"The 2022 World Cup kicked off in a stadium shaped like a Bedouin tent. This provided American actor Morgan Freeman’s speech at the opening ceremony with an easy metaphor. ‘We gather here as one big tribe and Earth is the tent we all live in’, he said, followed by some universalist message about how football unites people and nations in their love of the beautiful game and how ‘this land has a story of its very own’. Beyond the platitudes, this comment about the land was very telling. It’s part of the doctrine crafted by the Qatari state (seemingly impervious to the public relations horror that its World Cup has turned into) which insists on distinguishing itself from European culture."