From denial to disbelief: Qatar’s 2022 World Cup is biggest sports washing coup

Questions like: how on earth? A World Cup in the desert, in December - are you sure? Is there anything, truly, that cannot be purchased if you are rich enough? Or, as Mrs Merton might have put it succinctly: so, old men of Fifa, what attracted you to the tiny, baking hot, gazillionaire-emirate of Qatar?

How did we get here? We cannot really understand what we are watching over the next month without taking in the journey; without asking if it is just a football tournament - 29 days, 64 games of kicking a ball - or the most expensive powerplay and PR stunt in sporting history.

How do you feel counting down to Qatar 2022? Asked to trace the path to Doha, what came up for me - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and perhaps, finally, a reluctant, grudging acceptance - was uncannily close to the stages of grief.

Denial

It starts with denial. I am standing in Doha in November 2009 as part of the English media contingent for a friendly between England and Brazil. I look around, as skyscrapers emerge out of the desert, and think, “A World Cup here? Don’t be daft.”

As I wrote then, Doha had everything for the planet’s biggest football tournament - apart from the stadiums, fans, hotels, climate, heritage, a football team and cultural tourist appeal. You may as well take golf to the moon.

The plan was (at this point) for the World Cup to be staged in the summer months, when you could fry an egg on my head. “It will be hot, but not too hot,” the bid’s leader Hassan Al Thawadi explained, with a straight face.

We laughed, at least I did, which goes to show how naive I was about the vast ambition, the unimaginable wealth and extraordinary lengths to which Qatar would go in order to win.

Their aspiration was even more mind-boggling with the knowledge that until the mid-20th century, Qatar was one of the poorest places on the planet; an economy based around pearl diving and a population of less than 16,000 in Doha.

Thanks to the discovery of the world’s third-largest natural gas reserves, the emirate is now so rich that it has no need to tax individual citizens or to naturalise any outsiders. You have as much chance of scoring the winning goal in the World Cup final as becoming a Qatari citizen. Being tiny, conservative yet unfeasibly rich makes Qatar both powerful and insecure.

It ceased being a British protectorate in 1971 - an independent nation younger than me, or Gareth Southgate - but still needs the security of alliances in a volatile part of the world. It hosts US Central Command, housing thousands of American servicemen and women, while a squadron of Typhoon fighter jets are flown by local and UK pilots.

Vast sovereign wealth buys political clout, military muscle, Harrods, Chelsea Barracks and the Shard - and in the quest for a place on the world stage, nothing buys broader profile like sport. What began as a vanity project - paying eight Bulgarian weightlifters to become Qataris for the 2000 Olympics, Angel Popov winning bronze as Said Saif Asaad - grew into the idea that Qatar could overtake Abu Dhabi (which bought Manchester City in 2008) and Dubai (the footballers’ favourite holiday venue) as the Middle East’s sporting hub.

An Olympic bid was deemed unfeasible - even the IOC saw beyond the lure of money - but football ambitions grew out of those friendlies (Brazil were paid pounds 4 million to turn up in 2009) into a seemingly improbable plot for the World Cup. On that trip, I scoffed at the idea but some of my colleagues sitting by the pool seemed persuaded. I put it down to sunstroke.

Anger

There was a moment shortly before the envelopes were to be opened on December 2, 2010 when one of the England 2018 bid delegation, sensing the humiliation about to unfold, muttered, “Please, God, let Qatar win 2022.” He hoped the outrageousness of such a victory would distract from the FA’s haplessness. Instead, that wretched day - with Vladimir Putin flying in to bask in triumph for Russia 2018, and the world dumbfounded by a win for Qatar 2022 - brought a plague on everyone’s houses, including the subsequent unravelling of the corrupt den of Fifa.

We must state that Qatar has always vehemently denied all allegations of corruption. So it must be purely coincidence that it won thanks to the most tainted electorate in history. More than half of the 22 men who voted have been enveloped in scandal.

If Qatar won fairly, it means that we must dismiss the whistleblower, a press attache for the bid who claims that she was in the room when African voters were offered more than dollars 1 million each for football development.

We must set aside the extraordinary painstaking work by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert for The Sunday Times, trawling through millions of leaked documents which showed industrial-scale payments by Mohammed bin Hammam, a Qatari and one of the most powerful men in the game. We must believe that those bank transfers had nothing to do with winning support for a Qatar World Cup when, for instance, bin Hammam sent dollars 450,000 (now about pounds 379,000) to the disgraced Jack Warner just before the vote and dollars 1.2 million (pounds 1.01 million) soon after.

We must believe that the FBI was terribly mistaken when, in 2020, it issued indictments against three South American voters - Nicolas Leoz, Julio Grondona and Ricardo Teixeira - for allegedly taking bribes to vote for Qatar.

We must think that Jerome Valcke, Fifa’s former general secretary, did not know what he was talking about when he wrote in an email that Qatar had “bought the World Cup” and accept that 14 men really did believe that this was the best for football. Do you?

Bargaining

When a senior Premier League executive said post-vote that he was determined to do all he could to block the Qatar World Cup from happening - and especially from being moved to the winter, thus playing havoc with the football calendar - he soon realised that he was whistling in the wind. Who in football would stand in the way?

Not the leading clubs, when Barcelona were taking lucrative sponsorship from Qatar, when Bayern Munich were making annual winter trips to Doha as part of money-spinning deals and Paris Saint-Germain, from 2011, were becoming a jewel in the growing Qatari sporting crown. Certainly not the most powerful footballing countries, when Argentina, Brazil, England, Spain, Portugal, Uruguay and more were flocking to Doha to play friendlies and lend credence to this tournament.

Zinedine Zidane, Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, David Beckham, Gabriel Batistuta and more from football’s A-list gave their backing. Indeed, for all the angst about how Qatar won this World Cup, name the significant football figure who has been willing to articulate any anger.

The shift to winter was, of course, accepted because it was less insane than the alternative. A half-baked idea was preferable to being roasted in summer. And so we have football’s first November/December World Cup. Given Qatar’s endless resources, the bargaining was not difficult.

Depression

While running Fifa, Valcke pondered the complexities of putting on a big tournament. “Less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup,” he concluded.

Less democracy means stuff gets done without bureaucracy, objections and, indeed, human rights getting in the way. They can be bulldozed, just like countless newly constructed acres of Doha. In that sense, Qatar was a perfect choice for Fifa, with its autocratic monarchy and near-absolute powers to the Emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. Leadership has passed through the Al Thani dynasty for more than 150 years.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers could be set to work on one of the biggest, fastest construction projects in history - seven new stadiums, a metro system, hundreds of miles of roads, a new international airport, dozens of new hotels - under a kafala system endemic with terrible living conditions, withholding of passports and, it soon emerged, many questionable deaths.

As outrage grew reforms were made to labour laws, but in his excellent book Inside Qatar John McManus portrays a deeply segregated society in which the crushing exploitation of many immigrants is in stark contrast to the conspicuous consumption that will be experienced by most World Cup visitors.

It remains to be seen how the authorities will react to any LGBT protests in a country ranked, according to more than one index, as the second-most dangerous nation in the world for the gay community. Fifa loves a diversity and inclusion slogan - but so much for football for all.

Acceptance

It would be fascinating to know if the regimen had anticipated anything like the level of scrutiny, and criticism, that has come with this World Cup, but I am guessing not. Scrutiny and criticism are not what normally comes to the rulers of Qatar.

And perhaps these issues will quickly pass once Qatar face Ecuador in the opening match tomorrow (Sunday). Maybe it becomes a World Cup on the TV like any other.

How much do you want to hear about human rights? As Ian Hislop mocked Gary Neville on Have I Got News for You when the former England defender said he would raise societal issues: “So, here’s kick-off in this appalling country with its human rights record. Oh, someone is kicking a ball, but honestly the amount of immigrant workers who have died it’s a shocker, ooh it’s a goal!”

There is a World Cup at stake, most of the best players will be on show and the tournament might pass without major incident. It usually does. The streets are never safer in any host nation - South Africa, Brazil, Russia - than during a World Cup finals. These big events are when a nation tends to show its best sanitised face. Russia even told its hooligan gangs not to beat anyone up.

Perhaps Qatar has the opposite concern of creating an atmosphere. This will be the World Cup as a premium corporate product, especially when I think of one of my most enduring tournament memories, of hundreds of Argentina fans waking up groggily from their camper vans parked all along Copacabana at Brazil 2014, wandering to the surf to freshen up as they brewed a morning mate.

In Qatar they have had to buy in the entertainment, like the Glastonbury fire-breathing spider, a magnet for ravers in Somerset every year, which has been rented and placed in a fan hub of DJs which punters can access for dollars 104 (pounds 88) a day, plus pounds 8 beers - or dollars 50,000 if you want the VIP Diamond Table. They are even buying in cheerleading fans.

How will it feel to have a World Cup in one city and its suburbs? In the European winter? This tournament is a one-off and has been ever since that jaw-dropping day in 2010. The result was so unfathomable that it triggered the end of the Blatter era - we should be grateful for that, at least - and prompted criminal inquiries in several continents.

What other legacy will Qatar 2022 leave? Gianni Infantino, president of Fifa, talks of unity, peace and global togetherness. As the man presented with the Order of Friendship by Putin after the 2018 tournament, what could possibly go wrong?

-The Times

Originally published as From denial to disbelief: Qatar’s 2022 World Cup is biggest sports washing coup