How is this arbitrarily treating them worse? We have a reason to do so and we can if we wish. Justice is rarely ever applied evenly so should we not apply it at all?

In China people are put in concentration camps, but they hosted the winter Olympics without this much fuss, so that certainly qualify as arbitrarily treating them worse.

There was definitely a lot of fuss around China and Xinjiang. The US did not send a delegation to the Olympics. https://www.csis.org/analysis/biden-boycott-2022-beijing-win...

The Qatari debacle is more focused though, because the controversy is directly affecting the players and the spectators (in particular the schedule shift and the alcohol row)

There is definitely much more fuss about this across MSM esp. in Europe.

Being more upset at lacking alcohol at a sports event over being upset at the existence of concentration camps in China is quite something. There is some palpable hypocrisy that's apparent if one holistically compares the coverage.

Probably the personal revolution of finding out that the game you love watching is actually quite boring unless you're pissed.

Also, the lack of appropriate alternate venues.

Developed countries do not want to host the Olympics anymore. By the time the 2022 selection was over, the only other candidate was Almaty, which isn’t less problematic and had a protest violently suppressed by Russian forces in January right before the 2022 Olympics.

The World Cup had Australia, South Korea, Japan and the US bidding to host 2022.

Because the Olympics, since ancient Greece, served as a way of wnemies to come together. Which is, despite the rampant corruptuon in the IOC which is only surpassed by FIFA when it comes to sport, Olymics can be held in coubtries belonging to the "other side". That Olympic Games are sold the same way FIFA sells tournaments is even worse, because of the diplomatic angle of Olympic games.

Neither coverage of either was particularly rosy. Host countries get criticized all the time, like Rio 2016. There’s just legitimately a lot more to criticize.

In particular:

* the schedule. Because of Qatar's extremely hot summers, the whole schedule has to be moved for the World Cup outside of summer. This now cuts into normal European football league times, cuts recovery times, etc. Neither Russian or Chinese games really resulted in a significant chunk of sports having to unexpectedly shift schedules

* the alcohol row. Qatar explicitly had to agree to be okay with alcohol at games, and is now reneging severely, which is pretty bad considering that alcohol consumption is pretty regular at football. Neither Russia or China imposed such severe restrictions on spectators.

The worst bit though, is that the process was blatantly rigged, most of the people directly involved have been indicted on corruptions charges, and it's pretty much the only way the bid went through because these problems are inherently self evident if you spend maybe five minutes thinking about Qatar.

> How is this different

Was it implied that it is different?

There was no enthusiasm for this past Winter Olympics in the English-speaking West; the engagement numbers were pretty clear on that.

The "problem" story is much cleaner in Qatar though: the migrant worker abuses are alleged in building the venues.

In contrast, China and Russia have complicated problem stories about camps in places people can't visit, or about graft and murky military movements. Tougher for the public to get into. So maybe that's why you didn't see all the stories and posts about them.

I don't like neither Chinese, neither Russian government. That said, unless we restrict such events to a very limited set of countries, we have to let a number of countries whose behavior we don't approve, as long as the event itself is properly handled.

Chinese Olympics where properly handled, ditto for Russian Winter Olympics (at least as far as I remember).

Qatar didn't at all. They promised a lot of things to FIFA and then went back on a lot of them.

Promised that the cup could be held in summer, we ended up doing it in winter (while forcing all the national and international competitions to adapt their scheduled.

They promised people could drink alcohol, went back on that two days before the beginning.

Promised proper accomodations for the fans, nope.

The list is longer but I think I gave the idea.

A world cup is not just the matches themselves. It's the fans, it's the atmosphere. It's the tradition. If you're not going to respect that, you shouldn't host them.

I don't blame only them though, half of the blame is of FIFA. I realize that there is always corruption going on in such events (although I don't like it), but I would expect the money not to be the ONLY thing that matters. Instead, this such a case.