be broken.

There are bombs being dropped on civilian buildings in Kyiv, and Gianni Infantino can’t even bring himself to say that he will return the Order of Friendship medal Vladimir Putin personally gave him. Vladimir Putin has been on the TV openly threatening nuclear war, and a Swiss lawyer who organises a game can’t bring himself to give him back his medal.

It’s not merely that the simple, moral cowardice is egregious, it is that it so fatally undermines his own, sacred, get-out-of-jail-free card, about Fifa’s role in promoting peace around the world. And in Russia’s specific case, there is also the unambiguous fact that their presence even in sporting competition itself is a stain upon them. Russia used its own Olympics in Sochi as an industrialised cheating factory. It has been stripped of nine of the gold medals it won in London 2012, retroactively ruining the spectacle. No countries are entirely innocent on the doping front. But Russia is the most guilty.

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In some ways, life has been made easy for sports clubs and their players. Firstly, Russia has taken itself to a place entirely beyond reproach. There is no moral complexity about what is the right thing to do. Secondly, Uefa have, thus far, made it clear that they will not act, so they have left it unambiguously up to others.

Such actions are immensely harsh on Russian players, Russian football teams and their fans. The 2018 World Cup should never have been awarded to Russia. Putin should never have been paraded on the world stage as an acceptable leader. But the tournament did nevertheless showcase the fact that despite its criminal government, Russia is a wonderful country, with fine people, an incredible history and arguably the single greatest cultural contribution to humanity made by any country.

It is harsh to expect sports people to pay the price for the actions of their leaders, in which they have no stake. They will be angry, but that, frankly, is the point. South African sports teams were also very harshly treated, and it was not the wrong decision to do so.

Sporting boycotts work. This one should have begun already.