Everything you NEED to know about the 2022 World Cup in Qatar
From a British colonial country with a tribal population of 16,000 to one of the richest countries in the world per capita. Here's everything that you need to know Qatar's World Cup.
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What to Expect from this Post
- Sports, Money & War
A deep dive into how the geo-political stage was set for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup.
- The Road to 2022
When Emir Hamad took over from his father, he embarked on a ‘sportswashing’ mission that landed a World Cup in Qatar.
- 2022 Controversies (so far)
Qatar’s World Cup has had a rocky start, but will it have a strong finish?
Sports, Money & War
The Qatar World Cup is the unfortunate product of corruption at the highest levels of the beautiful game.
It may yet be remembered as great World Cup despite the obvious anti-democratic, humanitarian and social concerns but it will always be marred in controversy.
The roots of this corruption can be better understood by taking a look at three seemingly unrelated events in 1990 that changed football and the world as we knew it.
The Taylor Report
On January 19th 1990, the final Taylor Report led by Lord Justice Taylor was released in the UK.
The inquiry was investigating the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans who were crushed at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield during an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest in 1989.
The Taylor Report indicated that poor policing and unsafe stadium infrastructure were to blame for the worst stadium disaster in Europe but from the outset Liverpool fans were made the scapegoat.
Over the next 20 years, in part due to endless campaigning by Liverpool fans, the British government were indirectly forced to admit that there had been a cover-up.
Three officers at the time were accused of trying to minimise the blame placed on South Yorkshire Police in the aftermath of the disaster by altering statements.
However, in 2021 Mr Justice William Davis ruled that the police officers on trial had no case to answer. The lawyer of the former police chief, Donald Denton, wrote in the Spectator:
[T]here was no evidence that he had done anything wrong, from any of the witnesses called. Not a scrap of it, as the judge made clear. The truth is Donald Denton should never have been charged.
He was the victim of political, media and public pressure applied on the CPS, which sacrificed a loyal and decent man rather than face the wrath of the Hillsborough campaigners, their lawyers and their media allies.
The Taylor Report underlined how out-of-date, Victorian stadiums, of which there are numerous across the country, had played a role in the tragedy.
It recommended that standing terraces be banned (which they were) and all-seater stadia be introduced.
This reform (which has been rolled-back in certain cases during the 22/23 season) changed English football and paved the way for the formation of the English Premier League (EPL) two years later.
Within a decade the EPL was set to become the most lucrative and watched football league in the world but in the early 2000s, it was Spain’s La Liga and Italy’s Serie A that were football’s Crown Jewels.
In 2000, Hernán Crespo's Serie A transfer from Parma to Lazio ensured that he became the first player to cost more than £30m.
At the time, the BBC wondered whether “the world [had] gone mad"?
Just two weeks later that record was broken again when Luís Figo made a controversial £37m move from Barcelona to rivals Real Madrid.
But compared to Neymar Jr.’s £190m transfer from Barcelona to PSG in 2017, yesterdays’ legends of the game were going for peanuts.
Neymar’s original transfer from Brazil and Santos to Spain and Barcelona in 2013 was equally dramatic.
He has only recently been cleared over allegations of fraud, as per Yahoo:
The prosecution had…sought a five-year jail term for former Barcelona president Sandro Rosell and an €8.4million fine for Barcelona.
At the start of the trial, DIS said it was demanding a five-year jail term for Neymar, and a total fine of €149million for the defendants…
A court document released in July [2021] alleges that Barcelona initiated negotiations on 2011 with Neymar, paying him €40million to ensure his move when his contract with Santos would expire in 2014.
“I believe it’s excessive to consider that offering 40 million euros is a crime,” the prosecutor said, calling it a signing bonus.
Before the prosecutor dropped his charges, Rosell had downplayed the €40million payment.
“It’s like when you buy an apartment and make a down payment ... it’s paying to have a priority future right of what you want to acquire,” the former Barcelona chief testified.
For some of the super-rich, and even some sovereign wealth-funds, the upstart EPL was an investment opportunity like no other.
It presented them not only a chance to make money but also the chance for legitimacy through sports—in something that would come to be know as ‘sportswashing’.
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
In Moscow, on February 7th 1990, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Mikhail Gorbachev, recommended that his party relinquish political power over the Soviet states.
This came as a surprise to many in the CPSU but others were delighted. The dissolution of the Soviet Union sent shockwaves around the world.
By March 11th, Lithuania had passed the ‘Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania’ to become the first Soviet republic to declare independence.
In August 1991 those opposed to Gorbachev’s dissolution launch a coup hoping that people would rally to the Soviet cause but they didn’t.
By the end of the year the hammer and sickle had been replaced with the Russian tricolour and Boris Yeltsin was the president of a newly independent Russia in a new world with a new democracy.
Under Yeltsin, his allies became millionaires and shortly thereafter billionaires. Yeltsin had contrived a scheme in which his cronies were sold utility companies like oil, gas and telecoms for bargain prices.
The most well-known of these oligarchs—which is a Greek word that means ‘rule by the few’—was Roman Abramovich.
In 2020, Forbes wrote a puff piece about his purchase of Chelsea Football Club in 2003:
When Abramovich decided to get involved in football, he started by commissioning UBS bankers to analyse the football environment across Europe.
England’s Premier League was not the clear-cut choice. Spain's La Liga and Italy's Serie A were looked at, as well.
But Abramovich homed in on the Premier League after learning about and “funnelling” three main factors: 1) the style of play; 2) the level of competition up and down the table; and 3) the country's business regulatory environment.
Then, he and his close associates considered three or four clubs that had been identified for takeover. Chelsea came out the winner…
The actual deal to buy Chelsea was arranged fairly quickly, in part because the club's majority owner was managing financial difficulties.
The final agreement had Abramovich buying the Chelsea business for £140-million, covering a club value of £60-million and £80-million of debt.
It was the first purchase of an English Premier League club by a major foreign investor.
At the outbreak of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, however, the British government seized Abramovich’s assets and forced him to sell Chelsea to the American businessman, Todd Boehly, eventually agreeing a deal worth over £4bn.
After winning 21 trophies in 19 years, Manchester United legend-turned-pundit, Gary Neville had this to say about Abramovich's Chelsea legacy.
"[Chelsea] have been a success machine for the last 10–20 years.
That doesn't just come with money, we've seen at Manchester United and Arsenal where they've put billions into the team and not had the success that Chelsea have had.
Chelsea can feel comfortable that they'll have rich owners, but will they have football smart owners? Because that's what Abramovich has been.
But a writer at ESPN questioned whether Abramovich’s spending at Chelsea had really changed football all that much:
10 of the current top 15 were also among the top 15 clubs in Europe before Abramovich arrived on the scene, while Atletico and Ajax were pretty close.
The three others on the current list kept spending and spending until they were able to join the club.
Manchester City, Chelsea and PSG had combined for 5 top-division titles in their respective histories to that point, but have since won 17, mostly in the past 11 years, along with 2 Champions League titles (both for Chelsea) and 3 more finals.
Despite it all, most Chelsea fans will tell you that they want Roman back.
He dazzled their club with almost two decades of success. Their trophy cabinet is full and gleaming. In the end, that’s all that matters to football fans.
Iraq’s Invasion of Kuwait
On August 2nd 1990, an army of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers invaded Kuwait.
Kuwait had bankrolled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for decades in his war of attrition against neighbouring Iran and wanted its billions of dollars in loans repaid.
To make matters worse for Iraq, almost all of their foreign reserves came from oil sales and as the price of a barrel of oil had collapsed from just over $40 a barrel in 1981 to under $12 in 1988, they weren’t in a position to negotiate.
So, on the pretext that Kuwait was slant drilling under the Iraqi border and stealing the country’s oil, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, declaring it an Iraqi province and thus escaped its debt obligation.
Although Kuwait’s Emir managed to flee to Saudi Arabia, the elites that remained were rounded up jailed, tortured and murdered.
Sheikh Fahad al Ahmed al Jaber al Sabah, a brother of the king, who had become famous during the 1982 World Cup finals for entering the field during France v Kuwait, was shot and killed whilst trying to defend the Dasman Palace.
After the invasion, oil prices surged to $41 dollars a barrel.
For a while the US and its allies had backed Saddam against their common enemy in Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini but the oil price surge from the Kuwait invasion roused Western nations, especially US president George H. W. Bush.
An international coalition was built, including Arab nations who feared that they would be the next Kuwait.
It was thought that Saddam had hoped to provoke ‘The Mother of All Wars’ because he calculated that Iraq had the best chance of winning it.
After unsuccessfully goading the US by firing Scud missiles into Saudi Arabia and Israel, and after US aerial forces bombarded Iraqi positions in Kuwait, Saddam’s Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia and captured the coast port of Al Khafji.
Coalition forces were forced to engage but leading the charge were two tank companies from Qatar who were under Sheikh Hamad (the crown prince of Qatar)'s command as Saudi Arabia had insisted that Arab forces led the fightback.
The charge was the first time that the Qatari army had ever been engaged and marked a turning point in the Gulf War forcing Saddam's troops back into Iraq and leading to their eventual capitulation.
Sheikh Hamad was hailed as a war hero after the victory and in the aftermath, he consolidated his power and reputation as a warrior crown prince of Qatar.
In 1995, Sheikh Hamad launched a bloodless coup against his father, who was more at home in Switzerland (coincidentally the location of Fifa’s headquarters) by then, to become Emir.
Emir Hamad was known as a reformer and had the royal families of surrounding Gulf states worried, according to an Economist article.
He gave women the vote and talked of a British-style constitutional monarchy where the Emir was head of state but the power resided in an elected parliament.
By the turn of the 21st century, Qatar had moved away from oil to liquefied gas and become one of the richest countries on Earth but they had grander plans still to come.
The Road to 2022
Hamad’s Dream
Emir Hamad was a sports enthusiast and played an active role in promoting and developing athletics in Qatar but it was neighbouring Dubai who had shown the Emir the blueprint for leveraging sport as promotion for the country.
From the 1990s, under the effective rule of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum (who did not officially become leader until the death of his brother in 2006), Dubai focused on trade with the west and marketed itself as a luxurious place to visit despite being part of a the Islamic legal system.
Moving away from fossil fuels was a necessary economic move because Dubai’s oil reserves were tiny in comparison to Abu Dhabi’s and depleting fast.
By 2006 just 6% of Dubai’s economy was dependent on hydrocarbons. But under Sheikh Mohammed, Dubai had achieved incredible international exposure through sport.
They had hosted the Dubai World Cup, a PGA tour frequented by Tiger Woods and the Dubai Tennis Championship, where Roger Federer regularly appeared and won.
Through state-owned companies like Emirates Airlines, Dubai, at one time or another, had been the main shirt sponsors of Chelsea, Arsenal (as well as paying over £250 million to secure the naming rights of their stadium until 2028), Paris Saint- Germain, Real Madrid, Benfica and AC Milan.
It also sponsored the world’s oldest football tournament, the English FA Cup and was a major sponsor of Fifa and the World Cup from 2006 through to 2014 though Emirates Airlines were eventually replaced by Qatar Airlines in 2017 after allegations of corruption.
Emir Hamad’s social, political and cultural activism enhanced the country's involvement and performances across a number of international competitions.
In 1992 Qatar won their first Olympic medal in track and field. A year later, the Qatar Open Tennis Championship was founded and by 2006, they had hosted the 15th Asian Games.
In 2005, under the direction of Emir Hamad and the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), a sovereign wealth fund created to manage the country's oil and natural gas surpluses, was founded.
The QIA and its subsidiaries acquired numerous businesses, including French football club Paris Saint-Germain F.C. in 2011.
The groundwork had been set for the Emir’s ultimate ambition.
Aspire Academy
On November 17th, 2005, the worlds’ media met in Doha for the opening of the Aspire Academy but they were not there for that.
They were there for Maradona and Pele, the greatest footballers of all time, who had been paid millions to appear at the event.
The Aspire Dome, which was the world's largest indoor sports dome at the time, and the centrepiece of the academy had just been opened by Emir Hamad.
The multi-billion dollar project was designed to scout and nurture elite sports talent from Qatar, the Middle East and around the globe.
Pele and Maradona’s appearances were merely a PR stunt for a stadium in the desert that no one really cared about.
There had been a longtime rivalry between the two, similar to Messi and Ronaldo now, over who was really the greatest player of all time (GOAT).
This was formalised by Fifa’s failed attempt to put the GOAT debate a public vote.
Maradona won the vote, but Fifa introduced a second award for company man, Pele, which allegedly infuriated Maradona, who had been battling his vices for some time.
After years of cocaine abuse and struggling with his weight, his friend, Fidel Castro, set Maradona up in a renowned rehab clinic outside Havana.
Later, he underwent a stomach stapling operation in Venezuela and was looking more like his old self, ready for the opening of the Qatari academy.
Though the journalists didn’t realise at the time, the Aspire Academy was set to become central to Qatar’s effort to host a major international sports tournament and fulfil Emir Hamad’s dream.
Naturalisation Policy
When oil was discovered in 1939, the population of Qatar stood at just 16,000. Having gained independence from the British in 1971, the population had increased to 120,000.
By 2022, that number has risen to just under 3 million but it is thought that 90% of the population is made up of migrant workers.
In June 2016, a fire broke out at a labour work camp near the Qatar-Saudi boarder, which killed at least 11 migrant workers, according to limited report by Yahoo News:
Firefighters were able to contain the blaze from spreading to adjacent areas. The cause of the fire is still being investigated.
Workers living in the accommodation were hired by the Slawa Tourism Project, the ministry said.
An article in the Guardian added:
[T]he exact number of migrant workers who have died as a result of negligence remains unknown.
Kafala, a colonial system that made it illegal for migrant workers to change jobs or leave the country without their employer’s permission; it was still in place in Qatar until reforms in 2019—the result of global pressure from the deaths of the migrant workers.
According to Frenchman, Philippe Troussier, Qatar's national team coach at the time, naturalisation was the only chance Qatar had to qualify for a World Cup.
Troussier once said after a loss:
Naturalisations are nothing new to Qatar, 80% of my squad were not born [here].
The Q-League spent vast sums of money attracting aging stars to come to Qatar and help to raise the standard of the players around them.
Marcel Desailly, Gabriel Batistuta, the De Boer brothers and Pep Guardiola were all enticed to Doha. However, this had little effect on Qatar's national team performances.
So there was a change in strategy.
Ailton Gonçalves da Silva had scored 28 Bundesliga goals in 2004, winning the league and cup double for Werder Bremen though that wasn’t enough for the Brazilian or German FA, who decided against calling him up to either national team.
Ailton was offered $1m up front and almost half a million dollars a year to play for the Qatari national team, however, and help them to qualify for the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany.
The New York Times reported Ailton’s remarks upon arrival in Qatar:
Brazil does not want me…Germany is not prepared to take me.
That's why I have decided to play for Qatar, which appreciates me.
I want to fulfil my dream to play for a national team.
Fifa president Sepp Blatter was adamant that this move did not happen.
In 2010, Blatter said:
If we don’t take care about the invaders from Brazil…If we don’t stop the fast naturalisation of players in some countries, [teams full of Brazilians] will be a real danger [at future World Cups].
In May 2011, Reuters reported that:
[A]fter Qatar tried to sign up Brazilian forward Ailton, FIFA ruled that players must have lived in their country for at least two years before they could play for it.
That was later increased to five.
Aspire Academy was Qatar’s way around Fifa’s naturalisation rules.
It was founded with a goal to scout every potential young player in Qatar and held trials for Qatari kids as young as six.
Aspire also launched 'Football Dreams’, which was a $100 million dollar international scouting project where 3.5 million boys were screened over a 7 year period with only 20 per year offered a scholarship.
Critics were appalled that Qatar was plundering African and regional talent to circumvent the tough new naturalisation laws that Qatar's original policy had prompted.
Qatar, of course, denied these allegations and maintained that Aspire was a humanitarian project.
By 2019, under former La Masia academy coach, Felix Sanchez, Qatar had beaten the UAE 4-0 and followed that by beating Japan in the final of the Asian Cup.
Almoez Ali, who was born in Sudan but moved to Qatar when he was five, was the tournament’s top scorer and Aspire Academy’s shining light.
World Cup Bid
In 2010, when Sepp Blatter announced Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022, the football world was stunned.
After the event, there was a scramble to understand quite how Qatar had beaten the US, UK or any developed, footballing-nations’ proposal to host a World Cup.
It was later discovered in the run up to the 2010 vote that the majority of Fifa’s Executive Committee had been suspected or found guilty of corruption, including Fifa President Sepp Blatter.
This article provides a detailed breakdown of each of the members of the Executive Committee’s accusations, crimes and where they are now:
The 82-year-old former FIFA President has started to make his voice heard again in recent months, notably on behalf of Morocco in the 2026 World Cup race, and is expected to be in Russia for part of this year's tournament.
A master politician, Blatter initially managed to secure re-election yet again to football's top job in May 2015, in spite of gathering storm clouds over FIFA and a dramatic dawn raid by Swiss police in Zurich two days before the vote.
The raid led to the arrest of a number of football officials and pitched the organisation into the worst crisis in its history.
A few days later Blatter announced he proposed to lay down his mandate, leading eventually to Infantino's election as FIFA President in February 2016.
In the meantime, Blatter had been banned from football activities over a CHF2 million ($2 million) payment made to Michel Platini.
The money was said to be for work Platini did for FIFA between 1999 and 2002, but was paid only in February 2011. The ban was initially for eight years, but was reduced subsequently to six years from October 2015.
The Guardian via Le Monde reported on an infamous lunch between French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Michel Platini, nine days before Fifa’s ExCo voted for Qatar to host the World Cup:
Platini has said that, when he arrived at the Élysée Palace, he found that Sarkozy had with him Tamim al-Thani, then the son of the Qatar Emir, now the Emir himself, and the then prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim.
Platini has said it was clear Sarkozy wanted the Qataris to take over the club he supported, Paris St‑Germain, and for Platini to vote for Qatar to host the World Cup.
Platini told the Guardian a fortnight ago in Paris before the Fifa congress that he had made his mind up to vote for Qatar before the lunch, having at first considered supporting the USA bid.
He said that when he arrived at the lunch and saw the guests, he understood that Sarkozy was supporting Qatar, but has always insisted he was not influenced himself.
Sarkozy has denied influencing Platini to vote for Qatar, suggesting in 2015 that he did not have the power to do so.
In the immediate aftermath of this lunch, beIN Sports, a Qatari owned spin-off of Al Jazeera, was set up in France.
The channel holds the rights to broadcast Ligue 1, La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga and the European Football Championship and the Champions League.
Mohammed bin Hammam, who became the president of Qatar’s FA in 1992, part of Fifa’s ExCo in 1996, a member of the Qatari parliament in 1998, and President of the Asian Football Confederation (2002-11), challenged Blatter, whom he had previously supported in the 1998 elections, for Fifa’s presidency.
However, in May 2011, three days before the vote, bin Hammam withdrew his candidacy and was suspended after allegations came to light that he had bribed 25 Caribbean Football Union (CFU) members with $1m in total.
In 2012, Mohammed bin Hammam was banned from football-related activities for life by Fifa, though the decision was reversed by a court of arbitration for sport, who stated that there was insufficient evidence linking Bin Hammam with the bribes.
Interestingly, the UK had hired Christopher Steele, a former MI6 agent, to investigate Russia’s 2018 World Cup bid. The New York Times reported:
Mr. Steele collected a growing pile of intelligence suggesting that Russian government officials and oligarchs close to Mr. Putin had been enlisted to push the effort, cutting shadowy gas deals with other countries in exchange for votes, offering expensive gifts of art to FIFA voters and even dispatching Roman Abramovich…to South Africa to pressure Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president.
(A spokesman for Mr. Abramovich told The Sunday Times that there was nothing “untoward” in his involvement in the Russian bid.)
Coincidentally (or not), Christopher Steele was also hired by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to find evidence of collusion between her opponent, Donald Trump, and Russia in what would come to be known as Russia-gate.
The New York Post revealed that:
FBI agents probing since-debunked claims of a secret back channel between Donald Trump and a Russian bank believed that the allegations had originated with the Department of Justice — when in fact they came from Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann, who had shopped them to the bureau’s then-general counsel days earlier.
Trump would gain the support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE after Qatar began platforming dissidents like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
This would eventually lead to the Abraham Peace Accords in 2020 and result in Trump becoming the first US President in modern history not to start a foreign war.
2022 Controversies (so far)
The lead up to Qatar’s World Cup has been chaotic. Below is a brief account of the controversies so far:
Infantino’s Speech
Fifa’s relatively new president, Gianni Infantino, gave a tone-deaf speech at the opening of the World Cup, defending Qatar for their cultural choices and chastising the West for making hypocritical statements.
LGBTQ+
In the lead up to the World Cup, there was much debate as to how national teams would protest Qatar’s ban on homosexuality.
Many of the captains said that they would wear the ‘One Love’ armband as a sign of support to the LGBTQ+ community but Fifa decided against allowing this, claiming that there was the possibility that players wearing the armband would be punished with a yellow card immediately.
The German national team went one step further when they posed for their pre-match photo covering their mouths—a signal that they had been silenced.
In response to the German national teams mouth-covering gesture, fans in the crowd of their 1-1 draw with Spain held up pictures of Mesut Ozil, who had retired from international football after Germany were elimiated from the 2018 World Cup.
Sadiq Khan vs Qatar
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, never one to shy away from political commentary, announced that the London Underground, which he manages, will remove all advertisements from countries will poor human rights records.
This led to bans for Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran and Nigeria, according to the Evening Standard.
In response to the London Underground ban over anti-LGBTQ+ laws, Qatar, who has become one of the largest foreign investors in the UK said that they will be “reviewing their current and future investments” in the UK and “considering investment opportunities in other UK cities and home nations”.
beIN Sports Ban
Saudi Arabia decided to block a beIN Sport affiliate streaming platform after the World Cup’s opening ceremony, as reported by the Telegraph:
Sources with knowledge of the situation claim it is a power play by Saudi Arabia to undermine Qatar.
Saudi's public investment fund, which effectively owns Newcastle, attempted - but failed - to buy beIN last year, Telegraph Sport understands.
Relations between nations had improved in the build up to the tournament and tens of thousands of Saudis are currently in Doha cheering on their team.
"This is all about Saudi control, and not having control of the most powerful medium in their country," a senior figure close to the sudden fall out said.
"Saudi beating Argentina is more powerful than any news channel, and they don’t own the rights to it. But they want to run world sport and be taken seriously. It is mad."
PSG Sale Rumours
The Financial Times reported that QIA, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund who own PSG, are looking into the possibility of a sale and seeking a deal worth €4bn:
Nasser al-Khelaifi, PSG president, told the Financial Times that talks were continuing based on a valuation of “over €4bn”, although completing any deal could still “take months”.
A figure of more than €4bn (£3.44bn) for the club would surpass the £2.5bn paid by a US-led consortium this year for English Premier League side Chelsea FC.
It would also boost price expectations around other big clubs, with Liverpool FC, Manchester United and Inter Milan looking for new investors, or possibly outright sales.
It is thought that QIA are interested in purchasing Manchester United, who have recently been put up for sale.