Unfurl the pale summer sparrow. Turn the thermostat up half a notch. Enjoy the yellowish glow from the rectangular screen in the corner of the room. The most divisive, brutal, stunningly corrupt sporting event of modern times is upon us. It’s finally time to Discover Amazing, as the Qatar 2022 Fifa Men’s World Cup repeatedly invites the passing traffic on the endless hoardings and fences that ring this city of light and sheer surfaces.
On Sunday night, the soccer players from Ecuador and Qatar will step out for the opening match at the Al Bayt Stadium. For the next 29 days, Qatar’s eight brand-new stadiums, gleaming glass and steel monuments to the men who died in their construction, will live out their own brief sepulchral lives before being dismantled for parts or converted into shopping malls.
England play Iran on Monday in the mid-afternoon heat. Wales kick off against the USA in the evening. Twelve years, £220 billion and thousands of unexplained deaths on the way, it seems we will indeed be playing football after all. Welcome to the cursed World Cup.
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Qatar: beyond football
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This is a World Cup like no other. For the past 12 years, the Guardian has reported on the issues surrounding Qatar 2022, from corruption and human rights abuses to the treatment of migrant workers and discriminatory laws. The best of our journalism is brought together on our dedicated Qatar: Beyond the Football website for those who want to delve deeper into the issues beyond the pitch.
The Guardian’s reporting goes far beyond what happens on the pitch. Support our investigative journalism today.
It has been a grueling process to get to this point. Twelve years have passed since Fifa staged its absurdly grand double selection ceremony for the World Cup in Zurich. Former President Sepp Blatter really seems to have thought he would win a Nobel Peace Prize by awarding Russia and the United States in 2018 and 2022. Instead, from the moment Blatter opened his envelope and read out the word “Qatar” in a halting voice – Blatter already knew then – he lit a match under Fifa’s own mountain bunker.
Later that day, as a Cold War Steve-style montage of A-listers, from Boris Johnson to Bill Clinton, slipped back into their helicopters, Vladimir Putin appeared on stage in Zurich to host a triumphant unscheduled press conference. Fast forward to today and 16 of 22 voting Fifa committee members from that day have been tainted by some form of corruption, either alleged or substantiated, from arrests and extradition orders, to such minor oversights as accepting a Picasso painting from Russia’s bid team and then really regret it and say sorry.
This is point one of Qatar 2022’s indictment, a World Cup that was essentially awarded by a toxic criminal organization. But that’s just the background here. The suffering of the huge immigrant workforce employed to build this tournament has been widely covered in the years since. A Guardian report has suggested there may have been up to 6,500 related worker deaths since Qatar was awarded the World Cup.
Qatar disputes this. For a long time it put the total as low as three. Qatar has also refused to perform proper autopsies on its working dead. Various independent reports have pointed to cases of cardiac arrest due to crushingly long hours in the desert heat, to a workforce governed on the basis of ingrained institutional racism, and to some truly heartbreaking details. A story in the New York Times this week reported that at least 2,100 Nepalis have died in Qatar since 2010, 200 of them suicides.
It takes a level of cognitive dissonance to continue watching a show haunted by these absences. The official mascot of Qatar 2022 is called La’eeb, billed as a sprite from the mascot’s underworld, and modeled after the traditional regional white cloth headdress. Basically, La’ee is grinning about looking like a smiling friendly ghost, presented via hologram box to arrivals at Doha International Airport in a way that feels unintentionally poignant. Here he is, the cheeky, ghostly face of a World Cup shadowed by death.
The question of why exactly Qatar wanted to stage this spectacle has perhaps not been asked enough. Qatar does not have a serious football culture. It had no infrastructure at the time, and is still devastatingly expensive to visit.
The argument for expanding the game has been used by Fifa since it was before the murderously framed 1978 edition. And it is true that there is a huge hunger for football in the Middle East and the Gulf. A first ever WC in the European winter is hardly an unreasonable wish from the rest of the world. But why not take this thing to a place where it can really take root, to a developing nation where Fifa’s vast wealth can be used to build facilities that are actually needed?
The term sports laundering has been a handy catch-all explanation, a term used to describe hard-line states that use sports to polish their public profile. This is of course nothing new. The World Cup has been the plaything of despots for as long as there has been a FIFA World Cup. Its second edition was staged in Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Only the intervention of World War II saved us from the great lost Nazi World Cup, Germany 42.
This is a little different. Qatar is not conducting a charm offensive. Qatar has no ambitions beyond its own borders. Qatar has 200 years of natural gas. It doesn’t have to be liked. Instead, this World Cup now looks like part of a broader national security program, a way to make this tiny hyper-rich peninsula visible to the world, to become a presence on the map, to minimize its vulnerability to coups and blockades. This is hard power, security, the shifting plates of global wealth and influence.
As the World Cup gets under way, and with Qatar’s status elevated by Europe’s energy crisis – the result of a war started by the host of the last World Cup – there has been a clear hardening of attitudes, a feeling Qatar is certainly in no mood to continue apologizing for.
It is hard to avoid the feeling that Qatar was also right, that it read the way the world was turning, that disbelief at the announcement as hosts in 2010 has been followed by 12 years of amassing influence. And now we have this: a brutally sharp end point for major league football’s remaking itself as a luxury propaganda tool.
But hey, Harry Kane is fit. Perhaps Gareth Southgate can be coaxed out of his hold and persuaded to play a back four instead of a back five. It might even be a pretty good tournament on the field. Brazil, France and Argentina are favorites to win, all three full of advanced attacking talent. England are tough enough to go out in the group stage, but also good enough to make it all the way to the end. Wales will bring vibes, collectivism and the basking late Gareth Bale. The show will roll on. And the world will, as always, be watching.
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