Clear & Obvious: An official analysis of the 2022 Qatar World Cup embalm

If FIFA is known for one thing, it is stellar, original graphic design that is in no way shape or form bland or so corporate that it is probably the visual equivalent of burning the Mona Lisa. In that vein, the organization has announced the host of the 2023 Women’s World Cup has been working hard on a truly important and vital endeavor - an embalm for the 2022 Qatar World Cup.

Behold, a swoopy white thing with symbols and letters on a red gradient background:

Here are some of the features of the embalm.

The big circle in the middle is an upside down tear and represents the brutal conditions that international workers face while constructing soccer stadiums in the wealthiest country in the world per capita.

The background is red, the color of blood, and Coca-Cola - a sponsor of the World Cup despite the horrid conditions that workers face building stadiums for the event.

FIFA rejected this as the embalm for the event for some reason:

In the middle of the 0 in 2022 is a diamond, a gem that Sepp Blatter fills his bathtub with every weekend and takes a big Scrooge McDuck swim in to appease the Tatzelwurms so that they don’t descend on FIFA headquarters and eat the entire Executive Committee.

This will be the 22nd edition of the FIFA World Cup, the previous 21 editions have been mired in graft, corruption, unnecessary stadium building projects, and Alexi Lalas.

A graceful symbol, whiter than the whitest ivory or the whitest sheets in Cape Cod, swoops and remains unbroken to represent infinity - the amount of time that FIFA will exist despite corruption scandals, abiding racism, and the overall sexist nature of the organization.

Qatar, a country that exclusively relies on imports for its food and would starve without global access to international trade has had tense moments with its neighbors, is the host of the 2022 World Cup. Saudi Arabia went as far as closing its borders with the country in 2017 in an ongoing trade dispute. 2022 is also the year the film Soylent Green takes place.

Soylent is a food company that makes neutral tasting food for people who can’t stand up from a computer to do anything worth doing like cook a meal or go outside. It’s kinda funny that it is named after Soylent Green, (maybe, I guess? it’s probably funny for someone who went to Georgia Tech) until you get to the end of the movie (SPOILER) and Charleton Heston is screaming about how industrialists have been selling human corpses as food. Epic bacon.

I’m going to start a food company, sponsor the World Cup, and call it A Modest Proposal. Narwhal.

One day we will all be eating food made out of crickets, algae, and chickens grown in labs and the marketing for it will say like, “yeah, we know this is a little gross, but at least it’s not made of people” and “CRICKETS! not just for frogs that we drove to extinction - THEY’RE FOR PEOPLE!”

Do you ever watch Jeopardy and say an answer that is wrong but adjacent to the right answer? This is the best way to play Jeopardy.

Luckily, the World Cup will take place in the winter, so Gregg Berhalter won’t have to make difficult choices about taking Wil Trapp and Gyasi Zardes away from their club teams and maybe the US can qualify and win more than one game in a World Cup in two decades... if the draw gets rigged.