To the Middle East, where Fifa’s brilliant plan to bring peace via the medium of football continues apace. Last month, Qatar’s extraordinary win in the Asian Cup was noisily welcomed by Fifa, presumably as retrospective justification for its decision to award the tiny Gulf state the 2022 World Cup. And in some of the regional countries currently blockading Qatar, the headlines on news coverage of the final show just how close the whole peace-dream is to becoming a reality. Which is to say, not very close, if they still can’t mention the match winner in a match report. As the UAE’s Gulf News had it: “Japan come up short in Asian Cup final.” That said, it did have two articles about the final. The headline on the other was: “The Samurai’s extra confidence caused their loss.”

Privileged sport officials willing to sacrifice Hakeem al-Araibi's life should be expunged | Craig Foster Read more

If you enjoy Qatar’s Voldemort-like status in a tournament they actually won, then you’d have loved the Khaleej Times’s headline: “Unlucky Japan lose AFC Asian Cup final.” “Japan fought until the last second,” this version of events lamented, “and like a champion side, dug deep to grab a positive result but couldn’t succeed.” Mmm. Sort of like a champion side, then. And sort of a positive result.

If the Fifa boss Gianni Infantino was expecting pan-regional celebrations of Fifa’s latest tournament, he might have noted that Qatar’s fans didn’t even dare to travel to UAE to support their side. These fears seem to have been well-founded. Last week, it appeared that a British man had been arrested in the UAE for wearing a Qatar football shirt, unaware that even seeming to promote Qatar in the UAE is punishable by a prison sentence and hefty fine. Issa Ahmad claimed to have been beaten after his arrest, but the UAE authorities have since claimed he beat himself up. They duly charged Ahmad with wasting police time and making false statements and he is now awaiting trial, where he faces up to 15 years in prison.

As for the Asian Cup’s wider halo effect on this most bitterly factionalised region, that is also very much TBC. Or as one expert put it last week: “The response to Qatar’s run in the Asian Cup has, if anything, deepened the split within the Gulf.” The UAE and Saudi are more opposed to Qatar than they were before the start of the healing tournament.

In a strange instance of synchronicity, furthermore, it was reported this week that the Tory election strategist Lynton Crosby had offered to coordinate a campaign to get Qatar stripped of the 2022 tournament, for a fee of £5.5m. The frontman client was apparently a self-styled Qatari opposition leader named Khalid al-Hail. Who funds Hail remains a mystery tantalisingly unsolved – but if you had to lay a fiver on his backers, I imagine you wouldn’t lose your bet.

Infantino declined to make any public statement despite the matter being a test case for Fifa’s new human rights policy

Even in this crowded field, though, the Middle East story with the most troubling implications for Infantino should be the case of Hakeem al-Araibi, the Bahraini refugee who plays semi-professional football in Australia, and who was detained for almost three months in a Thai jail after an Interpol red notice was suspiciously issued. Bahrain sought to extradite Araibi to serve 10 years for vandalism during the brutally-suppressed Bahrain Spring – a crime he is unlikely to have committed, as he was playing in a live televised football match at the time it happened. Some have suggested that his real crime was to publicly accuse the Asian and Bahrain Federation president, Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, of abandoning his players during the crackdown. Indeed, though he denies it, Sheikh Salman himself was personally alleged by several human rights groups to have ordered the torture of athletes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even on the day the Bahrain government were submitting their extradition order to a Thai court, Gianni Infantino was standing alongside Sheikh Salman to hand out medals in the Asian Cup. Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images

Araibi was freed on Monday, following the frankly heroic efforts of the former Australian football captain Craig Foster, various human rights organisations, players unions and others. But not, would you believe, Infantino himself. While the Fifa general secretary, Fatma Samoura, wrote a letter to the Thai government, this was only after Araibi had been imprisoned for two months. World football’s president himself declined to make any public statement, at any stage, despite the matter being an absolute test case for Fifa’s new human rights policy. The Asian Federation chairman, needless to say, did even less.

Now that he is free, Foster is clear that Araibi’s story is about those who helped him in his desperate need – but also about those who didn’t. He said on Monday: “We will work to ensure all those in positions of governance that were willing to sacrifice the life of one player while occupying positions of influence and prestige, whether in football, the Olympic movement or any other sport, are expunged.”

He’s free, but who’s to blame for Hakeem al-Araibi’s ordeal? Read more

On the very day the Bahrain government submitted its extradition order to a Thai court, Infantino stood alongside Sheikh Salman to hand out the winners’ medals in the Asian Cup. Salman, you may recall, was the runner-up to Infantino in the 2016 Fifa presidential election. I always loved him as a candidate – there’s something so insanely auto-satirical about a royal family member from one of Earth’s most repressive regimes standing up and twatting on about the cleansing power of an election.

As for Infantino’s decision to stand side-by-side with a member of the Bahrain regime while a footballer was in mortal peril from the Bahrain regime, I guess you could say he keeps his friends close, and his former leadership rivals closer. But with less than four months until the Fifa presidential election in which he is the only candidate, his priorities deserve greater scrutiny than ever.