Misdirection and Malpractice: the Qatar 2022 blueprint may be the perfect fit for the next Gulf World Cup
In my first report from Play The Game 2024 in Norway, I share the speech I'll give today on what I learned investigating every angle of a tournament built on lies
I’m spending this week in Trondheim, Norway, at the Play The Game 2024 conference, which started yesterday afternoon and runs until Wednesday.
Play The Game (PTG) is an organisation run by the Danish Institute for Sports Studies with a stated aim of “raising the ethical standards of sport and promoting democracy, transparency, and freedom of expression in world sport.”
Year-round, PTG puts modern sport under the microscope to explore doping, corruption, good governance, match-fixing, sustainability of mega-events, the role of sports journalism, the rights of athletes, and much more.
PTG has run biennial conferences for decades, and they are a brilliant place to meet a diverse array of athletes, governing body insiders, academics, whistleblowers, journalists, criminals (or to be more precise, former criminals, most of the time), politicians and all sorts of other global sports industry folk.
Play The Game has its home in Aarhus, Denmark, and I’ve attended several PTG conferences there over the years, as well as the 2022 edition in Odense, Denmark. PTG has been staged in different places across Europe – this time in Norway.
My first PTG conference was in 2009, in Coventry. I’d been asked to chair a panel on football finance but met some fascinating people there, including Greg LeMond and Michael Franzese.
LeMond, the winner of the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, told us in Coventry that “cycling is on a slow death march because of widespread, systematic doping”. He added: “In 20 years, drugs will have damaged cycling so much it might not be at the Olympics.”
In an interview for The Independent, he spoke about Lance Armstrong and told me: “If Armstrong’s clean, it’s the greatest comeback. And if he’s not, then it’s the greatest fraud.”
Franzese was absolutely fascinating. He is an American former mob boss, who was the capo in the notorious Colombo crime family, one of the ‘Five Families’ of New York gangsters. In the Martin Scorsese movie, Goodfellas, Franzese is played by Joseph Bono, in the role of ‘Micky’; his nicknames included ‘Prince of the Mafia.’
Franzese served multiple prison terms for various Mob activities from racketeering to counterfeiting, extortion and gasoline bootlegging. After he left the Mob, he went into witness protection and remains the most high-profile former Mob man to have gone into witness protection, and out again, and remain alive.
He was at the PTG 2009 to talk about his experience of fixing basketball matches in the USA as part of a betting racket. He has lots of compelling stories to tell and he was absolutely charming. We remain Facebook friends to this day!
At this year’s edition of PTG, I’ve been invited to chair a couple of panels, including one yesterday on illegal gambling in sport and all its ramifications. The panellists included Frédéric Van Leeuw, who is the federal prosecutor in Belgium and has vast experience tackling organised crime and terrorism; film-maker Zoe Flood, who spoke about the explosion of sports betting across Africa; and Philippe Auclair, whose presentation was called ‘How sports betting has made elite football complicit with criminal activity and human rights abuse’.
You can watch sessions from PTG live and also on catch-up here.
I was also asked to talk in a session this morning: ‘Biased, bigoted, boorish? The global debate on Qatar 2022.’ The aim was to reevaluate the award and delivery of that World Cup, and all the other controversies in between.
What follows below is a version of my speech.
12 years of misdirection, and what it tells us about football's future
Even using the pejorative word “misdirection” may lead to me being accused of being biased. Make up your own mind. If you watch this session live or via catch-up, you will also hear from one of the many PR people paid handsomely to promote Qatar 2022 and suppress certain information.
The story of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, from the bidding stage to the completion of the tournament, took many twists and turns. I am writing today from the perspective of a journalist who followed it all.
The story raised questions over transparency and honesty, not least in the voting process that awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament to Qatar at the same time on a bizarre December day in 2010.
Vladimir Putin flew in that evening and when I asked how he’d convinced the FIFA Executive Committee to vote for Russia, he fiddled with his earpiece, pretended he hadn’t heard it, and didn’t answer.
Make no mistake, Russia and Qatar would not have been awarded their tournaments without money, many billions of dollars of it. Money makes the world go round, of course, in football as in all parts of life. It’s why Saudi Arabia will be staging the men’s 2034 World Cup. It’s why the 12 years of misdirection around Qatar showed us the direction in which the beautiful game is going.
There is already a lack of transparency over precisely how a deal was cooked up to give the 2030 World Cup to six countries on three continents, effectively handing 2034 to Saudi Arabia. Who voted on that? It looks like a one-man vote from Gianni Infantino to me.
The selection of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts involved 22 men who together comprised arguably the most corrupt sporting electorate of all time. The process was hugely flawed and without doubt involved bribes and strange incentives of many kinds.
Sepp Blatter was among those 22, as FIFA’s president. He later received two separate six-year bans.
Jack Warner was among the 22. He was later banned for life and was one of FIFA’s biggest ever crooks. He was a ticket tout on an industrial scale, a serial bribe taker and a thief who stole from the victims of the Haiti earthquake.
Department of Justice documents proved Warner was paid $5m to vote for Russia 2018, and detailed the wire transfers, and there were allegations Warner and family members were paid by Qatari firms after Warner perhaps voted for Qatar in 2022 instead of the USA, the bidder from his own Concacaf federation.
One theory says that Warner fell out with another member of the 22, Chuck Blazer, over this. Blazer was an American and also a serial crook, bribe taker, ticket tout and TV deal skimmer.
I don’t have time today to detail all the corruption allegations against the 22, a majority of whom were beyond doubt corrupt, and/or banned for corruption, and/or indicted in RICO frauds and/or charged by other bodies for malfeasance. But they included Julio Grondona of Argentina, Ricardo Teixeira of Brazil, Mohamed Bin Hamman of Qatar, Worawi Makudi of Thailand and Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay. Others voted for Qatar for literally political reasons, including Michel Platini of France, while Marios Lefkaritis of Cyprus earned £27m from the sale of a pocket of land to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund not long after the December 2010 vote.
When I asked via email in 2013 about his 2010 vote for Qatar 2022, his office replied: “Please be informed that Mr Marios Lefkaritis is recovering from a surgery and cannot answer your questions.” He didn’t even bother to say: ‘No, I didn’t sell the land to them for £27m.’
And then there was a collusion pact between Qatar and Spain, for each nation and their allies among the 22 to vote for each other. It didn’t work, not for Spain at least. There have been reports that Qatar also had a pact with Russia, which did benefit both countries, but when Michael Garcia was investigating the matter for FIFA, Russia had unfortunately destroyed all the computers used on their bid, and Qatar protested their innocence.
A few weeks before the 2010 vote I got a call from a former Qatar bid insider, who would later become known as the Qatari whistleblower. Her name was Phaedra Al Majid and she told me in our first conversation of many: “I don’t think Qatar will win the 2022 vote. I know they will.”
She provided compelling evidence, including documents, showing that Qatar had not played by the bidding rules. Qatar made promises it didn’t keep after winning the vote. These included promising to stage a summer 2022 World Cup in stadiums so efficiently air-controlled that nobody would notice the season. We were told in 2010 that those stadiums would use revolutionary cooling technology and that if Qatar won, these stadiums and this technology would be gifted to developing countries so extreme heat would never prevent any country – rich or poor – from bidding to stage an event like a World Cup.
You may have noticed that the 2022 World Cup didn’t take place in summer. And those stadiums with that amazing tech were never built – or given away. One stadium at WC 2022, the romantically named Stadium 974, because it was built from 974 shipping containers, was supposed to be given away, but more than a year after the 2022 World Cup ended, it hasn’t been.
Time again constrains how much detail I can go into on other anomalous events. But in January 2020, a whistle-blower from Australia’s failed 2022 bid, Bonita Mersiades, published a book – Whatever It Takes – that exposed serial dodgy behaviour inside Australia’s bid, and also detailed how, in the run-up to the vote for 2022, some FIFA executives were concerned about a financial shortfall if Qatar were picked over the USA for 2022.
Bonita – now a friend, and also a friend of Play The Game – wrote how Qatar-based Al Jazeera (now beIN Sports) had agreed a secret deal to pay a $100 million ‘bonus’ to FIFA in the event that Qatar won the hosting rights. When I asked beIN sports about this, a spokesman described the payment as “production contributions” which were “standard market practice”.
You will hear at PTG in detail from others about the fates of migrant workers who went to Qatar to build around $200bn of infrastructure in readiness for the 2022 World Cup. In 2022 I spent months, on and off, using Qatar’s own official government data since 2010 to try to ascertain how many migrant workers died in that time, and how. There is a Twitter thread about that work, and links to the final report.
The official line from the Supreme Committee was three worker deaths: that’s three workers who died specifically on stadium building sites, inside working hours.
Using Qatar’s own detailed death data between 2011 and 2020, I looked at deaths of migrant workers aged 18-60 who died in that time in Qatar, not counting anyone older or younger, or anyone who died of an identifiable illness, such as cancer.
That left me with 2,465 deaths from circularity, heart, and respiratory illnesses with no post-mortem explanation; another 2,823 deaths marked as “unspecified” in official data; 1,447 deaths in road accidents; 263 deaths caused by falls; 279 deaths by drowning/fire/electrocutions; 435 suicides; and 727 deaths by external causes, including death by inanimate object, crushing and homicide. That’s a total of 8,439, and if you reduced that to only those in the cohort of low-paid, labour-intensive groups, you got to 7,459 deaths.
Of course, I didn’t know how many of those had straightforward explanations completely unrelated to work, so I asked the Supreme Committee for data about death figures on all infrastructure projects that would support 2022, and not just people who literally died as they worked within the footprint of a stadium. They said they didn’t have that information.
So I asked the Qatari government. To begin with, I received no reply and so I chased it up. The person in charge of answering told me he hadn’t received my questions. When I gave him documentary evidence that this was not the case – I had copied in a colleague of his and he had confirmed receipt of my email – I never heard from him again.
Qatar opted instead to use the law firm Carter Ruck to answer (or rather not answer) basic questions, and they wrote aggressively and with threatening overtones in letters marked ‘Private and Confidential / Not for Publication’.
Carter Ruck huffed and puffed a lot before getting down to the point: they couldn’t or wouldn’t provide the data I was seeking.
Qatar employed a PR army to try to shut down journalistic enquiries on subjects as varied as the state’s human rights record, or whether members of the LGBTQ+ community would be safe at Qatar 2022. I know some national newspaper editors were taken out by Hassan Al-Thawadi – the secretary general of Qatar 2022 – and over a lovely lunch were convinced to send the message down the line to sports desks that it was time to stick to the football.
The 2022 and 2034 World Cup hosts are oil-wealthy, authoritarian neighbour states that were rich enough to convince key people in FIFA they were good for the money. The scrutiny on them isn’t because they are in the Gulf. It’s standard practice to scrutinise World Cup and Olympic hosts in the run-up to hosting. I did it ahead of Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, and London 2012. And before the World Cups of 2010 in South Africa, 2014 in Brazil, and 2018 in Russia. The bit that’s worthy of scrutiny is how they convinced FIFA. It’s the plutocracy part that matters. Money trumps all.
There are good things to say about both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, obviously: from wanting to be positive global actors, who are diversifying their economies for a post-oil future, while pouring billions from their sovereign wealth funds into assets and businesses around the world who benefit from that money. Saudi Arabia has been stressing it is a young country demographically, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to invest in all sorts of sport and entertainment for its people. All true.
But Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup was opaque and remains so. So was Saudi’s winning of 2034.
Qatar made promises it didn’t keep. Time will tell on Saudi Arabia.
Qatar had major migrant worker issues. Saudi Arabia does too, as will be highlighted over the next decade, although Saudi Arabia is already refusing certain journalists access to the country.
Qatar wanted to control the narrative. Saudi is doing the same.
FIFA is ok with all that.
You can see the future … just look at the past.
