it's disgusting to organize public, worldwide events in barbaric countries.
I'm in two minds about his story, it was a much smaller scale event and sounded well run. This World Cup though sounds flat out awful, mainly due to the throwaway slave labour in building the infrastructure and the rampant corruption from both sides. If the infrastructure wasn't built with slave labour, and if the country won the right to host fairly maybe I'd be OK with it.
Availability bias at its most obvious.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar aren’t going anywhere if they can’t get World Cups.
...despite making profits of around $250M/year with cash reserves of over $2.5B.
In disputes, WMF has argued that it should not necessarily be liable for content written by 3rd-party contributors, which doesn't appear to be an entirely unreasonable position. It has lobbied for consumer rights in Copyright legislation hearings, and it has lobbied against governmental mass surveillance in which it was joined by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
It has also been criticised for some software projects being late, over budget, and not living up to expectations (so, par for the course for a typical software project?), or being developed with insufficient transparency. Which, OK, isn't great.
But you're comparing that to FIFA, whose officials have been repeatedly charged (with some guilty pleas, some convictions, and other cases ongoing) of multiple counts of political corruption, bribery, match fixing, racketeering and money laundering. Also, they lobby for exemptions to workers rights protections, and for special case tax exemptions beyond those normally afforded by it's non-profit status.
If you were trying to make the point that FIFA "isn't that bad, actually", I don't think comparing them to WMF does them any favors. (Or, it does make WMF look pretty good, in comparison.) Maybe try comparing FIFA to the IOC or the NRA if you want to make them look better next time.
They're embroiled in politics at the highest level because football / soccer arguably is the world's most popular (spectator) sport, which is something politicians gladly make use of to promote their own agendas and careers.
FIFA World Cups more often than not involve large public infrastructure programs.
FIFA and its high-ranking officials on the other hand profit in various ways, too, from "mere" tax holidays to downright corruption.
I think it may be useful to remember the origin of the word. Barbarians in ancient Greece were simply the non-Greek. People of different culture, speaking a different language. And of course, they were considered inferior and unrefined by the Greeks, who called themselves citizens.
For the Romans, Barbarians were those who were neither Roman nor Greek. It included Germans, Gauls, Persians,...
So I think it is useful to remember that in addition to the idea that "barbaric" means primitive, brutal or cruel, there is also that idea of looking down on cultures that are not our own.
/s