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John Oliver joined Monday’s Late Night With Seth Meyers and spoke about FIFA banning Russia from any international play, including the World Cup, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have dealt a major blow to the economy, and Russia is now seen as a pariah on the world stage. FIFA joins a growing number of organizations and companies now cutting ties with Russia, but Oliver still has an incredibly low opinion of soccer’s governing body.
“It is kind of amazing. If you have lost the moral high ground, as a country, to FIFA, you are morally subterranean,” Oliver said. “They will try every possible angle to do the wrong thing, and if they couldn’t find that and they ended up kicking them out, things are bad.”
Oliver and Meyers joked about FIFA’s original decision to just make the Russian team play as the “Football Union of Russia” before instituting the full ban. Oliver also pointed out that the Russian team is now banned from the upcoming World Cup taking place in Qatar, where several thousand migrants reportedly died while constructing the venues for the tournament.
“You just cannot let FIFA occupy any kind of morality here, because they are banning Russia from the World Cup in Qatar, which is basically built on blood,” Oliver said. “So yeah, FIFA, in the macro sense, are still continuing to do the wrong thing, and will until the end of their existence.”
But despite his criticisms of FIFA and Qatar, Oliver admitted that he will be watching this summer.
“You cannot defend the fact that the World Cup is happening in Qatar,” Oliver said. “And I am gonna watch it, and I am going to criticize it before and after, and who knows, during. But I am gonna watch it, and what does that make me? It’s some version of a kind of lower-h hypocrite.”
