Want a World Cup survival guide?

20/11/22 . Blog

The Forum usually produces a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek, health-related World Cup Survival Guide. Where is it?

I have to say that this year it was a bit harder to focus on the funny with all the other stuff going on in the lead up to the World Cup. A year ago the Guardian newspaper revealed that 6,500 migrant workers had died in Qatar since the country was awarded the 2022 World Cup in 2010, mostly from poor countries and nearly all men. Throw in the persecution of gay people. And the celebrities, ex-players and officials who try to deny there's a problem or relativise it all on the basis that there are problems everywhere - again these deniers are mostly wealthy men. So, I think we can say Qatari sports-washing is a men's health issue.

Nonetheless, this is the world we live in and we'll support our teams. The Forum is backing, in alphabetical order, England and Wales. We can't help much with the conflict we all feel between between loving football and hating dehumanisation and discrimination but if you want to get through this tournament, reasonably fit and healthy the World Cup 2018 Survival Guide will help. We'd have reused half the jokes anyway.

Jim Pollard,
Editor

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In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

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