The truth about World Cup visas nobody wants to hear |
Working out in the gym on Monday, after rugby training on Sunday, was difficult. So, a dose of John Oliver’s politically motivated rants are good to distract from a painful recovery session. When he chose the current FIFA World Cup and the restrictions imposed on visiting fans, I thought – You are the type of person who will screech about how awful FIFA is, yet sit in their underpants screaming for England to win, while watching as many games as possible. However, his hypocritical rhetoric took me back to the Russian World Cup of 2018 and its aftermath. Because I knew, 100% knew, that his invective was dangerously uninformed.
In August 2018, my neighbor, the then-Tunisian military attaché, told me that at a recent meeting of African ambassadors, there were major concerns about Africans who came for the World Cup but ended up working illegally or trying to get into the EU. I discussed it on Capital Sports and encountered the odd African or Asian person who’d come for the World Cup and remained. But I left it to one side, until January 2019.
During a visit to the Russian Football Union (RFU), I was given actual facts and figures related to fan overstays from the 2018 FIFA World Cup. At the RFU’s House of Football in Taganka, I discovered that more than 500 men who’d arrived to attend matches at the FIFA World Cup in 2018 hadn’t exited Russia. I mentioned it in a summary of the World Cup legacy. It was picked up on by the biggest football site in the world, GOAL.com, which dove deeper into the murky mess. Their chief editor, Peter Staunton, who’d been in Russia for the event and was a regular on Capital Sports, did a super job and noted that many ‘fans’ had used the World Cup to enter the EU illegally.
It was no secret that ‘fans’ were using match tickets and Fan IDs, which granted them visa-free entry to Russia and Belarus, to try steal into the EU. ........