Not sure how I got there — sports are not generally my area of interest, nor SB*Nation on my usual reading list — but David Roth’s discussion of Qatar’s preparations to host the 2022 World Cup (of soccer, aka ‘football’ to non-Americans) is most entertaining:
Well, it’s complicated. Just because it’s FIFA and it’s the World Cup and so of course it’s complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it’s this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world’s totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes — everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless — that seem almost to incent lawlessness.
And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It’s just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision! Because it’s the bribe-takingest, patronage-swappingest and generally sketchiest organization of its type in the world, it’s basically impossible to assume FIFA picked Qatar to host the World Cup in 2022 because of how good Qatar’s bid was. There is no reason to assume that this organization is awarding World Cup bids, or doing anything else, for anything like the right reasons…
I was speaking to James Dorsey, a Moroccan-born writer on soccer in the Middle East and professor at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an old hand in the Gulf, and first visited Doha less than a decade after independence… I was trying to answer a question he’d asked, and had admittedly run long in my answer. He shook his head: no. “That’s how Qatar got the World Cup,” he said. “I asked why Qatar got it.”…
“Every bidder does a cost/benefit analysis,” Dorsey said. “Australia puts a dollar figure on that: $45 million, that’s what it’s willing to gamble in hopes that it wins the bid. Could they put $200 million on the table? Of course they could. It wasn’t worth it to them. But if you’re doing this as a key pillar of your defense and security, your cost/benefit is very different. It’s worth that much more.”
Qatar would, of course, also have to spend that much more to make it work. There were three large-ish stadiums to be expanded to World Cup standards, and nine new stadiums that needed building. All of this would happen in a nation roughly the size of Connecticut, and which is for the most part frankly uninhabitable. Leaving aside the question of whether or not a World Cup should be held in a small desert country that does not yet have a full slate of sidewalks in its capital city or a handle on how to enforce its own labor laws, it seems more or less reasonable that it would cost $220 billion to stage it there…
To have the World Cup in Qatar is to have the World Cup in very close quarters, which is not necessarily bad — fans could indeed see two or three games in a day, and could conceivably swipe their Qatar MetroCard to see those games without so much as getting into a car. In the video, Pep Guardiola smilingly makes this very point. Granted, this would involve taking a Metro that does not yet exist to stadiums that do not yet exist, and then watching two teams play in a microclimate made bearable by world-changing technology that also does not yet exist. But a salesman is got to dream, and also, crass as it may seem, if such an implausible multi-layered miracle can be bought, Qatar would be one of the nations that both could and would buy it.
But, again, with all the things in this world on which to spend money — Damien Hirst installations are just the beginning — and with the dismal track records of such expenditures paying off for the nations that spend on this sort of thing, given all that: why so much, and why on this?
The answer is complicated, and certainly more complicated than Because The Emir Wanted It. Of all the risible sentences in Ball’s retracted opus, the one that came to seem the most ridiculous after talking with people working for the World Cup bid — call it Q22 if you really want to sound like you know what’s up — and familiar with Qatar was this: “at the swish of the emir’s gold pen, new laws come into effect.” Bizarre huzzah-for-authoritarianism tone to the side, this is not really correct. It’s confusing a country without democracy for a country without politics. Qatar has only the barest cosmetic modicum of the former, and a suffocatingly large amount of the latter….
This is actually a chunk from the fourth of five parts, and it’s all worth reading.