Qatar World Cup: What was promised and what is actually being delivered

The Athletic has published an article about how Qatar manages to keep its promises in various spheres related to the World Cup. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

"The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present."

Florentine diplomat, historian and philosopher (a genuine Renaissance man) Niccolo Machiavelli would have been good at winning bids for major sporting events.

A World Cup for all of Italy? Sure. Us, the Duchy of Milan, Papal States, Venetian Republic, we're all Italian brothers.

A dozen new stadiums? Absolutely - why not 15? New roads? Of course, we'll pave them with gold!

Machiavelli would have stuffed the bid book full of this stuff, waved his Medici credit card around and pulled in every favour his city-state was owed to land the prize… and then forgotten half of it once Florence 1522 was in the bag.

It is a strategy nearly every host of an Olympics or World Cup has followed ever since: promise peace on earth, a cure for cancer and the greatest celebration of humanity ever seen; deliver a month of good sport and, hopefully, a few moments of joy and excellence that will stand the test of time. Qatar is no different.

The small-but-rich Gulf state won the right to stage the 2022 World Cup by working out what each of the 22 voters on FIFA’s executive committee needed to hear when they gathered in Zurich on December 2, 2010.

Of course, different strokes for different folks, and for some the vision - or what football's global governing body calls the "bid concept" - was the thing.

"The vision is arguably more important than a list of promises," explains John Zerafa, an Englishman who worked on the Qatar 2022 bid as a strategic communications adviser.

"A core part of Qatar's pitch was that this would be a World Cup of firsts - football's biggest tournament held in the Middle East and in a Muslim country for the first time. That was compelling in 2010 and remains so now.

"Why should football's biggest tournament only be held in Europe, North America, South America and a handful of Asian countries? We never said it wouldn't be without challenges, but is it fair that a region like the Middle East can never host a World Cup?

"But the thing to appreciate is that all hosts have to deal with changes in circumstances and new realities. It's very rare to deliver on every promise it made in the bidding process. If I think about the 2012 Olympics in London, the original estimate for the budget was £3 billion ($3.4bn). It ended up closer to £9 billion. Economics and politics have a habit of forcing a change in plans."

And the weather.

"I'm sure different people believed different things or had different motivations, but my sense was always that no one cared about the details of Qatar's bid because the entire thing wasn't on the level," says Matt Miller, a former spokesman for the Department of Justice and a member of the delegation the US 2022 bid sent to the vote.

"The whole idea of holding a tournament in the desert, in the summer, in outdoor stadiums that would be cooled using air-conditioning technology that hadn't yet been invented, was so obviously fantastical that it's hard for me to believe anyone ever bought it in the first place."

Qatar has spent the past 12 years denying there was any vote buying - over or under the table - on their part. The World Cup hosts have repeatedly stated they won fair and square and to suggest otherwise is a case of sour grapes or prejudice.

And yet Miller's concerns are widely shared, which is understandable when you consider what we learned about FIFA's electorate in the years following the vote, a litany of bans, convictions, dawn raids, extradition orders, guilty pleas and indictments.

But this piece is not about how Qatar persuaded those men to give them the World Cup (we will return to that another day), it is about the promises it made in 2010 and whether it matters if Qatar kept them or not.

These promises were set out in a 700-page bid book and were repeated in numerous presentations, speeches and videos. It was important the promises were repeated so often because only two of the voters even asked for copies of the bid book.

Let us break these promises down into five main categories - concept, locations, transport, accommodation and legacy - and pick out the definite hits, near misses and nowhere nears.

Concept

As pointed out, this will be the first World Cup in the Middle East and the first in a Muslim country. Qatar has emphatically delivered on those promises.

The fact Qatar is a Muslim country, with a legal system guided by Sharia principles, has raised concerns about its suitability as a host for an event which is meant to be a party with inclusion at its heart, most notably around LGBT+ rights.

We have covered these issues before and will continue to report on them, so we are not ducking anything here. But this is a piece about the Qatar bid’s promises and it was always vague on this topic, almost certainly on purpose, and the messaging that “all are welcome (just respect our culture)” has never changed.

For what it’s worth, FIFA’s evaluation report of the bid, which was highly (but diplomatically) critical of the technical aspects of the plan, had nothing to say about LGBT+ rights. It was an omission that spoke volumes. In fact, it only made a passing reference to the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers that would be needed for a Qatari World Cup.

FIFA did have plenty to say about Qatar’s size, though, which is understandable when you consider it will be the smallest place to host a World Cup, with just 44 miles (70 kilometres) separating its northernmost and southernmost venues, with the rest concentrated in Doha, the country’s only real city.

No amount of wealth could hide this, so Qatar made a virtue of it, claiming a “compact” World Cup would cut down on the amount of travel, enable teams to stay in base camps and give fans a chance to see more than one game a day.

“The vote took place not long after the World Cup in South Africa, which had some logistical challenges, and the next World Cup was going to be in Brazil, which involved huge distances,” recalls Zerafa. “So, there was some perceived upside in Qatar being compact.”

These promises have been met — or will be as soon as the first fan posts a video on social media of them watching their second match of the day — but coupled with the idea of compactness was Qatar’s big claim that this World Cup would be carbon neutral.

Again, plenty has been written about the validity of this claim, with experts pointing out it will only be carbon neutral if we forget all the carbon expended in getting Qatar ready for the tournament. The organisers and FIFA, on the other hand, will point to the generous but globally accepted criteria that events must meet to justify this claim and say they will hit them.

But, and it is a big but, Qatar made such a huge deal out of being green(ish) because it had to address one of its biggest weaknesses head-on: how do you stage something as energetic as a football competition in a place where the thermometer does not dip below 30 degrees in June and July and averages 40 degrees?

The answer is air conditioning… lots of it. Not a financial problem for a country sitting on the world’s third-largest gas reserves, as well as oil reserves, but a hard one to square with those environmental aspirations. And yet squaring it is essential for Qatar’s long-term ambitions to wean itself off its energy-based income and become a place where more people choose to live, work and play.

We are going to have to take a rain check on that, as FIFA decided in 2015 that you cannot air-condition an entire country, even a small one, and moved the tournament to November/December, interrupting domestic leagues across the world but saving thousands from heatstroke and a fortune in carbon credits.
This, then, was a promise missed but not a surprise.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind who knew anything about football actually believed they could stage it in the traditional June/July time slot,” says Bonita Mersiades, the Australian football federation’s former head of corporate and public affairs and a senior member of Australia’s bid for the 2022 World Cup.

“After all, Mohamed bin Hammam, the Qatari president of the Asian Football Confederation and FIFA vice-president (at the time), said it wasn’t possible to play the World Cup in Doha in the middle of the year.

“It was little noticed and even less talked about, but there was always wriggle room in the agreements between FIFA and bidding nations to move the World Cup if FIFA deemed it appropriate. It was more of a surprise that the big leagues, whose seasons are massively disrupted, put up so little resistance to the move. But that is a reflection of Qatar’s growing influence and deep pockets.”

Qatar, for its part, kept cool during the controversy, saying it was happy to host the tournament whenever FIFA thought best.

Locations

New venues in Al-Khor, Al-Rayyan, Doha and Al-Wakrah? Tick! A new stadium for the final in an entirely new “city”? Tick! Five-star base camps and high-quality training facilities for all 32 teams? Tick!

Shall we move on? Not so fast.

The bid promised 12 stadiums - nine of them new, three renovated - in seven "host cities", although we have already mentioned that at least four of these cities are suburbs of the capital.

But, in a move that proves Qatar’s wealth is not limitless, the country asked FIFA if it could downsize its portfolio to eight stadiums, seven of them new.

The background to this request was low energy prices, which forced Qatar to tighten its belt a little. In 2017, the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, the World Cup's local organising committee, said it was reducing its budget by 40 per cent to about $10bn, which was still three times the 2010 estimate.

But just to put this economising (and that “World Cup budget”) into context, Qatar was spending about $500m a week in 2017 to get the country ready to host the World Cup.

"That doesn’t mean the stadiums only, we are talking about highways, railways, ports, airports, those are underway, even hospitals and everything," said finance minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi, adding Qatar could afford that level of capital expenditure for four years.

"We are really giving ourselves a good chance of delivering things on time - we don't want to start painting while people are coming to the country."

When put like this, it was easy to see why FIFA did not make a fuss about 12 venues becoming eight, even if it further shrunk the tournament's footprint.

Transport

This brings us to another mixed bag of pledges and it is at this point we should make two things clear.

The first is Qatar's hosting of the World Cup must be seen in the wider context of the country’s nation-building efforts. The Gulf state is a young country which only got wealthy when the oil and gas started to flow.

In 2008, the ruling emir launched National Vision 2030, an all-encompassing plan to set Qatar up for the rest of the century. Winning the right to stage the World Cup simply moved the finish line for many National Vision projects forward a decade.

So, it should not come as a shock that some of the promises made in 2010 remain on the drawing board. For example, the tunnel under Doha Bay linking the commercial centre to the airport is still just a good idea and not how FIFA’s VIPs will get to their hotels.

But the second point to note - and one we could have made in the section about this being a World Cup for all Arabs - is that Qatar had a colossal falling-out with its neighbours between the summer of 2017 and early 2021.

For three and a half years, Qatar was diplomatically and economically blockaded by Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which should explain why the promised high-speed train service from Bahrain to Doha and link to Saudi Arabia’s rail network have not happened.

However, the three most important promises in the transport plan have been kept. Doha’s new international airport was opened in 2012 and is now a major hub; a new port was opened in 2016, which enabled Qatar to bring in the building materials it needed during the blockade; and Doha’s gleaming metro, which links seven of the eight stadiums, came into operation in 2019.

But the delays to the National Vision project caused by the diplomatic dispute and then compounded by COVID-19 have meant Qataris have had to make some fairly significant tweaks to their transport plan for the World Cup.

For example, fans crossing the border from Saudi Arabia will not be doing so via fast trains. They will be parking at the border and getting a park-and-ride bus to Doha. Supporters coming from Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and the UAE will be flying into Doha’s old airport, which has been reopened, on daily shuttle flights.

Dr Paul Michael Brannagan, a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Institute of Sport, has been following all this for years and is the co-author of "Qatar and the 2022 FIFA World Cup", an academic study of the country's journey from 2010.

“What we tend to see with the bidding for all major sports events is that potential hosts make widely ambitious promises, only for these promises to rarely be fulfilled,” explains Brannagan.

“One issue here is that, in most cases, local organising committees are disbanded post-tournament, so there is no one there to see these promises through and no one is held accountable.

“Of course, the nature of the process is that the ‘best’ bid wins, so naturally hosts will put forward the most competitive bid they can, which usually includes flawed understandings of the true social impact sports events actually have on local areas and citizens.”

“It was made clear at FIFA’s July 2009 bidders’ workshop for all bidders that while it required 12 stadiums for a bid, that requirement may not stick,” recalls Mersiades, the founder of the Football Writers’ Festival, which takes place in Sydney just before next year’s Women’s World Cup.

“This was seen to favour Qatar as well as the Australian bid, which had a shortfall of stadiums at the time.”

But does it matter that a bidder only delivers two-thirds of what it promised - an orgy of spending on stadium-related expertise - in a beauty contest?

"It should matter," says Mersiades. "If we are going to invite interest in hosting the tournament from around the world, then it should be on the basis of the proverbial level playing field. A bid should be won or lost on the basis of known criteria that's the same for all bidders and assessed by independent experts."

Accommodation

That leads us to the question of where the one million visitors Qatar is expecting during the World Cup are going to sleep.

This is something FIFA's bid inspectors had huge concerns about in 2010, as their evaluation report is full of references to the accommodation strategy depending on "significant construction" and how the proposed timetable would make it impossible to test the plans under anything like World Cup conditions.

Twelve years on and many experts and seasoned World Cup watchers still have those concerns, but the Supreme Committee is adamant all will be well.

According to the bid book, the organisers could lay their hands on 84,000 rooms, comfortably clear of the required minimum of 60,000, although more than half of those rooms did not exist in 2010.

The rooms that did, however, were of the luxury variety and they are reserved for FIFA and its sponsors. The inspection team was very impressed with this and liked Qatar’s plan to create a FIFA bubble in downtown Doha, complete with new convention and broadcasting centres. FIFA was also confident there would be beds for the media, too, which is reassuring.

But fans? Well, it would appear to be a case of fingers crossed, as the 2,000-bed temporary "villages" in the desert were still under construction as of last month.

The bid book also referred to a cruise ship that would house 6,000 guests in the bay. One ship has subsequently become three.

"We were specifically told at that (2009) workshop that there could be no floating cruise ships, let alone three of them," recalls Mersiades, noting that Qatar also asked if it could include hotels in the UAE in its accommodation plan.

"There’s every reason to believe we would have kept our promises since we weren’t really promising things we couldn’t deliver," says Miller of the US bid.

"Our big advantage was how easy it is for the US to do this sort of thing given the existing infrastructure, hotel rooms and so on. In fact, one of the things that was striking to me at the vote was how convinced the bid team was that we would end up holding it here in 2022.

"First, they thought they would win the bid. But even if they lost, they thought it would end up getting moved here because the Qatar idea was so obviously silly. They anticipated that a summer tournament in Qatar was impossible - obviously - and believed FIFA would move it here once that idea collapsed, like in 2003 when the Women’s World Cup was relocated after China had an outbreak of the SARS virus."

They were wrong about 2022 but one of the legacies of the controversies caused by the decision to give Russia the 2018 World Cup and Qatar the 2022 tournament was that FIFA played it safe next time and awarded the 2026 World Cup to a joint bid from Canada, Mexico and the US, ignoring the more romantic but riskier pitch from Morocco.

Legacy

Speaking of things that are still specks on the horizon, the final batch of promises we are looking at here are related to what is left behind after the World Cup.
When it comes to mega-event bids, you are guaranteed an “L” if you ignore the l-word. Qatar went very big on legacy pledges.

The most talked-about promise was to build 22 “modular”, or demountable, stadiums so they could be scaled down after the World Cup, with the unneeded sections shipped to poorer countries.

The best example of this is the venue which was called the “Doha Port Stadium” in the bid book but has become Stadium 974 - 974 being the international dialling code for Qatar and the number of shipping containers used in the ground’s construction. This 40,000-seat venue will be taken down after the tournament, as it is sitting on prime real estate, but it is unclear whether it will be reassembled somewhere else.

The same can be said of the other venues that are set to be scaled down next year, as well as temporary upgrades which have been made at training sites. The Supreme Committee has not responded to The Athletic’s questions about how this particular legacy promise is panning out.

Qatar's bid also spent a lot of time talking about the football development work it wanted to do at home and abroad, and there have been grassroots football projects in Nigeria and Thailand - countries that just so happened to be the homes of executive committee members - as well as school initiatives in Nepal and Pakistan, two massive sources of migrant labour for Qatar.

In terms of developing the game at home, Qatar's bid promised new competitions for children, the disabled, ex-pats and women.

"Most bids had lofty ideas and even loftier promises for so-called legacy projects," notes Mersiades, whose book about the 2010 contest, Whatever It Takes: The Inside Story of the FIFA Way, is an eye-opening read. “This was one of the fatal flaws of the entire bidding process.

"The Qataris have made some half-hearted attempts (to grow the game at home), which are more about publicity stunts than real change - there is a long way to go."
Zerafa, understandably, disagrees.

"We talked a lot about the idea of sharing," he says. "You can see that with the concept of dismantling stadiums after the World Cup so they can be given to developing countries.

"Another example was the cooling technology that Qatar was serious about developing and then sharing with other countries in hot parts of the world so they could stage events. That was an important part of the narrative we were trying to tell - it separated the bid from its rivals and resonated in Asia and Africa."

Brannagan sees it like this.

"FIFA is run like a business and, like any business, profit maximisation is key," he says.

"If you look at where the money is right now in terms of who's investing in sport globally, the Middle East is probably the number one player. For FIFA, the key thing here has been the desire to break into new, wealthy markets."

In short, forget the details and focus on the bigger picture, which sounds a bit like Machiavelli’s most famous maxim: the ends justify the means.

Or, as Mersiades put it, whatever it takes.