PERHAPS it is possible that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association could arrange a World Cup in which the host nation was determined by its human rights record and every four years we would be back in Finland, or maybe Canada. Wee Luxembourg might even be in with a chance with its scores of 98 out of 100 on the Freedom House index for political rights and civil liberties. North Korea would barely squeeze out a vote. But that, self-evidently, is not the system that the federation has been operating. Indeed, it would be daft – like automatically awarding the cup to the team that has the nicest, most ethical players. This is football, after all, not the human rights Olympics.

But, nevertheless, as the tournament kicked off in Russia on Thursday – with Vladimir Putin declaring: “We have opened our country and our hearts to the world” – I couldn’t help but find myself wondering how open the country is for those who live in it. Much that has happened in the lead-up has enhanced that feeling. We learned last week, for instance, that a senior Moscow lawmaker was warning women in Russia not to have sex with men who weren’t their own race as their children would likely be discriminated against. There have been various warnings in the UK, from MPs, gay rights groups and the BBC, that LGBT fans should take care for their safety. Amnesty international recently published a list of what they call “the bravest World Cup team you’ve never heard of” – eleven human rights defenders, many of whom had been detained or imprisoned.

The anti-gay climate has been ramping up for some time. It was there, even before the Sochi Olympics in 2014, when a law was passed banning “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations in front of minors”. In 2017, gay and bisexual men were reportedly jailed and beaten in anti-gay purges near Grozny, one of the World Cup training sites. As Yulia Gorbunova, a researcher at Human Rights Watch's Moscow division, has pointed out: "The situation of human rights now is the worst it's been since the fall of the Soviet Union."

Fifa, of course, now has its own human rights policies – established after the public backlash over the selection of Russia and Qatar. Yet what’s sorely missing from them is a strong statement, declaring that violations of human rights, such as homophobia, will not be tolerated around their tournaments.

That Fifa so far has only shown lip service to human rights is not surprising. The world is a corrupt place. Football, especially Fifa, has itself been tainted over recent years by corruption scandals. What's remarkable is that anyone ever thought football could heal the world. This year’s World Cup feels particularly far away from being the kind of event that helps the flow of international peace and understanding.

Indeed the idea seems strangely laughable. Yet, that seemingly was exactly what former Fifa president Sepp Blatter believed in. He even once said: “What I was asking, really asking, was for the Nobel Prize – for football, not for a man. It is the movement, for Fifa, what Fifa has done in the world.”

Political commentator David Runciman, writing last week in the London Review Of Books, noted: “The evidence for Blatter’s basic premise that international sport spreads peace and goodwill has always been fairly thin ... Rarely though has a regime [Russia] so brazenly signalled its indifference to the niceties of international sport.”

Those niceties are starting to feel like a thing of the past, if indeed they ever really existed. Few of us are now under the illusion that football is going to help save the world – even when it’s staged, as is planned for 2026, partly in lovely, human-rights-friendly Canada.

EYES ON THE PRIZE

THE new five-second rule is here and it doesn’t involve food, ground contact, or the pseudoscience of how long bugs take to attach themselves to buttered pieces of toast. This one is all about eye contact, and, according to news reports last week, it's one of the guidelines issued in the anti-harassment training Netflix is conducting with its staff. The Sun reported that an on-set runner who had experienced the training had said: “Looking at anyone longer than five seconds is considered creepy.”

Now I’m not fond of the word creepy. It’s the kind of word that gets used not just for those who might harass but for people whose behaviour we don’t really understand, or for outsiders we just don’t like. Nor do I think that we should be counting the seconds on a gaze, or using such measurements of normal human contact as if there were a pseudoscience around how long it takes for a glance to become predatory. In any case, those who harass will always find another way.

But, at the same time, I want to applaud Netflix – because in the post #MeToo moment it’s training like this and debate around conduct that is needed. The fact that eye contact is mentioned is a reminder that it’s not only a grope or a that we’re talking about. Yet, of course, the five-second rule lends itself to ridicule. And that worries me. For there are too many people out there keen to make out that this is what feminists are asking for – a sexless, joyless world in which human eyes can barely even meet.