The joy of loathing the Qatar World Cup

It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill Clinton, Roman Abramovich, Sebastian Coe and Boris Johnson.

What a moment of disappointment it was for us. Not only had England got just a paltry two votes in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup, losing out to Russia, but we learned that the 2022 one was going to be held in a tiny, single-city desert state whose football team had never got near to qualifying, and whose summer temperatures were 50°C. My now 28-year-old son remembers where he was when he heard the news (at his desk at school), the traumatic moment seared into his memory. Qatar. How could they?

Speaking not as a football fanatic myself, but as a mother of football fanatics, I must say, though, that it has been a pleasure for 12 long years to listen to the rants about this around the supper table. All families need something they love to hate, something to unite around wishing failure on, and the prospect of the Qatar World Cup of 2022 has fulfilled this role to perfection.

Our 12-year raging fire of fury has rained down upon every aspect of it: the backhanders that must have enabled the decision; the hare-brained promise that they could install air-conditioning systems in the eight brand-new stadiums; the horror of migrant workers dying from heatstroke on the building sites; the Fifa president Sepp Blatter later blithely admitting, of the decision to hold it there, that ‘Of course it was a mistake – one makes lots of mistakes in life’; the inevitable falling-through of the air-conditioning scheme, leading to the decision to hold the tournament in winter, thus interrupting the domestic season for six weeks and thereby depriving millions of their local tribal
winter entertainment.