Pressure mounts for teams to boycott 2022 World Cup in Qatar
Campaigners are pressuring Germany, Denmark and Norway to boycott the 2022 FIFA World Cup in protest against human rights conditions in the host country, Qatar. They amount to the most concerted calls to boycott the tournament since Qatar won the bid to host the world’s most-watched sporting spectacle more than a decade ago.. “We do not believe that we, as a democratic nation striving to live up to global human rights, can benefit from having some of the country’s most prominent sporting players participate in the finals and blue-stamp a dictatorship like Qatar,” read a petition calling on the Danish national team to forgo participating in the tournament....The boycott calls have prompted Arbejdernes Landsbank to consider withdrawing its sponsorship from the Danish national team, while several club teams in Norway are calling on their national team to withdraw from the competition. In Germany, a group of concerned fans called the ProFans alliance, are pushing the German Football Association to boycott a tournament that would be “a lavish football festival on the graves of thousands of migrant workers”. Last week, the Dutch government postponed a trade mission to Qatar set to take place this month, citing the troubling revelations from The Guardian report.