As we enter late November, a World Cup beckons like never before: one laced with corruption, sports washing, and social injustice. Allegations of corruption and bribery have been reasonably levelled at Qatar’s bid to host the World Cup. A lack of appropriate infrastructure or a football culture in the peninsular Arab country should have been enough for the bids of FIFA officials to go elsewhere. Coupling these problems with human rights issues was not enough to prevent the World Cup from going to Qatar.
This World Cup is already a huge failure, further tarnishing the image of FIFA and football as a whole. The tournament at the pinnacle of the ‘beautiful’ game has been managed in a very ugly, immoral manner fuelled by greed and politics.
Why did Qatar want to host the World Cup?
Hosting the tournament does not make the host nation any money, contrary to popular belief: not in the short term nor the long term. The outlay is always much higher than the income that is gained as a result of the tournament. FIFA will be the ones to profit from the sale of all tickets and merchandise, as well as retaining all media and TV rights contracts for Qatar 2022. Qatar spent over £200 billion to host the tournament due to the lack of any appropriate infrastructure. For reference, Russia 2018 was the most expensive World Cup ever at the time, costing just over £14 billion. The motivation for Qatar was to change the reputation of the tyrannical, repressive state, increasing foreign investment and tourism. This is part of Qatar’s aim to diversify its economy away from oil (accounting for 85% of export earnings). The neighbouring United Arab Emirates have done so quite successfully, turning their own capital, Dubai, into a major economic hub and tourist destination. Qatar needs to take similar action as its economy is dependent on a finite resource, the extraction of which is estimated to make the region uninhabitable by 2090 should it remain at its current rate.
Not the First Controversial World Cup
Qatar 2022 is far from the first controversially-won World Cup, nor will it be the last. Announced alongside Russia 2018, the December 2010 announcement was soon scrutinised by rightfully suspicious football fans who failed to see the reason any FIFA officials would vote for Qatar.
In 2002, Japan and South Korea were unpopular hosts due to the time difference meaning games disrupted the working day for European fans. Germany 2006 was won after an official who was expected to vote for South Africa, who finished with just one vote less than Germany, abstained his vote. FIFA officials were also charged with fraud over the awarding of the World Cup to Germany. South Africa’s successful bid to host the 2010 edition of the competition was later revealed to have involved bribes. Brazil 2014 was met with riots across the country due to the huge financial outlay and opportunity cost associated with hosting the competition. Whether they are practical issues regarding finances and infrastructure or other issues like a lack of footballing culture or the presence of modern-day slavery, the World Cup bidding process is never entirely smooth.
What’s the difference?
While the earlier-mentioned bids are not perfect, there are clear benefits to them all. In 2002 the tournament was brought to Asia, in two developed and politically stable countries with growing footballing interests. In 2006 the World Cup was hosted by a country as well-equipped as one can be to host a tournament of this sort, with a great football heritage, that had never hosted the World Cup before. South Africa 2010 brought football’s biggest tournament to a football-mad nation, creating infrastructure benefitting South Africa beyond 2010, as well as being the first World Cup held in Africa. Brazil was an appropriate host for obvious football-related reasons, being the most successful country in football’s history. Russia is a huge country who had good infrastructure to host, immense football history, and had not previously hosted the tournament.
No matter which practical or moral angle from which you assess Qatar as a host nation, it is nearly as bad a host as imaginable. They have the money to put the tournament on, and that is where the practical strengths end. The country is geographically smaller than the Falkland Islands, with a population of just 3 million. The nation has had to build every stadium bar one involved in the tournament. This was due to Qatar having next-to-no football heritage, ranking outside the top 100 in FIFA rankings when they won the right to host the FIFA World Cup in December 2010. The nation also only hosted around 600,000 international tourists in 2021, less than Malta. There are usually around 8 million fans visiting the host nation of a World Cup, so Qatar was never going to be able to host them easily. The fans will be kept in tents and shipping containers in the middle of a desert with there being next to nothing when it comes to appropriate accommodation in the nation. The tournament has also, obviously, been moved to the Winter because Qatar is unable to host the tournament at the same time of year it has been played since its inaugural edition in 1930.
The 2022 Qatar Cup
To be appropriate hosts of the world cup, one would think Qatar would cater to the diverse nature of the visiting fans it opens its doors to as hosts, which all the previously mentioned hosts achieved well. Qatar is a repressive, authoritarian dictatorship and its laws reflect the religion of the nation, Islam. It does not allow the consumption of alcohol, sex outside of marriage, or same-sex relationships. The idea that Qatar 2022 was a tournament to show the diversity and inclusive nature of the sport is illogical and the reasoning Sepp Blatter (former FIFA president) employed to justify the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar. How can a repressive state which discriminates against homosexuality among many other modern freedoms be seen as embracing diversity and inclusion? If the ruling powers of sports and governments want to move to a diverse and inclusive future it is through excluding countries that are not willing to embrace change. Bringing the World Cup to Qatar is a clear backward step in this journey. While many have confused criticism of Qatar as criticism of Islam, I think it is important to recognise the difference between following a religion, and religious laws being legally forced upon tourists; football fans from across the diverse world which Qatar should be welcoming. Women also share similar rights to children in Qatar, needing a man instead to permit their endeavours like travel, work or education. How can Qatar host the ‘World’ Cup whilst maintaining repressive rules on those who make up half of its population?
Built on the Backs of Slaves
While the practical and moral issues make the country an utterly incompetent host, the issues are also humanitarian. Qatar’s population of 3 million is around 90% made up of migrant workers, largely from South Asia, who work in unskilled, manual employment. These workers are victims of Qatar’s laws which involved the Kafala system until 2021. This system binds workers through a contract to a kafeel (sponsor), who controls their immigration status. It means employees, in Qatar, could not leave their job or the country without their employer’s permission. This has been largely labelled as modern-day slavery. It creates an economic apartheid in the nations the system is present in. It has given way to poor living conditions, passports being seized, non-payment of wages, and physical abuse. Unionisation was illegal and anyone who tried to organise a union to protect these migrant workers was arrested.
This type of treatment and behaviour has been present across the world, and slavery of some sort has had a hand in building almost every advanced country in the world today. Some, including FIFA president Gianni Infantino, have used this to protect Qatar from scrutiny. Infantino also claimed to know what is like to be discriminated against just a few days ago, saying “Today I feel [like] a migrant worker” in a frankly insane statement that “made King Lear look balanced” according to The Times’ chief football writer Henry Winter. His given reason was that he was picked on for being ginger with freckles in school. Infantino also claimed that Western countries could not scrutinise Qatar due to their own past humanitarian issues. This man is at the pinnacle of FIFA, and therefore, the governing powers of football. The migrant worker he “feels” like would have to work for over 2600 years straight, without sleep or breaks, to earn what Infantino has earnt in his 6 years as FIFA president. . The remarks are ignorant, shocking, and truly concerning.
FIFA is guided by money and the decisions on football’s future are in the hands of a few greedy business people who do not have the future of the game in their best interests. The 2022 Qatar World Cup epitomises everything wrong with the way football functions at the highest level. Any country, it seems, can buy the World Cup. Eleven of the 22 committee members who voted on the Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 tournaments have been fined, suspended, banned for life, or prosecuted for corruption. For a sport often described as the beautiful game, football is getting very ugly.
AOG Football 