Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp said that national team players and managers who are on their way to the World Cup in less than 3 weeks should not have to answer questions on Qatar’s eligibility to host the tournament. He also said that the football world as well as the media should have criticised when the bid was awarded back in 2010.
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“I watch it from a football point of view and I don’t like that players, from time to time, get in a situation where they have to send a message. You are all journalists, you should have sent a message. You didn’t write the most critical article about it – and not because it is Qatar and things. No. About the circumstances, which was clear,” Klopp said in a pre-match press conference.
Qatar is the first Middle Eastern nation to host the World Cup but questions were raised when the tiny Gulf country that had never qualified for the tournament before was awarded the hosting rights in 2010 in a controversial bidding process.
“You are all journalists YOU should have sent a message!”
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Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp didn’t hold back when talking about the Qatar 2022 World Cup.pic.twitter.com/d0ZVohDxZ8
— Sky Sports News (@SkySportsNews) November 5, 2022
“Now we are telling the players you have to wear this armband and if you don’t do it you are not on their side and if you do it you are on their side. No, no it is footballers, it is a tournament, and we have to organise it. Players go there and play and do the best for their countries, it has nothing to do with the circumstances,” he added.
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Klopp also stressed that he bore no ill will towards the people in Qatar but said that he was not particularly happy on how the bid was awarded to the middle-eastern country, stressing that now it was too late to criticise it due to the World Cup getting closer by the day. He said that the players and the managers should be kept out of the political discourse and their opinion on the human rights issues, because it was too late now. He said that now, that the World Cup is happening in the country, the players and the managers should be allowed to focus on the task at hand i.e. to win the tournament.
“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, let them just play the games, the players and managers. And 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,” the German coach said.
Asked if he would attend the world Cup in person, Klopp replied with a terse “No”. When probed further, the Premier League winning coach said, “It’s nothing to do with Qatar and they want the World Cup, now it’s there. At the moment you put it there, it was all the things which followed up were clear. The people at that time, everybody that was involved, should have known. At that moment that we later talk about human rights in the sense of people have to work there in circumstances which are, putting it nicely, difficult.”
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He also talked about how stadiums didn’t materialize out of thin air, pointing to the fact that labourers had to build them in the scorching Qatari heat.
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“We couldn’t play the World Cup there in the summer because of the temperature, [but] it’s now pretty hot [there]. There was not one stadium in Qatar, maybe one, so they had to build stadiums there. Nobody thought about that, I don’t think anybody mentioned that that day. So somebody had to build them because they don’t just poof [out of thin air], and there’s a new stadium,” he said.
Qatar has come under intense pressure in recent years for its treatment of foreign workers and restrictive social laws, leading to many participating teams raising concerns, although the country has denied claims that workers were exploited.
(With Reuters inputs)
