NEW Sports Minister Tracey Crouch showed her true colours yesterday when discussing the Premier League television deal and the 2022 World Cup, saying that the main reason the 2022 World Cup should be moved from Qatar was due to the heat.

In previous interviews around the staging of the tournament in the Gulf nation, Crouch has used the controversy surrounding the way Qatar won the right to host the tournament and weather as her reasons for not wanting to see the World Cup staged in Qatar.

And an interview with her local radio station in Kent yesterday morning, Crouch said that she wouldn’t want to watch games in the searing heat, totally ignoring the continued exploitation of migrant workers.

She said: “I would rather see it being played in the winter in Qatar than in the summer, I wouldn’t like to play in searing 50 degree heat, let alone watching it in the stadium.

“I have been quite vocal in my views on this and if it’s going to be played in the winter then that’s better.”

Crouch also got her figures wrong when discussing the multi-billion television deal the Premier League signed in February — mistakenly referring to the figure as £6 billion instead of £5.1bn.

She went on to highlight the fact that she was a member of a grassroots club and that funding was a “massive issue,” with only a third of the promised £1bn actually be invested outside of the top flight.

When asked if she believed more should be given to the grassroots, Crouch said: “I do. We need to be aware that the Premier League is one of the richest leagues in the world and a lot of grassroots clubs — and I have been a member of one for the last eight years — struggle for a whole variety of reasons. Funding is a massive issue particularly around the infrastructure that supports the clubs.

“The Premier League has recently just got £6bn worth of TV rights. That’s just the UK rights, it doesn’t include foreign countries buying the rights yet.

“They have said they’ll put £1bn into grassroots which sounds fantastic but I guess only a third of that will filter down to what you and I would call grassroots and I don’t think that’s enough.

“We can certainly persuade them to put more money into the grassroots and encourage them do to so through a variety of levers.”