The World Cup is a multicultural block party held in the midst of a gold rush

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These days, the only place at a World Cup you get any sense of the diversity of human experience is at the media conferences.

The players are all from the same rich and famous tribe. The fans are from a slightly more downmarket branch of that clan. Different countries, different languages, but the same rootless, aspirational class. Everyone knows their roles in this performance, which is the same everywhere.

Wherever you go, you hear the soothing, unplaceable electronica that has become the soundtrack of global travel. No one leaves home any more. They temporarily move their home somewhere with a concierge.

But in the news conferences, there is some reassurance that we do not all yet speak, think and behave exactly alike.

For instance, the U.S. coach being asked why he will not move the U.S. Fifth Fleet out of the Persian Gulf. I’m guessing he could try calling the Navy, but I’m not sure it knows what soccer is.

How about the Brazilian press officer tossing aside an intruding cat while members of the media – Americans, no doubt – shrieked in outrage? There’s a whole world out there, and they don’t all love their fur babies.

My personal favourite were the Iranian news conferences. In Canada, we value brevity in a question. In Iran, the more ornate the better. Every journo there needs two or three minutes of introduction and preamble before they can get to the point.

Someone asked one of these questions of Iran’s Portuguese coach, Carlos Queiroz. Queiroz has coached Iran for a decade. He should be used to it. But as the ‘question’ dragged on, his grip on the translation headphones loosened until they were hanging slackly in his hand. He’d stopped listening before any query was delivered.

His answer, in English: “To be honest, I don’t understand actually your question.”

That’s the World Cup these days – an answer to a question no one bothers listening to.

What do we want from global sporting events any more? It can’t be that old line about getting the whole world together.

The world is always together. We never leave each other’s company. Whether it’s social media, fashion trends or whatever superhero movie everyone’s watching, there is no more regional flavour. There is only a numbing worldwide consensus.

It’s great for business, but it’s boring. Can you remember when you would travel somewhere and the stores were different?? That ancient world – which still existed 20 years ago – now seems as romantic as the Renaissance.

Is it to foster mutual understanding? Oh God no. That’s such a 1980s idea. Every global sporting event is now an opportunity to yell louder than everyone else about your own values.

The people you’re yelling at couldn’t care less what you think. They understood going in that you’re a hypocrite. You’re there, aren’t you? Eating their food and playing on their fields?

It’s like showing up at a wedding reception, grabbing a mic to critique the decorating themes and then stealing all the centrepieces. If anyone really cared about Qatar’s politics, they wouldn’t go. But we all did. As usual, the only people we’re yelling at is ourselves. As the audience, your role in these limp theatrics is to pretend to be fooled.

Is the point of this making money? Yes. But goddamn you, no!

FIFA makes billions. The teams make tens of millions. The players make a whack. Qatar gets a social leg up on its neighbours and puts its name in the mouths of every soccer-loving citizen on planet Earth. Everybody makes out like bandits here.

But you go up to the Canadian practice facility and someone asks you not to take more than one plastic bottle of water: “We’re trying to be carbon neutral.”

Because – wink, wink – the real focus of the World Cup is sustainability, and growing the game, and eliminating discrimination. Everything but what it is.

Did you all row here together in a massive canoe that you made from the trunk of one tree with your own hands? Because otherwise, it’s not carbon neutral.

If there were an overarching motto for major sports events these days it would be: “Live capitalist; talk socialist.” If you repeat TikTok’s concerns back to people in a soothing tone, you can ignore those concerns entirely.

‘I know. I know. Rising global temperatures. It’s awful. Nobody’s doing anything about it. We’re all going to die. And yes, absolutely, we have shaded parking for your jet.’

There could be no place on Earth better suited to this ‘say one thing, do another’ ethos than Doha. This city is what would happen if they put the Circus Maximus in the middle of a religious shrine.

There are all sorts of rules and customs in Qatar, none of which pertain if you have enough money. You can’t drink in Qatar. Except in the places you can. A lot of things are like that.

What’s it like in Doha? Hot and rich.

It can be hot and rich in North America, too, but not like Doha. Downtown, it’s the Vegas strip. It’s glass towers, man-made islands and shopping mall after shopping mall.

You drive a half-hour in a straight line and you’re in a Lawrence of Arabia backlot. A bit from that movie rings in your head: “There’s nothing in the desert, and no man needs nothing.”

There is something in this desert – money. Whenever you meet a Westerner who lives here, they are giddy with wealth, and just itching to tell you about it. Did you know there is no income tax in Qatar? Because a half-dozen people told me that, apropos of nothing.

This World Cup isn’t a sports tournament. It’s a block party held in the midst of a gold rush. There was nothing here 50 years ago and it’s close to certain it will return to that state soon enough. The World Cup is an attempt to mark this period with something other than megayachts.

This isn’t Qatar’s fault in any particular way. All global sports events are the same now – Disney for the beautiful people.

It’s even harder to tell them apart if you’re one of the unbeautiful people working one. They go so far as to import the same furnishings into all the facilities. A media centre in Beijing is indistinguishable from one in Rio de Janeiro.

The only way you can tell where you are is by having a conversation with someone. The world may be approaching a perfect praxis of homogenized commercialization, but people continue to be weird and wonderful in their own way.

In three weeks in Qatar, I didn’t knowingly meet a single Qatari. But I met people from a dozen other places, all of whom ended up here in search of a living or adventure or both. Their world isn’t boring. It’s vaguely terrifying, uncertain and full of possibilities. They are us before we got comfortable.

Those people made Qatar the most logistically successful tournament of any kind I’ve ever been to. Say this much for money – it smoothes a path. On the way home, we went from the opulence of the new Doha airport to the Pensacola-bus-station feel of Pierre Elliott Trudeau International in Montreal. We Canadians like to guilt-brag about our collective wealth. If that’s true, you wouldn’t know it by popping by our place for a visit.

In Qatar, if it said a bus left at 9:17, it was there waiting for you at 9:10.

There was a Kenyan driver who would roll by our place most mornings blasting Kenny Rogers. Sometimes he’d mix it up with George Jones or Alan Jackson. But heavy on the Kenny.

The first morning, as we drove through a dusty neighbourhood of walled compounds, a colleague turned to me and said, “This is not the place I thought I’d be listening to Coward of the County.”

The driver was a young, seemingly well-adjusted guy, and had not obviously emerged from a tear in the fabric of space-time. So I finally asked him what was the deal with the music.

“It’s my mother’s favourite,” he said.

Somehow that gives me hope for the World Cup, and every other circus like it.

The corporate protests, cynical hymns to human development and work-shopped mottos are the smoked door behind which they hide the cash-counting room.

But out on the floor, if you bring enough people from enough different places together and let them mingle, maybe we can actually get somewhere.