Armband shambles and selfie-hunting journalists

This dispatch from Doha by Gavin Cooney is available in full exclusively to The42 Members.

To get the full newsletter directly to your inbox, join The42 Membership now at members.the42.ie or from the Membership tab in your iOS app.

WHEN YOU LAND in Qatar you realize that this World Cup, like many previous ones, is festooned with bland and meaningless slogans. Drive along the highways and you’ll see them in all their beige.

Now is All! Light the Sky! Deliver Amazing!

Until now I have thought of these as the bland assaults on language that are distilled from committees and focus groups, perhaps partly as consolation. Sure, the suits get all the money and the access, but hey, at least us journalists get the best sentences.

My big lesson of my second full day in Qatar is that the meaninglessness of these slogans is not a byproduct of their dullness. The meaningless is the point.

The One Love armband shambles proved it.

The European sides at the tournament came together ahead of the competition to make some kind of statement and came up with a rainbow-framed armband reading the slogan ‘One Love’. It was criticized by gay rights activists group as being vague and ineffective.

There were rumblings that FAs would be fined if their captains wore the armband, but Fifa were largely silent on it all. That was until Saturday, when Fifa suddenly imbued ‘One Love’ with some actual meaning.

They did so by, in classic fashion, sluicing out into the world a collection of slogans that again meant nothing. On Saturday, Fifa announced a new plan for captains to wear armbands bearing different slogans for each different round.

Here they are, a collection of what Alan Partridge might call some liquid Fifa pablum….