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By Tariq Panja and Rory Smith
Tariq Panja provided in 2010 when Qatar selected to host the 2022 World Cup. This article is based on a lot of interviews he and Rory Smith conducted about his victory and the consequences for football.
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Michel Platini was expecting a personal audience with France’s president when he arrived for lunch on a bloodless day in November 2010. Instead, as Platini, a legendary French player who, in retirement, had one of the toughest men in football, enters a luxurious living room of the president’s official residence, he immediately realizes that the guy he came to see, Nicolas Sarkozy, is absent.
Instead, Platini was directed to a small conversational organization across the room and in a verbal replacement that would change the course of his career, tarnish his reputation, and replace the game he had committed his life to.
Platini smiled as he officially brought to the lunch the honorary visitors: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, Prime Minister of Qatar, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who in a few years will take over from his father as absolute ruler of the country. The Qataris had come to Paris to talk about a plan that bordered on the fantastic: their small, incredibly wealthy Gulf state was looking to host the World Cup.
Platini, vice president of FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, had long supported the idea. A year earlier, he told friends he had the idea of allowing Qatar, a country without a significant soccer tradition, to lack critical infrastructure such as stadiums to host the World Cup. The biggest sporting event would prove disastrous for FIFA. Just two months earlier, he had told a rival U. S. bid that he was seeking the 2022 tournament to take position “anywhere in Qatar. “
Sometime this afternoon, however, Platini’s reservations faded. What made him replace his brain at a lunch with an expired Sarkozy and the two Qataris remain, more than a decade later, decidedly difficult to understand and bitterly discussed. Platini himself has presented at least two separate versions of events, in both cases saying his vote was his own choice and did not reflect outside influence, and in 2019 he was detained, but not charged, by French investigators believed to be investigating Congress.
By then, however, the deal was closed: A week after lunch, in a cavernous Zurich convention hall, Qatar was hosting the 2022 World Cup.
Since then, the world’s greatest game has been counting on the consequences of this decision.
U. S. investigators and FIFA itself have since said that several members of FIFA’s board accepted bribes to change the vote in Qatar (Platini is not one of them). A wide-ranging investigation into corruption in the conduct of FIFA’s affairs has resulted in dozens of arrests. and others helped topple the entire FIFA leadership and nearly toppled the establishment itself.
But the resolution has also irrevocably replaced football’s more sensible-level economics. After winning the World Cup, Qatar temporarily established itself as a true powerhouse in the sport. Less than a year after lunch at the Elysée, Qatari interests bought French Paris. Saint-Germain’s team and a Qatari sports network began pumping money into European football by buying broadcasting rights. This influx of money not only affected what the most sensible players earned and where they played: it also briefly threatened to drive an irreconcilable wedge between a handful of the sport’s wealthiest groups and the rest of the game.
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