As the final window for the European World Cup qualifiers draws near, a growing number of countries have explicitly expressed their desire to move the location of some of the matches.
Just one day after UEFA announced that the Champions League final will be moved from Saint Petersburg to Paris, three countries - Poland, Sweden, and the Czech Republic - released a joint statement saying that they will not budge in their stance that Russia should not host their matchup with Poland on March 24, or their matchup with either Sweden or the Czech Republic on March 29.
OŚWIADCZENIE FEDERACJI PIŁKARSKICH POLSKI, SZWECJI I CZECH. Więcej... https://t.co/fkNXQJIseH pic.twitter.com/Tc9o5POp02
— PZPN (@pzpn_pl) February 24, 2022
“It’s a possible scenario … spontaneously around the feelings we have as we wake up this morning are that it is almost unthinkable that we in a few weeks would play a football match in Russia,” SvFF (Sweden) chairman Karl-Erik Nilsson told Reuters Thursday. “As it looks here and now, today, there is absolutely no desire to play a football match in Russia.”
While it is encouraging that we are seeing more and more countries make the smart decision by not hosting sporting matches in a country making aggressive war against its neighbor, why is it taking an open conflict to wake people up to the fact that we should not even be allowing Russia to benefit from the revenue stream and PR opportunity of world sporting events?
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Russia is a ruthless nation that is rising in world prominence and is openly an enemy of the West and what it stands for, so we should not permit them to have the privilege of hosting important fixtures in two of the most lucrative sports tournaments in the world.
Furthermore, why did other nations not show this much backbone when standing up and demanding accountability for China and their countless human rights violations before the start of the Winter Olympics? Sure, the ratings for the Olympics were the lowest of all time, but the games still happened and countries still participated, even though China provided atrocious living conditions and treated athletes just one step above cattle. Heck, Joe Biden walked back his own diplomatic boycott of the Games after getting just the slightest bit of pushback from China.
In the future, it would be easier if the governing bodies of these major events would not allow tyrannical nations to host these events in the first place. But if it takes protests and last-minute venue adjustments to bring about change, that is at least a step in the right direction.