Expect Amazing. As a writer, I was never a great fan of the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid slogan, on grounds of dodgy syntax.
With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see they were just one syllable away from a formulation that pretty well encapsulates what we have been going through since the Gulf state’s fourth-round December 2010 victory: Expect A Maze.
To summarise – with the third anniversary of Qatar’s moment of moments fast approaching, it is still perfectly unclear whether this small but fabulously wealthy, and increasingly influential, country will a) host the tournament in June and July 2022, as we thought had been decided, b) stage it at some other time, or c) highly unlikely – not put it on at all.
Fret ye not though: next week’s FIFA Executive Committee meeting in Zurich has “2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar: period of the competition” as item 25.2 on the agenda. Surely that will dispel all uncertainty.
Actually, I very much doubt that will be the case.
It is a hazardous activity at the best of times to attempt to plot a path out of a maze in the surreal world of FIFA. But there is one piece of information that it would be particularly useful to know in attempting to second-guess the denouement of this particular desert imbroglio.
Has Michael Garcia of FIFA’s Ethics Committee discovered any way in which the Qatar bid broke the rules?
Garcia was reported by this website to have confirmed in August 2012 that Qatar – and, for that matter, Russia, the 2018 winner – were to come under fresh scrutiny. Has that scrutiny yielded anything?
If it has – though Qatar has always, as far as I know, denied doing anything wrong – then, whether FIFA chooses to disclose the development or not, it might give the governing body the leverage to bend Qatar to its will, or even to re-run the competition.
In spite of all the dithering, there are still nearly nine years to go before the 2022 tournament kicks off. So there remains plenty of time for anything, even a return to Square One.
If Qatar is in the clear, then I think it would be well advised to dig in its heels, resist the clamour – now joined by FIFA President Sepp Blatter himself – to move the competition from June and July, and try to hang on to what it has got.
Why? Because my feeling is that a ‘winter’ World Cup in Qatar might well turn out to be a mirage, and thus, as far as Qatar is concerned, a trap.
For all Blatter’s recent delving (once again on this website) into the minutiae of the 2022 bidding documents and hosting agreement, it seems to me that such a monumental change in the calendar could trigger all manner of challenges, and that these challenges might culminate, after further weeks, months, years of uncertainty, with the decision that the bidding contest needed to be re-run.
One of the things that has struck me most about the direction this farce has taken is how quickly, three years after the issue was supposed to be debated, a consensus has apparently formed that a World Cup in the scorching heat of a Gulf summer would be irresponsible.
Having felt the effects of the sort of stadium cooling technology Qatar is proposing to deploy, and assessed the wall of money the state seems prepared to throw at the World Cup project, I think the players would be OK, as long as matches were scheduled at night, or when direct sunlight was not shining on the venue.
Such scheduling would, moreover, not be a problem with the broadcasters who are such key paymasters for FIFA: night-time in Qatar is peak viewing-time in Germany, Brazil, even the eastern USA.
A much bigger issue, to my mind, is the fans (no pun intended). A Qatar World Cup would be the World Cup of air-conditioning, with supporters – certainly those not used to the region – pretty much obliged to stay indoors from the moment the sun rose until after it set.
Boredom might set in, drink might be taken and fans of rival teams might well be in close proximity to each other. This would require extremely careful management. And if one single visitor passed out on their way back from a game and was lying asleep somewhere at sunrise, FIFA could easily find itself with a PR disaster on its hands.
This was why I was surprised three years ago that a clear majority – 14 – of FIFA Executive Committee members felt able to vote for Qatar, notwithstanding the Evaluation report’s conclusion that: “The fact that the competition is planned in June/July, the two hottest months of the year in this region, has to be considered as a potential health risk for players, officials, the FIFA family and spectators, and requires precautions to be taken.”
Even if the matches themselves could take place without undue risk, then, FIFA might find itself in the uncomfortable position of actively discouraging western fans from attending a June/July Qatar 2022 World Cup. And, of course, it would have 2.8 million tickets to sell – for a tournament that is its only cash cow.
That would be a bizarre, and far from ideal, situation. But it is hard to feel too much sympathy, since it is a corner that FIFA, and FIFA alone, would have painted itself into.
How much longer is this going to go on? Well I could see it being an issue in the next Presidential election campaign, particularly if it is fought between Blatter (who, I am satisfied, did not vote for Qatar) and UEFA boss Michel Platini (who did).
If only FIFA had not taken the profoundly ill-advised decision to run the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding contests concurrently. Without the distraction of 2018, this terribly serious question of whether the timing of the World Cup needed to be changed in order to accommodate Qatar’s desire to stage it would have stood a much better chance of being debated and properly thought through when it needed to be, instead of three years after the event.
As it is, we have been left with a situation which, make no mistake, if things get out of hand, could yet rock the world’s biggest sport to its foundations.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938