For Canada the World Cup should be beautiful. But this one is ugly.

In today’s Big Story podcast, making it to Qatar for the World Cup is the culmination of years of hard work, sacrifice and program building from Canada Soccer. But the games themselves have been largely overshadowed by questions surrounding the ethics of hosting the tournament in the gas-rich Gulf nation, where same sex relationships are illegal, thousands of migrant workers have died building stadiums, and stories of censorship and bigotry have already been reported by journalists on the ground.

Donnovan Bennett is the host of Sportsnet’s new show, Going Deep. He joins us to break down Team Canada’s objectives for the tournament, and discuss the many ways in which politics and sports have intersected — and often clashed with one another — during the tournament’s opening days.

“FIFA sent a letter to all the football federations before the tournament, saying, ‘these games will not be political, please do not use them as a platform for anything other than sport,’ [and] England still took a knee,” he said, “these games are political whether you like it or not.”

So how did the World Cup end up in a country, that at the time their bid was accepted, lacked any of the necessary infrastructure to support it? And how do we reconcile our excitement over seeing Canada back on the pitch for the first time in 30 years, with the host country’s attempt to sportswash their past human rights abuses?

You can subscribe to The Big Story podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google and Spotify.

You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.