Whatever happens on Sunday, it will be the start of football’s grim new era

The game is clinging to its past because it doesn’t have the courage to look into its future

Sport, like gold, is an unreactive element. It cannot be alloyed, compounded or diluted. At its most luminescent moments, its dazzling brilliance outshines its many imperfections.

Sunday’s grandstand moment is 12 years in the making and the World Cup’s organisers already know they have got precisely what they wanted. They could scarcely have hoped for more. If Lionel Messi wins, arguably the greatest football fairytale of them all will be complete. If he does not, well, there’s always Kylian Mbappe. Both men, of course, are directly on the payroll of the Qatari state – Monsieur Mbappe to the tune of a reported €630m (£550m). Either man will do for the billion-dollar photograph they seek.

A job well done. Fait accompli. For 12 very long years, Qatar has had to contend with difficult questions that had it not won the bid to stage the World Cup would never have been asked of it. About its kafala system of indentured labour, in which poor foreign workers, usually Nepalis, come to the country in their hundreds of thousands to do manual labour and receive virtually no rights or freedoms in return. Or about its laws which still criminalise homosexuality.

Neighbouring Dubai and Abu Dhabi are scarcely any different. The world goes on holiday there without pausing to consider whether a moral question mark should hang over their head for doing so.

Such things often compel people to wonder what exactly is the point of sportswashing. Of paying to have the world ask you a million questions that it otherwise wouldn’t bother with. But sportswashing is smarter than that. They know what we all know. That in the end, as Lionel Messi frisks his way down the wing, turning and then turning again, he shakes off not merely a Croatian defender but all doubting too. It is a force the questioning cannot withstand. It does not speak its language.

It was always known that, once the first ball was kicked, the questions would fade away. That is always what happens. In a week’s time, it will be a surprise if there is any discussion of Qatar at all. The Premier League will be back. They know that, too.

But it is legitimate to ask whether sport can survive the putrid onslaught that is coming for it. When Sunday’s grand image makes its way into the soft focus montages, will we feel a sense of unease, when the pictures do their dissolve cuts from Bobby Moore to Pele, to Maradona and to whatever happens in the Lusail Stadium on Sunday? Where there will be a sense of something having changed? Of a wrong turn taken?

Probably not.

Football is clinging to its past because it doesn’t have the courage to look into its future. In this country in particular, we would rather just not think about, not worry about, exactly what it means that the Premier League has already become a front line in a weird middle eastern geopolitical game that almost no one is even attempting to understand. That Newcastle United, that ancient, storied club, where the roar from the stands can be heard in the shops on Monument Market Street, is somehow bigger than Saudi Arabia. That this is just a phase, that things are carrying on as normal, rather than changing forever.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Of course it doesn’t. Different futures are possible. The beauty will not be diminished by less money, less ulterior motive. There does exist a world where Gareth Southgate can just be asked whether a three-man midfield was strictly necessary to contain Adrien Rabiot and Aurelien Tchouameni, and did it give Antoine Griezmann too much time on the ball. A world in which football players and football managers do not have to face questions on human rights and human wrongs, which are foisted on them by the moneymen who have mounted a quiet hostile takeover of their sport and then retreated silently into the background.

Messi has already said it will be his last World Cup. Cristiano Ronaldo will certainly not play another. It will be the end of an era. It is certainly worth noting that between them, the two great men spent precious little time in the pay of the petrochemical elite. In a few years’ time, it will almost certainly be said that Messi’s final act was to usher in the new era.

Messi and Ronaldo’s brilliance was, for so long, almost an accidental resistance to the new forces, but it yielded in the end. In a few years’ time, it will also almost certainly be said that we should have done more to resist it.