The Daily - Qatar’s Big Bet on the World Cup

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

The World Cup, the biggest single sporting event on the planet, began earlier this month. By the time the tournament finishes, half the global population is expected to have watched. The 2022 World Cup has also been the focus of over a decade of controversy because of its unlikely host: the tiny, energy-rich country of Qatar. How did such a small nation come to host the tournament, and at what cost?Guest: Tariq Panja, a sports business reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The decision to take the World Cup to Qatar has upturned a small nation, battered the reputation of global soccer’s governing body and altered the fabric of the sport.Many in Qatar say the barrage of criticism about its human rights record and the exploitation of migrant workers is laced with discrimination and hypocrisy.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Pretty much everyone is watching the World Cup. This month marked the beginning of the single largest sporting event on the planet. And fans getting loud and ready to cheer on their country in the world's biggest sporting event. The World Cup. Getting hold of the ball, and it's sent into the middle, the first goal of the World Cup. It's a tournament that, by the time it finishes, is expected to have been watched by more than half the world's population.

It has also been the focus of more than a decade of controversy. It's in Qatar. It shouldn't be there. No. Twelve years ago, when Qatar was given the 2022 World Cup, there was wide criticism. Because of its unlikely host, the tiny, energy-rich country of Qatar. They're hosting an event expected to attract over a million spectators in person to a country just the size of Connecticut. Today, I talk to my colleague Tarek Pan, about how Qatar got the cup and at what cost. It's Monday, November 28th. So Tarek, you cover soccer and the business of sports for The Times.

And you've been writing about the World Cup in Qatar since it was selected to host. And now you're finally there. So what's it been like? It's been a surreal journey. This country has, you know, in many ways been rebuilt around a one month long sporting event. And you get that sense everywhere you go. Where do you say we go? Go up the escalator.

From the moment you arrive at the Hamad International Airport, you go through the terminal, all of that feels very shiny, very new. Do you know where the metro is, please? The metro will be on the second level. Then we head to this metro system. There's not much signposting here for a metro. Created in many ways to transport soccer fans

to World Cup stadiums in this tiny country. We've just arrived in the apartment where we're going to be spending the next month. Me and my colleagues from the New York Times here, we're staying in an apartment block and we are the first guests. Everything is new. The street is new. The building is new. It's got a new apartment smell. It's got a new apartment smell. It's felt a bit like being on a movie set that is box fresh. They've essentially built everything from scratch in order to host the World Cup. Okay, so there's been all this new construction and preparation that's gone into this thing.

How has it actually been going now that it's finally here? Yeah, it hasn't been the smoothest of sailing so far. It's been a bit of a bumpy ride. And one of the biggest flashpoints has been over beer. Beer. So Qatar had promised the world that just like at every other World Cup, there will be beer here. It's a conservative Muslim country. And that didn't go down too well with the domestic population, as you would expect. It's not part of their culture. Right. There's been this push and pull. But 100 days before the World Cup,

FIFA and the local organizers announced there would be beer within the perimeter of the stadium and then suddenly we start to see this shift a week before the tournament the brother of the emir goes walk about he doesn't like the look of those red budweiser tents and asks for them to be moved. And then 48 hours before the start of the World Cup 2022 in Qatar, beer is banned. The royal family does not want it here. Those fans who have travelled thousands of miles, spent all of that money,

they'll find out when they get here that, nope, this is essentially, as far as the stadiums goes, a dry World Cup. Okay, so here we are in 2022 at the biggest sporting event in the world without any alcohol. That's pretty crazy. How did we get here? So it's 2009. FIFA, the world's governing body for soccer, opens this competition to host the 2022 World Cup. And Qatar, this thumb-shaped

peninsula located next to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, decides it needs to do something to be known in the world, to have its place. Yes, it's wealthy, but it needs something to give it some great standing. Why not bid for the world's most popular sporting event? And it was just not taken seriously in the beginning. If you ask, you know, if Qatar has the possibility of hosting the World Cup, everybody will say you are crazy, you know, you are crazy. The country hardly ranked as a soccer playing nation.

It was in the hundreds somewhere. That's the problem. Qatar has no soccer history. They had no infrastructure. They had kind of one stadium that would be of an international level, but they'd need several more. Spending to build the eight stadiums necessary to host the event would have to top $200 billion. So it makes absolutely no sense at all.

Well, I think it's incredibly worrying for members of the LGBTQ plus society. And being gay is a criminal offense in this country. We are welcoming everyone. But of course we would like the people to respect our culture and rules and regulations. Many football fans are gay. Will they be welcome here? The other thing. This is a typical day in Qatar.

Now about one in the afternoon and the temperature is just at 124 degrees. It is fiendishly hot. If you could think of a more absurd place to play the World Cup in June and July than Qatar, I would challenge you because that's when the World Cup is played. There was nothing about this bid that would have made sense, apart from one thing, I think. What will it mean to the region if the world's greatest sporting event comes to the Middle East for the very first time? Why not take a tournament to the Middle East?

Right. So here they are, Qatar, in this field that includes the United States of America, South Korea, Japan and Australia. South Korea, Japan and Australia. The winner to organize the 2-22 FIFA World Cup is Qatar. And just like that, we have a result. Thank you for believing in change. Thank you for believing in expanding the game. Thank you for giving Qatar a chance. And we will not let you down. You will be proud of us. You will be proud of the Middle East.

And I promise you this. But Tarek, why does Qatar even want it? I mean, they're totally ill-equipped to host it, as you're pointing out. So why try for it to begin with? There's two stories here when we look at that. One is the one that is described by the Qatari officials when you ask them. They're saying, well, we've had a national project to build Qatar. And even if we didn't get the World Cup, we would be building all of these things. You know, we need to have a modern country with infrastructure that you have in the rest of the world. And this kind of accelerates that. But if you ask other people, this is a

tiny country in a tough neighborhood. Just being in the region, there is that rivalry between these different kingdoms. They're all fabulously wealthy. There's only so many palaces you can build. palaces you can build. There's so many luxury hotels, but there's only one World Cup. And now the emirs of Qatar have had it. They've got the first. It's not Saudi Arabia. It's not the UAE. It's not Bahrain. It is here. And no one can take that away from them. So it's like a prestige thing, basically, kind of a marketing project in their competition with other Gulf states. Yeah, and we've seen sport as a vehicle for this in the region. So next door you have the UAE and you have Emirates, the airline, emblazoned across the jerseys of all the big European capital city soccer teams.

of all the big European capital city soccer teams. You have this powerhouse Premier League soccer team in Manchester owned by the brother of the ruler of the UAE. This is a team that has absolutely crushed all its opponents. So sport has always been used as this vehicle. And there's been this competition to exert this soft power through sport. And Qatar, for me, have put the accelerator down on this. They have got the World Cup, nothing bigger. Okay, so Tarek, I get why they want to host the World Cup. But as you told us before, they don't have any of the infrastructure. So my question to you is,

how did they actually get it? Like, how did they win the bid? Well, publicly, they spent more money than any of the other bidding nations to put up presentations, to sponsor events, to get their name out there. They invited the 22 men of FIFA's executive committee who would vote in the election on multiple visits to Qatar. They showed them air-conditioned stadiums they would build. They hired former football players that were world famous, for example, Zinedine Zidane, the French World Cup hero from 98. They paid him millions just to endorse their bid. They threw the kitchen sink at it in terms of wealth to get their name out there.

But behind the scenes, they were also lobbying intensely this group of 22 men to convince them. And none of that is played out in demonstrations or in adverts or anything like this. This is smoke-filled rooms and meals and private conversations. What can we do for you? So basically, you're saying that they got it the old-fashioned way, right? Corruption. Buying off these FIFA guys. Well, immediately, that's where everyone's minds turned. Shortly after the World Cup was awarded here, allegations of corruption surfaced

that FIFA officials had taken bribes to vote in favor of Cutter's bid. This process was already in doubt. Two members were suspended over allegations they'd offered to sell their votes. Two of the voting members had been expelled for offering to sell their votes to undercover reporters. This was a highly biddable, buyable group of individuals. And then... A whistleblower has alleged three members were offered cash for votes by Qatar. Everyone was trying to find this smoking gun. They were expected

to uphold the rules that keep soccer honest and to protect the integrity of the game. Hearing the former head of UA for Michel Platini has been detained by French police investigating the award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Reports after reports of potential bribes of these men were broadcast in European media. This really is the World Cup of fraud. But Qatar steadfastly denied all of this for all these years. When people say, how did you win the World Cup? You know, the simplest answer, and I assure you and I promise you, it is not said in any way with any arrogance. We were the best bid.

And then... Prosecutors have revealed new details of alleged bribes paid to FIFA executive committee members to gain their votes for Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup. There was a curious detail in a US indictment related to soccer corruption. Then president of the South American governing body CONMEBOL and former Brazil Federation president Ricardo Teixeira received bribes to vote for Qatar. It said three of the South American voting members received money to select Qatar. That's the closest we've had of any major authority confirming our worst suspicions,

that bribes were paid and Qatar was the victor. What we can be sure of is that most of the committee that took this decision have since been accused, banned, or indicted over allegations of corruption or wrongdoing. Okay, so at this point, it seems like Qatar bribed their way to host this World Cup. But at the end of the day, they got it, right? Like, it's there. So then what do they actually have to do to make it happen? Well, they embarked on an intense building frenzy, the life of which few would have seen. This is a 12-year process of reimagining an entire country. Yes, it's small, but it is a rebuild of a nation.

We'll be right back. Okay, so Tarek, how does Qatar approach trying to pull off this pretty crazy feat? Well, I think after they took a big gulp that, oh, we're now going to have to do this, they have to figure out how they're going to build an entire country. This is building seven stadiums in the desert. This is building hundreds of miles of road. This is building sewage systems, scores of hotels, a new metro system, a port, like anything you can think of, this country needed to build. And how are they going to do it? When you have a domestic population as small as this, the World Cup final stadium in Luzail is 80,000. If you fill that four times, that's pretty much all of the Qatari nationals in the world. Oh, wow. Every citizen.

Every citizen. And around this region, there are some poor people just across the water who are desperate for work. These are people who are living hand to mouth with few job opportunities where they are, particularly in South Asia, parts of West Africa as well, Philippines. So you have this wealthy country with huge ambition meeting desperate poverty and hundreds of thousands of workers from these countries are dragged to Qatar through force of need. Now, Qatar's population spiked not far from doubling from the moment they started bidding in 2009 to this period in 2022. This population increase is solely down to the need for workers to build this country. All told, about 85 to 90% of this country is made up of migrant workers. Wow.

And, you know, you're talking about people earning less than $10 a day in one of the wealthiest countries in the planet. They get up in the morning, extremely early, often before dawn. They'll get on buses, and they get driven to labor sites. They will do eight to 10 hours at these places, doing the most difficult work in the most difficult conditions. Don't forget, in the summer, the temperature rises to up to 50 degrees. So over 100 Fahrenheit. Yeah. And then they will do that for six days a week. And they are the army that is going to build this country. And that is what they did for this entire period. Okay. So just to recap here, Qatar needs to build all these stadiums,

all this infrastructure, roads, even hotels and office buildings in order to successfully host the World Cup. And they don't have the people, so they bring in migrants like many other countries in the world, right? The United States has done this too. You know, many countries do this. But it's particularly common and particularly harsh often in the Gulf. So what do we know at this point about how this ultimately went? I mean, what happened to these migrants? We've seen stories of awful accommodation, men crammed together in tiny living spaces, sometimes with no air conditioning.

There was too much heat. My shoes used to be filled with sweat. There was no electricity, no food. We had nothing. We've seen people working in the desert under the hot sun, suffering seizures, dizzy spells. We've heard of stories of young men of working age found dead in their beds, apparently dying in the night. One of the most common causes seems to have been respiratory failure and cardiac arrest. Football's governing body FIFA and the Qatari government

introduced worksite inspections to improve conditions. Qatar eventually introduced this rule where in the summer months, between a few of the hottest hours in the afternoon, work must stop. But that came belatedly. When he left for Qatar six months ago, she was his wife. Today, she's his widow. What we know is thousands of workers who've been in Qatar have died. The Guardian also reporting that last year the Nepalese migrants in Qatar, they were dying at a rate of one every two days. A report in the Guardian said 6,500 workers have died in Qatar since 2010. So according to some reports, thousands of people died building this World Cup.

I mean, that's a devastating toll. Yeah, and it's not only this. It is also the contractual ties these people have. They are across the Gulf, at least when this Qatar project started, part of something which is called the Kafala system, which ties a migrant worker to one employer, and they would be at the whim of this employer. So they often didn't get paid what they should get paid. They had nobody to complain to, and they couldn't even leave the country if they wanted to. They would have had to have been given permission to leave Qatar. Tarek, how has the rest of the world responded to these conditions? I mean, what are people saying? A World Cup based on labor exploitation.

In a new report today, Amnesty says some abuses amount to forced labor. We've seen human rights groups focus very, very closely on this in recent years. Amnesty International has told the BBC that football associations need to start looking into the conditions for migrant workers now. And that level of scrutiny has brought it to the attention of some of the European nations that compete in the World Cup, for example. Ten European football associations, including those of England and Wales, say that human rights are universal and apply everywhere. They've found themselves under pressure. Germany, the English, Denmark,

countries where the conversation about human rights is at the top of the agenda most of the time. Some question if, ethically, the World Cup should move forward in a country with such a history of turning a blind eye to abuse. And it's not only about migrant workers. This is also about Qatar's relationship and laws related to homosexuality.

Campaigners in the UK say that they don't think anyone from those communities should be traveling to watch the World Cup in Qatar. Calls to boycott the tournament have gathered momentum. And if you're talking about this all of the time, how could you as a nation, in good conscience, send your soccer teams to this World Cup? World Cup. So it sounds like, Tarek, that not only is Qatar under pressure for its human rights record, but the countries going to the World Cup are also under pressure from their own populations. Like, their participation could be seen as endorsing Qatar's treatment of migrants or its approach to LGBTQ issues. So that pressure has been there. But if they did something,

made a big stand in Qatar, they would upset their hosts and potentially risk being penalized by FIFA for a tournament that they have prepared for, for four years. This is a culmination of a player's career in many ways. There's nothing bigger than the World Cup. So on the one hand, you have this domestic audience that needs you to stand up for values that they think are important. On the other hand, this is everything your career has built up to. So what we've had is various efforts to almost make a stand, I'd say. Denmark, for example,

the public there and the media there has been particularly opposed to this World Cup. So the jersey will be in black, the colour of mourning. And then there was this plan of seven European countries for their captains to wear an armband emblazoned with the word one love and in the grand scale of things wearing an armband might not seem like a show of defiance but as far as FIFA is concerned it is one step too far. These teams have arrived in Qatar and FIFA has said sorry we're not going to let you do this. We will issue sporting sanctions against the team captains who would dare to wear this armband. And as a group, they caved. Wow. So even the armband was too much.

That's right. Did any of the bad press affect Qatar? I mean, especially, you know, as you said earlier, one of the points of doing this was to improve their position on the world stage. So this presumably wasn't good for that reputation, like for the prestige that they wanted so badly. No, the global headlines have taken their toll on Qatar. And it's led to changes. The kafala system that I described, for example, Qatar is one of the first, if not the first

in the region to abolish this. It announced a minimum wage, $275 for the entire month. They've had a policy of insurance for wages that have been stolen. But the enforcement, and this is perhaps to be kind, has been patchy. You can have all of these rules, but the enforcement hasn't been there. So the workers have still suffered. But Qatar would say, look, we've been doing these things. Why are you still attacking us? Why are we not getting any credit for the reforms we've made that our neighbours haven't,

for example? We are doing more than anybody else. We are improving. Why can't this be part of the story as well? And the officials I speak to, they feel they've been unfairly maligned to the point where they're shutting down. What do you mean? By that I mean, all right, we're never going to convince you. So we're not even going to try to now. Whatever we do will not be enough. Qatar has spent more money on this tournament than any country has on any type of sporting event, including the Olympics. It spent $220 billion. Crazy.

I think they thought, look, we're going to spend $200 billion plus on building the best party in the world. So why are our guests so ungrateful? How dare they be so nasty to us? You have the Emir, Sheikh Tamim Al Thani, making an address to lawmakers here in Qatar, where he says no country that has ever hosted a sporting event has been attacked in the same way Qatar has. And you have other ministers from this country claiming that racism has been at play here. And the feeling has been one of bitterness from the Qataris. And what about FIFA? How have they responded now that the World Cup is actually underway?

Well, I've been pretty quiet in the last few months. Before this World Cup started, the world's media were ushered into an auditorium to meet with the FIFA president, Infantino. Today I feel Qatari. And it was a jaw-dropping 90 minutes. Today I feel gay. I've covered a lot of press conferences with FIFA presidents, but nothing quite like this. Today I feel a migrant worker. He was essentially running defence for Qatar. Because I know what it means to be discriminated. He equated his experience as a ginger-haired child in Switzerland, an immigrant from an Italian family, with, it seems, the plight of migrant workers and homosexuals in Qatar

in the wider Gulf. I was bullied because I had red hair and I had these red, how do you call them? Freckles. Freckles. Freckles. Sorry? Freckles. Freckles.

Yes, I don't even know the term. He basically railed against European and Western culture. We in Europe, we close our borders. Essentially saying that you have no right to criticize these people, given the historical context of your countries and continents. I think for what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people. Wow, so you actually have the president of FIFA

standing up there and turning all of this criticism we've been talking about back on the West, basically saying, back off, right? Leave Qatar alone. So another weird moment in this World Cup. This has been the most news-heavy tournament I have covered. And I've been doing this for almost two decades. This is not what a World Cup normally looks like. So all of this makes me wonder, Tarek, I mean, the proposition of drawing so much attention to itself for Qatar was to occupy this space as a player on the world stage. But on the other hand, it's bringing all of this negative attention.

Its human rights issues are really on full display. And I guess my question is, do you think at the end of the day that Qatar will say, we're getting enough out of this World Cup to make it worth all of that negative attention? I think it's going to be very difficult for them to leave this moment feeling like victors. However, it has bought itself all of this attention. It's basically found the shortest shortcuts to get itself on that top tier of the world.

The world is here. The tournament is being played. The most famous athletes in the world are here. Thousands of media professionals here. Millions of hours of television is being beamed to the world from this tiny desert peninsula. So from that point of view, they've got what they wanted. We are here now for one month and this football tournament is taking place. They will hope that the goals that are scored in those stadiums, those magic moments will be at least for this month, what is beamed from Qatar and the backdrop will be their country and those beautiful stadiums that were constructed by these migrant workers. They will hope that that backdrop will be remembered as the stadium where Lionel Messi scored the winning goal in the World Cup final, not where Ram Prasad from Nepal lost his life. Let's concentrate on football.

We have 32 great teams, 33 with Team 1, the referees. We have beautiful stadiums. We have a city that wants to welcome the world. Let's please, please celebrate and hope that we can give some smiles to some people around the world. Tarek, thank you. Thank you.

Since the World Cup began a week ago, millions of people around the world have watched. On Friday, more than 15 million Americans tuned in to watch the U.S. play England, setting a record for the most viewed men's soccer match in U.S. history. And on Saturday, nearly 90,000 people attended the match between Argentina and Mexico, making it the largest crowd reported at a World Cup in nearly three decades. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. Over the weekend, protesters angry about strict anti-COVID measures called for China's powerful leader, Xi Jinping, to resign.

It was the most defiant eruption of public anger against China's ruling Communist Party in years and delivered an unprecedented rebuke to Xi's authority. The protests were sparked by a fatal fire in a Chinese province. Firefighters tried to get to the scene, but ultimately, 10 people died. The response raised questions about whether the victims were sealed in their burning building because of COVID measures. China is the only major country still taking extraordinary steps to stop coronavirus transmission three years after

the virus emerged. The public reaction across China has been broad and varied. On university campuses, students staged vigils, many holding up pieces of blank white paper in mute protest. In Shanghai, the police used pepper spray to drive away demonstrators. But hours later, they came back. On Sunday, the Associated Press reported that authorities in at least eight cities, including the capital, Beijing, struggled to suppress demonstrations. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Will Reed, Rochelle Banja, Stella Tan, and Sydney Harper, with help from Jessica Chung. It was edited by John Ketchum, Paige Cowett, and Anita Batyjo.

Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Special thanks to Doug Shoresman. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.