FIFA World Cup 2022: Controversy abounds but the question remains, why Qatar?

Holland are training at a facility called Qatar University Training Site 6. The grass is pristine, there are floodlights, two pitches, every piece of equipment they requested is here and it is all enclosed inside a freshly planted perimeter of greenery to keep it private. You see, it is not just a Metro system and seven new stadiums (plus one reconfigured) that Qatar built for this World Cup, it is a large number of training facilities too. Reuters reported that the eight stadiums plus 136 training pitches in use each require 10,000 litres of desalinated water a day in winter and 50,000 in summer. How do you feel about that?

The answer, at almost every turn, is: astonished and perplexed. Has the planet ever delivered a project of such scale and ambition? And has anything ever had you so struggling to understand the complexity of it all, and continually asking: why?

This all started, for me, as international visits tend to, at the airport car hire desk. The nice man says to you, “It’s coming home,” so you double-take and he smiles at the connection he has made and it turns out that he is an Albanian and his sidekick behind the desk is not an England fan because he is Tunisian, and so he has his own team here.

At our residence, the front desk has been staffed by Rwandans, South Africans and Egyptians. Uber drivers are, more often than not, Indian. Security staff seem to be Pakistani and Moroccan. The two attendants staffing the gents in the media centre were from Ghana. I’ve been served food by Nepalese and Sri Lankans and the workers I spoke to outside the new Raffles hotel were Tunisian and Bangladeshi. The whole world is here, it seems – apart from Qataris.

This is a World Cup city that has just appeared from nowhere. That goes for the vast army who built it and who are now servicing it. New buildings, new workforce. The population has tripled to 3 million in less than 20 years. Of that 3 million, only about 10 per cent are Qatari. The population is as new as the Dutch training pitch.

Where are the Qataris? One answer is that they are not in the service staff; there is a clear class system here and they are perched at the top of it. The other is that a lot of them are flying out of the country. The stronger conservatives do not want to be here while their home is exposed to all this western culture.

At the start of the week, Budweiser was instructed to move some of its concessions stands to make them less prominent, an edict that reportedly came from the royal family. Yet how do you hide the western world when you invite it to your World Cup?

The fact is that traditional Qatar has been witnessing westernisation ever since this project began. Just for instance, when you treble your population and globalise like this, many thousands of the female workforce won’t be wearing the hijab and won’t follow the rigid gender segregation they find here. There are the more liberal Qataris here too, and a new young, highly educated generation with showpiece American accents for their second language.

We take a boat over to West Bay towards a breathtaking catwalk of high rises. In front of them, in the water, is the ultimate symbol of the day: on a tiny piece of recovered land, a giant Qatar 2022 tournament logo is being erected. Ambitious, exhibitionist, modern, last minute. They were still painting it yesterday (Wednesday). Will it be ready for Sunday’s kick-off?

Behind it on West Bay, you see the distinctive shape of the Sheraton hotel, erected in 1979 and, for so long, the only building on this stretch of water. Now it is looked down upon by these state-of-the-art architectural supermodels, a kind of New York skyline with an Arab twist, plus multistorey images of World Cup footballers down the sides of the buildings. Gareth Bale, Bruno Fernandes, Marc-Andre ter Stegen, nice to see you.

In 2000, there were only 19 hotels in all of Qatar. By the end of 2019, that number had gone past 200. In the 16 months leading up to kick-off, 105 more hotels were due to open. Probably the most extraordinary of all, near the Lusail Stadium, where the final will be held, is the six-star Raffles hotel, an extraordinary futuristic crab claw design with 35 storeys of luxury suites rising high up the two sides of the claw’s pincers.

From the jetty, on its seafront, Raffles has a floating five-a-side pitch ready for its guests. It was expected to be ready today (Thursday). The new Sainsbury’s nearer the stadium has got no chance.

Can Qatar pull this off? You can’t tell. They haven’t stress-tested the taps in the Raffles hotel; with four group games a day, they can’t have properly stress-tested the new Metro. They simply cannot know whether Doha can operate with a million World Cup visitors.

And who will fill those new hotels when they are gone? Who will play in these new world-class football stadiums? That is where the scale of this achievement seems amazing, but also unnecessary and obscene.

Cop27, the climate change conference, was only last week. Over the next week, the World Cup will unveil the most beautiful herd of white elephants known to man.

The promise, here, that we are at “the first carbon-neutral World Cup” has been met with derision by numerous studies (Reuters, Bloomberg, BBC, Le Monde). An open letter from Morten Thorsby, the Norway international, on behalf of a number of players informed FIFA that Qatar 2022 was “an absolute disaster in terms of its environmental footprint”. Maybe this was somewhere in Van Gaal’s head when he said that a Qatar World Cup was ridiculous.

It may help to bear in mind a few facts: Qatar didn’t strike oil until after the Second World War. Before then, its depression was so severe and its population so poor that whole villages emptied and cleared out to other parts of the Persian Gulf. In England and Wales, homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until 1967. At that time, Qatar didn’t even have a university.

That is how new this host nation is; this World Cup shows how far and how fast it has moved, overtaking much of the western world and simultaneously still lagging far behind.

-The Times

Originally published as FIFA World Cup 2022: Controversy abounds but the question remains, why Qatar?