Oil Money in the Desert — Qatar 2022

December 2, 2010, FIFA headquarters in Zurich. An envelope is opened, and a card is held aloft. At the name written on it, the hall erupted in astonishment — “QATAR.” A desert nation of fewer than three million people, where summer temperatures climb toward 50 degrees Celsius, and which had never once qualified for a World Cup finals. That country had just won the right to host the greatest festival on earth. The corrupt machinery of FIFA we examined in the previous chapter was, in this moment, about to reach one of its peaks.

Yet to look only at the outcome — Qatar — is to miss a larger current. From the end of the twentieth century, the World Cup had been deliberately spreading its stage beyond the “traditional hosts” of Europe and South America. The coronation of a small desert nation was no sudden mutation. It was the inevitable culmination of a festival reaching to circle the entire globe.

Beyond Europe and South America — to Asia, and then to Africa

If one were to name a starting point for the road to Qatar, it would be 2002.

That year, the World Cup was held in Asia for the first time. A tournament on a continent that was neither the Americas nor Europe was a first in the history of the event. And it took the form of a joint hosting by two countries, Japan and South Korea. The format of two nations sharing the festival remains, to this day, the only such case in World Cup history. Japan and South Korea had originally been competing for the bid separately; after a fierce tug-of-war, it has been reported that FIFA chose the unprecedented compromise of “co-hosting.” It has also been said that, faced with a choice between “no hosting” or “a shared hosting,” the two countries reluctantly accepted the joint arrangement.

The tournament ran from May 31 to June 30, 2002, across venues split between the two nations. Newly built and renovated stadiums, upgraded transport networks, and a fervor that filled the streets — South Korea, carried by home support, surged to the semifinals, while Japan reached the knockout rounds for the first time. The title went to Brazil, who defeated Germany to claim a record fifth crown. Amid the heat of Asia, football impressed upon the world, forcefully, that it was not a culture belonging to Europe and South America alone.

After Asia, the World Cup turned toward the African continent. In 2010, the tournament was held in Africa for the first time. It has been reported that South Africa prevailed in an intra-African bidding contest against Morocco and Egypt. A nation that had overcome apartheid taking on the world’s largest sporting event — the symbolic meaning of that was immense. The title may have been carried off by Spain, but it was here that the World Cup became, decisively, a festival that could be held on any continent.

Asia (2002), Africa (2010). The one great blank that remained was — the Middle East.

Why a tiny desert nation?

As the move to fill that blank, the card Qatar played was a simple one. Money.

A peninsular state jutting into the Persian Gulf, Qatar boasts one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. Its wealth dwarfs the scale of any single nation, and through sovereign wealth funds it had been flowing into Europe’s storied clubs and football-related ventures. Stadiums, an airport, a metro, clusters of hotels — everything the tournament required could be “bought” and built from nothing. The total investment is said to have swelled to a scale beyond comparison with any previous tournament.

But suspicion clung to the bidding process from the outset — the suggestion that money or favors had changed hands before and after the vote. In later years, the pursuit of irregularities around the bid ran seamlessly alongside the wider corruption investigations into FIFA (the FIFAgate of the previous chapter), with sanctions and inquiries continuing across many countries. Qatar has consistently denied any wrongdoing, yet the question — “why, of all places, this country?” — never quite faded before the opening day.

Before the ball, there were the workers

Those lavish stadiums, however, did not rise on their own.

Laboring on the scorching construction sites were, in large part, migrant workers from South Asia — India, Nepal, Bangladesh. From 2010, when the hosting was decided, international human rights organizations sounded the alarm again and again over their working conditions. The “kafala” system, which bound workers tightly to their employers, restricting movement and job changes; long, brutal hours; unpaid wages; debts incurred for travel that trapped them — Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented such abuses in detail.

There was grave reporting on worker deaths as well. In 2021, Britain’s Guardian reported that more than 6,500 people from South Asia had died in Qatar in the roughly ten years since the hosting was awarded (this figure was not limited to deaths on tournament-related work, however, and its interpretation has been a matter of debate). The precise attribution of the numbers demands caution, but the weight of the fact does not waver: a great many people lost their lives building the stage for a festival they would never see. While the world gazed at the beautiful turf, the story of the people who dug the soil that held it up went almost entirely untold.

A summer festival held in deep winter

This tournament carried another unprecedented anomaly. It was held in the dead of winter.

The World Cup has traditionally been held in the northern hemisphere’s summer — across June and July. Korea/Japan 2002 and South Africa 2010 both fell within that custom. But Qatar’s summer was far too harsh for human beings to play in. So FIFA overturned precedent and shifted the tournament to November 20 through December 18. Europe’s major leagues were forced to break mid-season, and the very calendar of world football was rewritten to suit the climate of a single nation.

“A single nation’s circumstances can rewrite the world’s conventions” — and what made that possible was, once again, money and the political power that moved it. Football was no longer the property of Europe or South America alone; before vast capital, it had become something that could be reshaped at will. The winter tournament was the symbolic proof.

A word called sportswashing

Around Qatar 2022, one word flooded media the world over. Sportswashing.

In the fifth chapter of this series — Argentina 1978, under a military junta — we saw its “prototype.” A dazzling festival used to divert the world’s eyes from a country’s darkest corners. That method, the criticism went, had returned half a century later, refined and armed with financial power of a different order. A glittering opening ceremony, state-of-the-art stadiums, smiling faces broadcast around the globe. Was that brilliance not obscuring the questions about human rights?

That said, the host nation told an entirely different story. For Qatar, the World Cup was a national strategy in itself — a way, with one eye on a future in which oil and gas would one day run dry, to inscribe the country onto the world map as “something other than its resources.” There were indeed voices on the ground that received this first-ever tournament in the Arab world as a historic feat, a matter of regional pride and prestige. Just as with Asia in 2002 and Africa in 2010, a festival held “for the first time on our own soil” carried a pride particular to that region.

The dawn of the Gulf era

Qatar 2022 was not a single, isolated “exceptional tournament.” It lay on the extension of the geographic expansion that had run through Asia and Africa, and at the same time it was the gateway to a far larger tectonic shift.

On the pitch, Argentina rose to the summit after a fierce final, and one star player at last claimed the crown he had chased for years — the competition itself left an unforgettable story. But off the stage, Gulf money had seeped into every corner of the football world. Europe’s storied clubs, the transfer market, broadcasting rights, sponsorship. Whoever controls where the money flows controls the future of the game. That configuration had become plain to every eye.

Then came the decisive blow. In December 2024, FIFA formally awarded the 2034 tournament to Saudi Arabia, the sole candidate. Following Qatar, another vast oil-producing power of the Gulf had taken the world’s largest sporting event into its hands. Concerns about sportswashing flared up again, but the current could no longer be stopped.

As we saw in the first chapter, the World Cup has been a mirror of “national prestige” from the moment it was born. To Asia, to Africa, and then to the Middle East — as it spread its stage, what that mirror now reflected, out there upon the desert, was the ambition of the Gulf states themselves: to convert wealth won from resources into prestige upon the world stage.

When the desert festival drew to a close, the world had already begun to turn its eyes to the next stage. North America — the United States, Canada, Mexico. The second instance of multi-nation hosting after Korea/Japan, and a World Cup expanding to a scale beyond all comparison — where on earth was it trying to go? The story finally arrives at the “now” in which we ourselves live.