(MENAFN- Gulf Times) As an attempt to discredit a rival, it was a bizarre piece of propaganda by Saudi Arabia.
A cartoon calculated to embarrass Qatar shows a cigar-chomping TV executive, surrounded by piles of dollar bills, losing his temper when sports fans desert his station for a pirate broadcaster.
Puce with rage, the fatcat charges around the houses, first knocking on FIFA's door where he is met by an unfazed Gianni Infantino in a dressing gown, who calmly points him in the direction of UEFA.
As boss of European football, Aleksander Ceferin also passes the buck, and the increasingly desperate beIN SPORTS boss ends up on a wild goose chase trying to get the Premier League and others to help him out.
Eventually he arrives home disconsolate and empty-handed, only to find his own children gathered around the box watching a Liverpool game on the pirate channel, beoutQ TV.
The clip ends with the words being flashed up on the screen in Arabic: ‘No to monopoly, no to politicising sport'.
The video was shown on beoutQ during the pirated UEFA Champions League highlights programme on September 21,2018, and been promoted on social media since then.
And even though the sporting world universally deplores what the Saudis are up to, the piracy goes on.
Far from slamming doors, FIFA has launched legal action against the rogue broadcaster; the World Trade Organisation is investigating the alleged piracy, and both the BBC and Sky have gone to the EU Commission to prevent the contagion from spreading, with embedded IPTV apps also now able to stream up to 35,000 pirated TV shows and 10,000 on-demand movies.
Perhaps more serious is the possibility that what might seem to be a regional quarrel between rival TV stations now threatens to explode into a spectacular bust-up at the next World Cup.
beoutQ is broadcast on the Riyadh-based satellite provider, Arabsat, whose largest shareholder is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
When the sale of beIN satellite decoder boxes was banned as part of Saudi Arabia's trade boycott against Qatar in June 2017, football fans living there lost access to the Premier League, Champions League, Serie A and La Ligue.
However, not only was beoutQ able to get the beIN footage of these top European leagues, but by the following summer it was also able to steal all 64 games of the FIFA World Cup in Russia.
With no end in sight to the trade blockade, it's highly likely that they will attempt to seize footage of the 2022 matches as well, setting up Saudi Arabia and Qatar for an even bigger fight in three years time.
The argument that beIN Sports shouldn't have a monopoly to the major sporting tournament, of course, rings hollow. It's a bit like saying ‘No' to Sky Sports getting exclusive rights to the Premier League (before BT Sport et al came along).
BeIN has exclusive rights to the crown jewels of sport across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region because it paid for it. And that, as they say, is showbiz.
Complaints that, in this case, sport is being politicised by the rich are rich coming from Saudi Arabia. Government and world leaders have long recognised that sport is able to wield tremendous influence. Bigger and more powerful than ever, it has the strength to bring nations together and rip them apart.
Saudi Arabia knows this better than anyone, not averse itself to putting pressure on FIFA to allow itself or other enemies of Qatar to host some of the World Cup matches in 2022, offering billions to host a new Club World Cup, or forking out for celebrity sports tournaments that it hopes will win them friends.
Much of the problem can be traced back to one man Saud al-Qahtani, a royal court adviser named as the leader of the hit squad which killed Jamal Khashoggi. He was the man said to have ordered the death of the Washington Post journalist on Skype with the words: ‘Bring me the head of the dog'.
In June 2017, when the Saudi-led boycott was launched, the 40-year-old was Saudi Arabia's Minister for Cyber Programming and Security. He also ran social media for the country's effective ruler, Mohamed bin Salman (MbS).
A week after the blockade of Qatar was announced in June 2017, al-Qahtani was reassuring sports fans they wouldn't miss out on watching their favourite team. He was able to do this because, tucked into his back pocket, was a plan to launch a piracy operation.
‘The alternative solutions are coming soon and they are going to be free or for a low price,' he told his Twitter followers.
He accused beIN SPORTS of paying way over the odds for sporting rights so that it could spread Qatari propaganda.
‘It was their plan after buying the broadcasting rights five times the real value to insert political bulletins and programmes to damage international stability,' he whinged.
In fact, across the board beIN is priced much more favourably than its regional rival, OSN.
Al-Qahtani also compared the situation to Britain and France where other broadcasters, such as BT Sport and Amazon, can also bid for TV rights.
‘There is a big hole in the law in their monopoly to broadcast in the region. Revise the situation in Britain and France, for example…that is enough indication'.
Saudi Arabia has the money to do what it pleases. But its complaints are nothing more than a smokescreen to distract global attention from its own problems.
It's furious that its rival Qatar is hosting the World Cup and furious that it hasn't managed to cow Doha into submission.
There is also sense that FIFA could, and should, do more to stand up to the Saudi pirates.
A month before its legal action against beoutQ was announced, Infantino and MbS were seated next to each other at the opening match of the World Cup between Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Surely one word from Infantino and the Saudi crown prince would have called off the pirates. Think of the lawyers' fees it could have saved.
But then where would millions of Saudi fans get their sport from?
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