Our Opinion: 2022
The Christmas World Cup
The Qatar tournament will, commercially at least, prove disappointing. Sponsorship revenue for the 2022 World Cup will come to an estimated $1.1bn, 16% down on earlier contests.
Some companies were put off sponsoring the tournament due to brand image concerns. Sony ended its sponsorship in 2014, while Hummel, the kit producer for Denmark, has toned down its symbol to protest human-rights violations. TV stations have been unable to sell advertising space at the expected amount, sending shares sharply lower. As for Qatar itself, it is hard to see that the state will ever recoup very much of the estimated $200bn it has spent on staging the spectacle. With the rise in the price of oil and gas, Qatar won’t worry too much about that. But it is hardly a great advertisement for the game.
The tournament is being staged at the wrong time of year. The blistering heat of the desert state meant that it would have been impossible to play football there during the early summer, the normal time for the World Cup. Instead, it has been shifted to November and December. To most followers of the game that just feels wrong. It breaks up the season, meaning that there was only a week for preparation instead of the usual month. It runs right into the Christmas season, which will inevitably overshadow it. And it means that in much of the world where the game is most popular, no one will be watching outdoors. It is too cold.
Qatar is also a controversial venue. It has a terrible record on human rights. Hundreds of thousands of workers were drafted into the country to build the stadiums and were treated appallingly. If it were not so rich, it would be a pariah state. The result? Lots of the players feel, quite rightly, that they should take a stand against the regime and many fans haven’t wanted to travel to the games. A few don’t even want to watch on television.
Finally, Qatar has no domestic tradition as a football-playing nation. There are no home fans to speak of, and no major club teams, nor are there any great Qatari players that any of us have ever heard of.
Just 13 days before Qatar’s opening game, Sepp Blatter, the former president of FIFA, world football’s governing body, said that awarding the World Cup to Qatar had been a “mistake”. He took a different line in 2010 when he pulled the card from the envelope and publicly announced that football was going to “new lands.” The idea was to broaden the game’s appeal. Few other observers were willing to defend the deal. Accusations of corruption and bribery grew.
Qatar has spent lavishly to ensure the tournament is a success, building seven stadiums, an expanded airport, and dozens of hotels. But it will be only a temporary reprieve. The decision to hold football’s biggest party in a tiny, autocratic petrostate with plenty of money, but no footballing heritage, is only the starkest example of how money and new ideas are shaking up the top levels of the world’s favourite sport.
Last year saw the rise and temporary fall of a plan for a breakaway “European Super League” (ESL) of elite clubs, built on the closed, cartel-like model of American professional sports. Hedge funds and investors from America and the Middle East have invested in financially precarious European clubs: they are keen to squeeze yet more games into an already packed calendar. There is even talk among investors, and the sport’s administrators, of a rash of new super-tournaments, some of which are explicitly designed to compete with the World Cup itself.
Money was one of Qatar’s chief attractions. Its team are Asian champions, but few considered them contenders. In fact, the national side has never qualified for a World Cup before. But it is a financial force, and keen to promote itself as a modern, developed country. Solid numbers are scarce, but the current World Cup is almost certainly the most expensive ever staged. The stadiums alone are said to have cost $6.5bn. Much of a broader $300bn economic development plan called Qatar 2030 has been written with the needs of the World Cup in mind (a gleaming new metro system, for instance, serves several of the new stadiums).
It is entirely true that migrant workers are often treated very badly in Qatar and there is much less sexual freedom than in Western countries. It is not a democracy. They are also true of Russia, which hosted the previous World Cup, and China, which hosted the most recent Olympic games, last winter.
Qatar may not be a democracy, but it is not the despicable regime that some are pointing out. The previous emir, under no popular pressure at all, introduced elections of a sort. He also set up a news channel, Al Jazeera, that is more outspoken than its Arab rivals, even if it goes easy on Qatar itself. That is a far cry from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where you get sent to prison for describing the war in Ukraine as a war, let alone denouncing it. And it is a world of difference from China, where no peep of political dissent is tolerated. The Argentine junta that hosted the World Cup in 1978 threw critics out of helicopters.
The world also looks at migrant workers in Qatar through a distorted lens. For one thing, the emirate is more open to foreign labour than America or any European country. Native Qataris make up only 12% of the population—a proportion supposedly more enlightened countries simply would not tolerate. Although these migrants are sometimes mistreated, the wages most earn are life-changing, which is why so many want to come in the first place. And whereas hosting the Olympics twice has not made China more democratic, the chance to stage the World Cup has led to an improvement in Qatar’s labour laws.
The idea of bringing the World Cup to the world is only right. The Middle East is full of fans, but has never hosted the event before. Nor has any Muslim country. If the World Cup is ever to be held in such a place, Qatar is a perfectly good choice.
Meanwhile, bids for the 2030 World Cup are already being prepared. Saudi Arabia, a bitter geopolitical rival of Qatar’s, is keen to host a World Cup of its own. In theory, eligibility criteria should preclude another Middle Eastern country acting as host for the next two tournaments. But Saudi Arabia has hitched its bid to those of Greece and Egypt, in the hope that it will therefore count as European or African. The kingdom says it will pay to build stadiums in both countries. The decision is not due until March 2024. But one lesson of Qatar is that it would be bold to bet against another winter World Cup in an autocratic desert state in the not-too-distant future. In football, as in so much else, money talks.
8th December 2022
