On Eve of World Cup, FIFA Chief Says, ‘Don’t Criticize Qatar; Criticize Me.’

DOHA, Qatar — The president of world soccer’s governing body on Saturday sought to blunt mounting concerns about the World Cup in Qatar with a strident defense of both the host country’s reputation and FIFA’s authority over its showpiece championship.

But in pushing back against criticism of the event, particularly from Europe, the president, Gianni Infantino, seemed to revel in redirecting much of that anger toward himself.

In an extraordinary hourlong soliloquy delivered in a grand auditorium one day before the opening game of the World Cup, Infantino attacked Western critics of Qatar, Western companies who do business in the country and human rights groups and news media organizations who have highlighted the cause of migrant workers.

All of them, he said, had engaged in what he labeled “moral lesson-giving” and “hypocrisy.” Citing statistics, history and even childhood to bolster his case, he at one point likened his own experience as a redheaded child of immigrants to Switzerland to the assimilation problems of gays in the Middle East, and defended the laws, customs and honor of the host country.