After Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille or Strasbourg, the City of Paris announces in turn that it will not broadcast the World Cup on a giant screen. In a press release, she deplores the organization, both on the environmental and social aspects.
Paris joins the list of cities that will not broadcast the World Cup. Exit the fan zones and giant screens: the town hall announced on Monday that the matches of the World Cup in Qatar – which will be held from November 20 to December 18 – will not be broadcast in the public space. “For us, there was no question of setting up match broadcast areas for several reasons: the first is the conditions for organizing this World Cup, both in terms of the environment and social aspects, the second is the temporality, the fact that it takes place in December”explains the town hall of Paris, after similar announcements were made by several major French cities.
Marseille, Bordeaux, Nancy, Reims but also Strasbourg, Lille or even Rodez have already taken the same decision, for humanitarian and environmental reasons. “This competition has gradually turned into a human and environmental disaster, incompatible with the values that we want to see carried through sport and especially football”assures in particular the Marseille municipality, led by the socialist Benoît Payan at the head of a large left-wing and environmentalist coalition.
On the Nancy side, a press release from the City also mentions the lag in terms of “the use of air-conditioned stadiums during this World Cup […] with the challenges of ecological transition” and calls on the organizers to “seriously review the rules for awarding the next World Cups”. Objective: to integrate the issues of “sobriety” and of “respect for human rights”. The mayor of Reims, Arnaud Robinet (Horizons), even qualifies the event as one of “most controversial in the history of sport”.
“Energetic aberration”
Among the reasons for this boycott include the treatment of immigrant workers and the number of people killed in the construction of the eight stadiums of the World Cup. If the official toll is only three dead, the International Labor Organization (ILO) reports in a report that 50 workers died in work accidents in Qatar in 2020, and 500 seriously injured. A figure that could be higher, according to her, due to shortcomings in the accident registration system.
In addition to the question of human rights, Pierre Hurmic, environmentalist mayor of Bordeaux, also underlines the inconsistency of this organization in relation to the efforts required of the population in terms of energy sobriety. “You cannot call your fellow citizens to sobriety and yourself be complicit in energy aberration of this nature”, he says, adding that “those who awarded the World Cup to Qatar in 2010 were light years away from energy sobriety”. Whether the World Cup is played in winter or summer, it doesn’t matter. The mayor assures him: the decision not to broadcast would have been the same.
A month and a half before the start of the competition, the mayor of Bordeaux is convinced “that other mayors will make identical decisions in the days to come”. And certifies it: he will not watch the competition.