Of all the stadiums Qatar has built for the 2022 World Cup, none beats like the 60,000-seat Al Bayt, which is shaped like a monstrous Bedouin tent, with an interior awning decorated with classic red and black sadu fabric. It’s a feat of engineering marvel worthy of the biggest stage, but it had to settle for shattered hopes on Sunday, when Qatar absolutely dominated Ecuador in a 2-0 defeat, becoming the first host country to lose in the competition’s 92-year history. His first match.
Ecuador dominated the match from the start and thought they had scored from the minute minute, but a hard header from Enner Valencia was cancelled out by the video refereeing. But the striker had his chance to get revenge just 12 minutes later when, after passing goalkeeper Saad Alsheeb to Qatar, he brought down with his arm outstretched. Valencia calmly sent the resulting penalty to the left of Alsheeb. Then, in the 30th minute, Valencia rose to receive a frizzy cross from the right to header in their moment of the night and extinguish any hope for the hosts.
On paper, it never seemed like a stellar encounter. Of all the groups that have qualified for the World Cup (hosts are guaranteed a spot), only Saudi Arabia and Ghana are below Qatar’s FIFA ranking of 50. Ecuador is just above them in 44th place. position and had not conceded a goal in six games before this match. The hosts’ chance came at half-time when striker Almoez Ali headed a little past Hassan Alhaydos’ cross from the right. It has been regulated in everything.
This is a great sadness for the hosts. Since Qatar won the bid to host the tournament in 2010, Al Annabi, as the national team is known, has focused on this moment. The Qatar All-Star League was suspended in mid-September to give the national team an extensive and extended education camp. In the weeks leading up to the tournament, Qatar’s Spanish coach, Felix Sanchez, enjoyed friendlies against groups such as Canada, Nicaragua, Chile and Guatemala.
Further afield, Qatar played 10 European friendlies, won the Asian Cup in 2019 for the first time, performed well at the 2019 Copa America in South America and reached the semifinals of the 2021 Gold Cup, a biennial festival for North and Central America. . plus the Caribbean. (Yes, Qatar strangely invited both. )It’s a remarkable race for the tiny Gulf nation, which has resolutely funneled its oil billions to forge a national identity through play through global expertise and world-class infrastructure.
Sunday’s result gave free rein to headline hopes that Ecuador will be a banana peel for Qatar, given that the South American country is the world’s largest fruit exporter. circumstances, after discovering that Ecuador had already presented an ineligible player. Instead of disqualifying Ecuador, as their rivals demanded, FIFA opted to penalize 3 points in their upcoming 2026 qualifying campaign. Ecuador arrived in Qatar with the youngest team of all South American participants. And some key players are missing due to injury.
Ahead of the tournament, attention focused on Qatar’s tactic of naturalizing players with tenuous, if any, ties to the oil-rich state. to tighten their regulations on the subject. More recently, Qatar has fielded players born as far away as Sudan, Ghana and Cape Verde. Many countries, especially Western ones, have a large number of players who are immigrants or their descendants. But what sets the Qatari team apart is that the country has one of the strictest naturalization laws in the world. However, 16 of the 26 existing World Cup teams were born in Qatar and several others were raised in the country from a young age.
However, much of the team’s good fortune in recent years has gone to Qatar’s Aspire Academy, a state-of-the-art sporting establishment founded in 2004 and located on the western edge of Doha. Funded through the state’s bottomless wallet, it has 8 large-scale football fields, adding one at the Aspire Dome, a sprawling indoor educational complex.
Among the graduates is Qatar’s star player Akram Afif, 26, who was born in Doha to a Tanzanian father and Yemeni mother and showed little of the skill that earned him the 2019 Asian Footballer of the Year award on Sunday. , Afif went into the center of the field to try to recover the ball and create a gap, his most productive possibility was a speculative shot in the 74th minute that climbed over the goal of Hernán Galíndez.
However, while Qatar has addressed the naturalization controversy, the same cannot be applied to a myriad of other problems. The migrant staff who died built the infrastructure needed for the tournament — Al Bayt and seven other stadiums, connecting railways and highways, hotels, as well as an airport expansion — in difficult situations, the only ones who missed Jung Kook of K-Pop megagroup BTS strutting under dazzling fireworks at the opening ceremony. (Qatar insists that labour reforms are vital and ongoing. )There is also ausentes. la overwhelming majority of LGBTQ sports fans, who made the massive decision to boycott a tournament organized in a country where homosexuality is illegal. “Qatari society is not an inclusive space,” says Josie Nixon of the You Can Play project, which advocates for LGBTQ representation in sport. “It’s surely shameless [to have the World Cup there]. “
Read more: This is LGBTQ life in Qatar
The estimated $250 billion cost of hosting the tournament (more than Qatar’s national GDP or, if you prefer, the combined charge of all previous World Cups and Olympics) doesn’t worry about serious promises of sustainability. (By comparison, the 2006 World Cup in Germany charges just $5 billion. )Despite the promise of the first “zero-carbon World Cup in history,” a June 2021 FIFA report predicted that 3. 6 million tons of carbon dioxide would be produced at the tournament. This is almost Iceland’s annual production, and 1. 5 million tons more than Russia 2018. Meanwhile, the lack of good hospitality arrangements or activities for enthusiasts, especially socializing with a beer, which is expensive and heavily forbidden, raises uncomfortable questions about the priorities of those who awarded the tournament to Qatar in 2010.
Qatar has strongly denied corrupt practices to secure its candidacy and an investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee has uncovered no wrongdoing. However, the fact is that 16 of the 22 FIFA Executive Committee members guilty of voting have been charged, investigated or convicted of corruption or alleged wrongdoing and similar allegations have plagued at least the last 4 tournaments. Among the officials sanctioned is FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who has since called Qatar a “bad choice” and a “mistake,” blaming the resolution on his former rival Michel Platini, then head of European soccer’s governing body, UEFA. (In 2015, either man was banned from playing soccer until 2023 for moral infractions as part of an investigation into suspicious payments. )
Of course, FIFA’s expressed preference to take the World Cup, which has alternated for decades between Europe and South America, to new horizons is, at first glance, commendable. The Japan/South Korea 2002 and South Africa 2010 editions were announced as major hits. (Despite the ruined and now unused “white elephant” stadiums in the latter. )But while the football-crazy Arab sphere certainly deserves a World Cup, Qatar remains a selection for the region. before the final whistle. ) Morocco, meanwhile, has a rich and proud football tradition, an abundance of varied tourist attractions and has submitted (unsuccessfully) five times its bid to host tournaments.
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Qatar is the length of Connecticut with a population of just 2. 9 million, of which only 300,000 are citizens. The abundance of migrant staff distorts the overall gender balance for about 80 per cent of men. Although it is open to some neighbors, it is by no means liberal. society. On Tuesday, a Danish film crew reached out through Qatari officials who threatened to break up their equipment. (An apology was later issued. )
In this context, it is perhaps no surprise that enthusiasts seem to have been placed at the bottom of the precedence list, kidnapped in an inhospitable and single fan zone, sleeping in Spartan tents in the desert or, for the lucky ones, on crowded cruise ships. Many decide to stay comfortable in the UAE, taking special buses from Abu Dhabi and Dubai via the Saudi Arabian slide from Qatar. be related to each and every World Cup, post a “Well, it’s embarrassing” on Twitter in response. Remain anonymous because it was not legal to talk to the media. As halftime approached, Ecuadorian enthusiasts erupted in choruses of “we need beer. “
Read more: Qatar beer a headache. Now the country bans alcohol in World Cup stadiums
Organizers hoped those considerations would take a back seat once the first ball was kicked. Sunday’s result does not help much to achieve this. While “sports wash” claims have unquestionable merit, they are not unexpected in an ancient context. Politicians have sought prestige and profile through football. The first World Cup held in Uruguay in 1930 was funded by the state largely to adorn national centennial celebrations. The victory of Benito Mussolini’s Italy as host of the next tournament in 1934 was used as a justification for the fascist project. Argentina hosted (and won) the 1978 World Cup just two years after a brutal military coup; Russia only 4 years after the annexation of Crimea by Vladmir Putin in 2014.
But if Qatar is not an aberration, it represents a significant shift, a reduction of European influence in football as the broader power link widens from north to south. The European national league calendar, much to the chagrin of the continent’s richest and toughest clubs, to avoid the scorching heat of the Gulf summer is a case in point. And Qatar can also simply forget about accusations of corruption, as well as migrants and human rights violations similar to the World Cup, as such issues might not be a priority. This comes as China’s developing economic weight and oil- and gas-rich autocracies like Qatar continue to erode Western assumptions about the superiority of liberals. democracy.
After making Beijing the first city to host the Summer and Winter Olympics, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced his ambition to host the World Cup in 2030 or 2034. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is preparing a rival joint bid with Egypt and Greece. This would mean that it will pay for all related infrastructure in the component countries. This is part of the fact that Saudi Arabia “positions itself as the center of an Afro-Eurasian conception of the world,” says Simon Chadwick, a professor of sports and geopolitics. economics at Skema Business School in Paris. ” It’s not just about kicking a ball. It’s obviously something much bigger and, I would say, seismic economically, politically and ideologically. “
It is unclear how a tournament spread over 3 continents would gain advantages for enthusiasts. But with the prospect of only one on the horizon, thousands of enthusiasts left Al Bayt on Sunday, lining up for ferries or sweating for the (sober) 40 minutes to the nearest metro station: one day I think, in fact, they were among the lucky ones.