The Gulf blog

Qatar 2022 teeters towards disaster 6, June 2014

The following article can be found at the New America Foundation.

__

For some time now, Qatar’s successful bid to host the 2022 football World Cup has looked to be far more trouble than its worth. Stinging media attacks have been relentlessly pillorying the state and its bid process, putting the country under a magnifying glass like never before. Human rights concerns and corruption issues have been the focus of much of the coverage and many are now questioning whether Qatar will – after all this trouble and difficulty – host the World Cup at all.

Indeed, the 2022 World Cup saga continues with a huge leak of emails to the Sunday Times in the UK, which the paper accompanied with 12,000 words of analysis castigating and criticizing the bid process. The emails printed by the Times do not necessarily reveal anything new in type, just volumes more damaging examples of people involved with the Qatari bid  – mostly Mohammed Bin Hammam, the Qatari former FIFA executive member – acting in…[consults lawyer]…unorthodox ways. Bin Hammam stands accused of, to put it charitably, being exceedingly overly generous to important delegates and other officials throughout the world with financial gifts and expenses. Much of this appears to flout FIFA rules.

The British media-led scrum to attack Qatar is at times neither accurate, with at the very least key names being repeatedly confused, nor edifying; but then again, that’s not what they are there for. They are there to sell copy and Qatar is thoroughly in their crosshairs of late. Indeed, the 2022 World Cup story combines a variety of tempting targets for the British press, tabloid and broadsheet alike: indignant rage, football, rich foreigners, human rights wailing, and glitzy corruption.

There is, as ever, a certain amount of hypocrisy surrounding this whole situation. The British press were, unsurprisingly, hardly as vociferous in their criticism when England shamelessly courted votes for the World Cup vote by playing friendly matches or wheeling out David Beckham, the former England captain, or Prime Minister David Cameron to woo specific voters. Equally, though, they did not engage in the kinds of mass expenditures that Qatar did to persuade key voters around the world.

Indeed, look at the Qatari bid. A key plinth of the bid was the promise to package up and ship off some of its stadiums to countries in need of stadia post-World Cup. Who decided the recipients of each stadium – and how – is unknown, but what is for sure is that if you are looking for a stadium, only with a successful Qatari bid do you stand a chance of receiving one.

Those in Qatar may well look to the rough ride they are getting and compare that to Russia who won the right to host the 2018 World Cup at the same ceremony as Qatar. Against a backdrop of increasing homophobia, rampant corruption, and energy extortion, Russia nigh-on invaded a sovereign state, annexed a section of that state using – to put it mildly – questionable means, yet in terms of football at least, Russia remains mostly ignored by the press. And, strangely, no one seems to be asking whether their bid was squeaky clean?

Yet understandably suffused with a concentration on Russia’s military shenanigans, the press has leapt over its bid and gone straight to the more salacious story in Qatar. Human rights have been front and center. Report afterreport has battered Qatar’s reputation and with often good reason. The standards for workers’ rights are simply not good enough. Ironically, this is the positive impact of the World Cup: it is fundamentally an agent of change in the country.In recent weeks the Qatari authorities announced changes and improvements to the scriptures that most trouble workers’ rights in the state. No, these changes are not enough, and their implementation remains to be seen. But this is unequivocally a step forward, and it is purely thanks to the pressure of the World Cup and its negative coverage.

Given a magic wand, I suspect that the new administration in Qatar that took over in summer 2013 would happily swap hosting the 2022 World Cup for an easier life. It has prompted tens of billions of dollars of spending, some of which is necessary (roads and a subway system) but much of which is seen as wasteful (stadiums and foreign consultants). While from the Western perspective, the incremental changes expected in the labor laws in Qatar are a good move, they are seen flatly as a pain and undesirable from the Qatari perspective: they want to retain control. Moreover, the 2022 World Cup is a touchstone issue that encapsulates the direction of travel in Qatar: that of a quasi-westernizing orientation with increasing openness to foreigners and their wanton ways; the perennial refrain being how will Qatar cope with drunk English football fans singing and swaying down the Corniche, the sea-side waterfront?

In lieu of a magic wand, Qatar’s elite will simply have to hunker down and lawyer-up. Whether the 2022 World Cup actually goes ahead is a question for legal professionals and FIFA insiders, not Gulf experts or Qatar’s elite. Qatar’s central concern at the moment is that one of their champions, Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s seemingly perennial President, has cooled his support recently, even calling Qatar’s hosting of the tournament a ‘mistake’. The moment that Blatter, who is running again for President (after he said he was not seeking re-election), sees more mileage in throwing Qatar under the bus to further his ambitions, Qatar has a big problem to add to its ever-growing list of 2022 issues.