KEIR RADNEDGE REPORTING —- International football’s movers and shakers meet in Doha, Qatar, tomorrow [Thursday] with a Russia-sized cloud hanging over the world game.

The annual congress of governing body FIFA serves as a political warm-up for the 2022 World Cup finals draw at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center in Doha on Friday.

In FIFA’s old days the pre-World Cup congress was awash either with plotting for a presidential election or pressuring all-powerful executive committee members for a greater slice of the development cash cake.

No more. The four-yearly accounting of both personnel and pay-cheques was switched to the year after a World Cup to prevent the squabbling overshadowing the finals. Of course, this year the World Cup is being staged in November and December for the first time so the issue would be academic in any case.

The congress agenda appears administratively anodyne and even the expected media fuss over standard Qatar-critical issues such as workers’ conditions and human rights will be overshadowed by bellicose events in Ukraine.

FIFA has suspended Russian teams from all international competitions at both national team and club levels. Simultaneously, the Russian military invasion of its sovereign southern neighbour has brought Ukraine’s football to a halt.

The immediate practical issue concerns how or when or where – or even if – Ukraine will be able to field a team for their World Cup qualifying playoff ties.

FIFA had tentatively set these for the international break dates in June but tragic events on the ground mean FIFA president Gianni Infantino and his advisers are having to look beyond then.

Also, Infantino will have to consider how to steer FIFA through increasingly turbulent times if pressure increases for the Russian football union itself to be suspended from membership altogether because of the warring choices of President Vladimir Putin.

Soundings among the football family will be taken behind the scenes in Doha. FIFA has known nothing like this politically since the expulsion of South Africa over apartheid 60 years ago.

Whatever the internal political squabbles, external complexities have largely been held at bay. FIFA, more by luck than judgment, has avoided being held prisoner by an event hosting as was the International Olympic Committee by the recent Winter Games in Beijing.

But if the time should arise for tough decisions over Russia then FIFA’s room for manoeuvre will be dictated not by emotional worldwide fan revulsion at the images beamed out of Ukraine but by the strategically-analysed orders of the governments of its 211 member associations

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