Jurgen Klopp insists that players and coaches heading to the World Cup should not be forced to take a political stance on the tournament.
The Liverpool manager will not attend this month’s finals and admits that he has little enthusiasm for it due to the timing and issues around the event.
Qatar’s documented abuse of migrant workers and treatment of LGBTQ+ fans has seen focus on their upcoming hosting shrouded in growing controversy.
But Klopp believes it is wrong to expect participating nations to lead protests against the Gulf state despite being ‘angry’ at the circumstances in which they were awarded the World Cup.
He said: “I watched an old documentary about when it got announced that Russia and Qatar were the places for the next World Cups.
“We all know how it happened and we all let it happen. No legal thing afterwards led to a real… what can I say?
“It was hidden everywhere but now it is open, now everybody knows, and you think: ‘How could it happen?’ It was 12 years ago.
“It’s nothing to do with Qatar. They won the World Cup and now it is there.
“But in the moment you put it there, all the things that followed it up were clear. The people who were involved at that time should have known.
“Later on we talk about human rights in terms of the people who have to work there in circumstances that are, let me say it nicely, difficult.
“We couldn’t play the World Cup there in the summer because of the temperature and there was not one stadium in Qatar, or maybe one.
“So you have to build stadiums. I don’t think anybody thought on that day about somebody having to build them.
“It’s not like Aladdin with his wonder lamp and: ‘Boom, there’s a new stadium.’ The situation makes you angry. How can it not?
“I will watch it from a football point of view but I don’t like the fact that players now have to send a message. You are all journalists.
“You should have sent the message but you didn’t write the most critical articles about circumstances that were clear. There we are guilty.
“But now we are telling players they have to wear an armband and if they don’t do it then they are not on their side. No, no, no.
“These are footballers, it is a tournament and the players must go there and play and do the best for their countries. It is nothing to do with the circumstances.
“There are wonderful people there and it is not that everything is bad over there but how it happened was not right in the first place.
“But now it is there, let them play the game as players and managers. Don’t put Gareth Southgate constantly in a situation where he has to talk about everything. He has an opinion but he’s not a politician.
“I’m not a politician. He’s the manager of England so let him do that.
“If you want to write about something else then do it, but by yourself without asking us so that it’s ‘Klopp said’ or ‘Southgate said’.
“As if that would change anything. You more than I let it happen 12 years ago.”
The German also bristled at suggestions that the media had attempted to take Qatar’s human rights abuses to task, insisting: “But not then [in 2010].
“There were plenty of chances in the next three or four years to say the process was not right and a lot of people took money for the wrong reasons.”