President Bernd Neuendorf of the German Football Association (DFB) sees the intensive discussion about Qatar as a World Cup location as a driver for progress in sport and politics.
“FIFA has included a human rights passage regarding the awarding of future World Cups, which did not exist before,” Neuendorf said at a panel discussion in the Dortmund Football Museum. “It shows that the award to Qatar and perhaps also to Russia would be difficult to imagine today, so uncritically and without conditions. That has changed, sport and politics.”
Neuendorf was “very happy” about his recent trip to Qatar in the delegation of Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). “It shows that we have never experienced a tournament like this, that the allocation of such events has become a political issue,” he emphasized: “These decisions used to be made in sports associations and then accepted politically, that has changed.”
The DFB boss repeated his call for a compensation fund for the relatives of workers who died or were injured on World Cup construction sites. The recent cancellation by the host country “irritated” him. Qatar’s Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri described a potential fund as a “publicity stunt” in an interview with AFP.
Faeser has announced that she will attend the German national team’s first game against Japan on November 23, despite her criticism of the host of the World Cup (November 20 to December 18).