motivation of it really was the fact that there was corruption involved in the bid, proven. you know, there was i think 11 of the committee members of fifa have either been fined, indicted or banned from football. well, we should also say that fifa s had its own investigation, which found that the votes weren t bought and that qatar says it s done nothing wrong all the way through it. which you put into your report. so, yes, we did that factually. help me understand, though, how you as a football presenter and a sports presenter and bbc sport generally judge these things. so for example, when you re presenting match of the day on bbc one, you ll be introducing games, say, featuring newcastle. newcastle is backed by a lot of money from saudi arabia. there are big human rights questions about saudi arabia. should you be putting quick explainers into match of the day about that? how do you judge? we did, we did. we did, ros. we did that, obviously. and i remember speaking
of fifa have either been fined, indicted or banned from football. well, we should also say that fifa s had its own investigation, which found that the votes weren t bought and that qatar says it s done nothing wrong all the way through it. which you put into your report. so, yes, we did that factually. help me understand, though, how you as a football presenter and a sports presenter and bbc sport generally judge these things. so for example, when you re presenting match of the day on bbc one, you ll be introducing games, say, featuring newcastle. newcastle is backed by a lot of money from saudi arabia. there are big human rights questions about saudi arabia. should you be putting quick explainers into match of the day about that? how do you judge? we did, we did. we did, ros. we did that, obviously. and i remember speaking to alan shearer on air about these things and how the fact that he felt uncomfortable about who the owners are. but we don t get the choice in that.
does he still support newcastle? yes, he does. obviously we ve had it with manchester city. we have discussed these things and we ve always tried to do that. i saw other people saying that, why didn t the bbc i wasn t involved, i don t do the olympics apart from when it was in london, why did the bbc not do the same thing around china? well, yes, they did. so help me understand how this works, then, within bbc sport and within the match of the day set up, if you were covering a tournament or a match, would it be standard that you would have a discussion? are there dimensions to this beyond the sport that we should cover? would that happen wherever the game was? every game that we do? not necessarily every game that you do, but every country in different ways has human rights questions against it. there are debates about it. absolutely and that was sort of my point about the fact that i m accustomed to this. and we ve had these things going into every tournament. and i can remembe
so for example, when you re presenting match of the day on bbc one, you ll be introducing games, say, featuring newcastle. newcastle is backed by a lot of money from saudi arabia. there are big human rights questions about saudi arabia. should you be putting quick explainers into match of the day about that? how do you judge? we did, we did. we did, ros. we did that, obviously. and i remember speaking to alan shearer on air about these things and how the fact that he felt uncomfortable about who the owners are. but we don t get the choice in that. does he still support newcastle? yes, he does. obviously we ve had it with manchester city. we have discussed these things and we ve always tried to do that. i saw other people saying that, why didn t the bbc i wasn t involved, i don t do the olympics apart from when it was in london, why did the bbc not do the same thing around china? well, yes, they did. so help me understand how this works, then, within bbc sport and within the match o
would it be standard that you would have a discussion? are there dimensions to this beyond the sport that we should cover? would that happen wherever the game was? every game that we do? not necessarily every game that you do, but every country in different ways has human rights questions against it. there are debates about it. absolutely and that was sort of my point about the fact that i m accustomed to this. and we ve had these things going into every tournament. and i can remember on many occasions having discussions about the issues within countries like we did in brazil with the demonstrations on the streets. so it s not a first, it was probably done in a bit more depth. but let s be honest, gary, i ve never seen you deliver a monologue like that at the start of some coverage. you weren t smiling. the tone of it was much more serious than anything i ve seen you do before. yeah, i think i was there in the room in 2010 and it stunk at the time.