The New Yorker Radio Hour - How Qatar Took the World Cup

Episode Date: November 18, 2022

No self-respecting sports fan is naïve about the role that money plays in pro sports. But, by any standard, the greed and cynicism behind the World Cup are extraordinary. The cloud of scandal surrounding FIFA, the international soccer organization, has led to indictments and arrests on charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering around the globe. Headlines have been filled with reports of the deaths of workers who constructed the facilities. “People are normally careful enough not to leave a paper trail,” the contributor Heidi Blake notes. But she says, of investigating FIFA, “I’ve never seen graft and corruption documented in this kind of detail.” Blake speaks with David Remnick about “The Ugly Game,” which she co-authored with Jonathan Calvert, and how Qatar came to host the World Cup. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Well, America, for at least one fleeting moment, democracy is safe, or at least safer than it was before the midterm elections. And so maybe we all deserve a little break, a diversion. Now, I'm not a particularly knowledgeable fan of the beautiful game. The NBA is more my thing. But every four years, I get deep, into the World Cup, a global phenomenon that this year will be played out in the tiny Middle Eastern nation of Qatar. And in my city, New York, anticipation is running high.

Who are you rooting for? Ecuador, of course. We're the ones that play first. Yeah, I think it's in Senegal, yeah. Argentina, Brazil. Either Iran or England. Wales is the World Cup. USA, baby.

The best team went the World Cup. I like football because the energy. We was born on soccer. You need a piece of land, a ball, and that's it, a bunch of guys. That's all you need. I've been waiting my whole life for us to get there. It hasn't happened since 1958, so it's been 64 years. Even if I'm in school, I'm going to watch the game, so...

How are you going to do that? Nah, I got something on the app that I've got to watch the game on Laos. We actually have the big screen ready. I already bet for Senegal to reach at least a quarter of final. It's amazing. It's fabulous. I'm very proud. Big claps from New York, definitely. Iran.

Iran. Vámos, with all. Viva Senegal. The best team in Africa. Come on, Kerry. I'm all here. Go Wekador. If you can't, which means that yes, we can.

What a bet is Senegal going to win the World Cup? Yes. I'm positive. I dream last night. Some people say it's a beautiful game. Do you know why they say that? Because it is. Soccer fans from around the world interviewed in New York.

But for all the anticipation, this year's World Cup is taking place under an immense cloud of scandal. We've seen headlines about the death of migrant workers who built the facilities. Charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering have led to arrests and indictments around the world. Even SEP Blatter, the former president of FIFA and a very dicey figure in the drama, even he, said that Cutter hosting the World Cup was a mistake. That's a quote. The choice was bad, he said. No kidding.

Blatter is banned from the game after an ethics probe, though he continued. continues to deny any wrongdoing. Heidi Blake, who recently joined the New Yorker, is an investigative journalist who dug into what happened at FIFA, along with a colleague, Jonathan Calvert, when they were both reporting for a British newspaper. They ultimately collaborated on a book about how Cutter was awarded the World Cup, and it's called The Ugly Game. Here's Heidi Blake. I have to confess that I am not a football fan. I don't follow the sport. I couldn't explain in the offside rule to you if I tried, which is deeply embarrassing, but did mean that I came to this kind of as a bit of an innocent.

Let's start with this. Why is it important to any country to get the World Cup? What does it mean for a country? What sort of became clear to me as I went about the reporting was just how deeply enmeshed world football and global sports more broadly, but I think particularly football have become with geopolitics. it's hard to overstate how glitzy a prize it is for any individual bidding country to win the rights to host the World Cup.

The Emir of Qatar has led his country from a small pearling industry to one of the richest in the world, with oil and gas. It had been his idea to bid for the World Cup and they carried him aloft as they took to their cast. The Qatar World Cup is expected to be watched by 5 billion people. There's literally no other event which would attract the world's gaze to your country, to that extent, particularly for countries that are trying to position themselves in the world as major global players, you know, as kind of up-and-coming forces in the modern world, like Qatar.

This is a huge prize. Qatar wants to do what? What does it hope to achieve specifically to Qatar by having the World Cup? and they spent a hell of a lot of resources and effort to get it. I mean, they sure have $300 billion on infrastructure alone to pull this thing off. I mean, it's eye-watering. For Qatar, the bid to host the World Cup was part of the Omer's plan to diversify the Qatar economy and Qatar's position in the world for the future when their oil and gas reserves begin to dwindle.

This is a hugely key part of that plan. I'm talking with investigative journalist Heidi Blake. More in a moment. So let's go back to 2014. I think that's where we're positioning this. Can you recall what happened when you learned, and you were a journalist at the Sunday Times at the time, when you learned that a whistleblower from inside FIFA,

the most powerful international soccer organization, had come forward with evidence of corruption within FIFA as it pertained to the bidding for the 2020. World Cup. What was going on? Well, I worked for the Sunday Times Insight team, an investigations team embedded at the heart of the newspaper,

and the Insight team had a bit of a history of reporting on corruption within FIFA and in particular in the World Cup bidding process. My then colleague, Jonathan Calvert, in 2010, during, while the World Cup bid was going on, had learned

of allegations of corruption and had actually gone undercover and approached FIFA voters asking them, what would it take to win their support for the World Cup? So they put a price tag on it, a specific price tag? A specific price tag. It was very clear that, you know, the exact sums these people were looking for.

And, you know, we were then approached years later by this source who came forward from Inside World Football and said to us that they had obtained an enormous cash of documents. There were literally hundreds of millions of emails and bank transfer slips and chat logs and phone records. I mean, it was a kind of absolute treasure trove which showed in really eye-popping detail the way that Qatar had gone about paying bribes

on an industrial scale across the world football community to buy up support for the tournament. FIFA chief set bladder is in Zimbabwe and has promised to crack down on match fixing in football. During his two-day visit, he appeared to take a tough start against anyone found guilty of corruption. You kind of sequestered yourself, as I understand it, for about three months in a kind of bunker-style setting. Can you describe that and what it was like to work that concertedly and that secretively for three months?

I mean, it was really wild. The source was understandably very, very nervous about their safety and the ramifications for them of having blown the whistle on this kind of a scale. I mean, this was one of the very, very first huge data leaks, actually back in 24. and they were very concerned. So the terms on which they were prepared to allow us to look at the documents was that we had to relocate to this, you know, what we came to affectionately call the bunker, this kind of dingy office space in a remote outpost of the UK,

where we were not to be in regular contact with colleagues or friends or family. We were monitored by CCTV. Our keystrokes on our computers were monitored, all to make sure we didn't try to remove any of the document. we were viewing. And so it was kind of a bit of a pressure cooker environment being in there. And we had three months before the World Cup kicked off in Brazil. And so we knew that we wanted to drop the story ahead of the tournament because that was going to be when there was just maximum attention. The whole world would be watching FIFA at that point. You know, the clock was ticking

and we worked sort of crazy hours and just sort of made our eyeballs bleed reading these documents sort of three in the morning. I'm interested first in FIFA itself, which operates a billion-dollar nonprofit, how it went from being almost like a gentleman's club founded in 1904 with less than, I think, a dozen employees, to what you call a global powerhouse with billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of staff members. Just give us a brief history lesson on FIFA. Well, yeah, it's an extraordinary story, and it's really a quirk of Swiss association. law that allows FIFA, an organisation which commands revenues of billions of dollars each World Cup cycle in TV rights and sponsorship deals, to call itself a non-profit organisation. But yeah, FIFA really wasn't professionalised until the kind of 80s and 90s under Set Blatter's predecessor,

the former FIFA President Hal Havillange, who's begun to see the potential to exploit the rights for, you know, to show the World Cup on TV, sponsorship deals. But it was actually Blatter, who came in as Havillander's protégé in 1998 and really professionalised FIFA, really saw the opportunity to start selling those deals and took what was a fairly small entity to these global heights, where now FIFA executives are greeted around the world like heads of state. You know, set Blatter would travel the world and be welcomed by prime ministers and presidents, kings and queens, and I think that's because of the political significance that the rights to host the World Cup have come to accrue. So much of your book, The Ugly Game, focuses on

someone named Mohamed bin Hamam. Who is he? So Mohammed bin Hamam was until 2011, the most senior football official in Qatar. He was a member of FIFA's executive committee, which was the then 24-person committee who have the ability to select the next host of the World Cup. And the World Cup is really the jewel in the crown for FIFA. And so a place on that committee is the most coveted position in world football. 24 executive committee members are appointed by worldwide football confederations and associations, and they in turn elect a president. Collectively, they determine the movement of billions of dollars coming in from TV and sponsorship deals.

And the awarding of World Cups is determined. by that. Bin Hamam had ascended sort of through the ranks of Qatari society. He is a construction magnate in Qatar. He made his billions in the construction boom after Qatar's discovery of oil and natural gas. And he then, you know, he was just, he was a football fan and managed to get himself by hook or by crook onto the FIFA executive committee and then found himself in this extraordinary position of being tasked by the Emir of Qatar with bringing the rights to host the World Cup to Doha.

And bin Hamam was the first to say, this is impossible, this can never be achieved for all kinds of reasons. But he was a loyal patriot, and he set about trying to do it. What was the task in front of him? What were the obstacles for Qatar to get the World Cup as opposed to any other country? Well, Qatar is almost sort of uniquely, badly positioned to host the World Cup. That's kind of why the dam broke at that point on FIFA corruption, because people looked at this and thought, there is no logical explanation for that decision.

This process must have been corrupted. And that's because Qatar is a tiny country. The Qatari citizenry amount to about 300,000 people. Everybody else in Qatar is a migrant worker or a foreigner who's moved there and doesn't have citizenship. The total population is about 2.9 million at the moment. there are 1.5 million football fans who descend on a country hosting the World Cup. So if you imagine trying to cram another 1.5 million people into a country of 2.9 million,

I mean, it sort of just doesn't make sense. Qatar had no existing infrastructure in place for a tournament on this scale. The city in which the World Cup was scheduled to be hosted, Lusail, did not exist at the point at which Qatar was awarded the rights. They had to build a city north of Doha. they had to build seven air-conditioned stadiums in the desert. They've spent 300 billion... We need to dwell on that.

Seven air-conditioned stadiums. Yeah, in the desert. I mean, they had to move the tournament to winter because the temperatures in Qatar are, say, punishing in the summer when the tournament is normally played. But, yeah, the only way that this would work was to air-condition the stadiums

in the desert heat. So when they win, people have to say, there's no way that palms weren't greased on a global scale. That's right. There were just kind of countless reasons why this obviously was a terrible idea. And so at the point at which it was announced, I think that was when it was like a bridge too far.

So then what did the documents tell you whose palms were being greased on what scale, who was guilty of what? Well, what was interesting about the documents was that, you know, we knew that Mohammed bin Hamam was, the most senior figure in Qatari football, and he was widely believed to be the mastermind of the campaign to host the World Cup. But Qatar's official bid committee had always sought to distance themselves from him. And what we could see in the documents was that they had been using him as a kind of cutout.

So while they themselves ran a fairly straightforward bid that did tow the line of the FIFA rules, Mohammed bin Hamam was flying around the world, hosting football officials on junkets where he handed out, wads of cash and held private meetings with football officials where he would say to them, I'd like you to support the World Cup, and then would bung them a huge amount of cash. And what was extraordinary about this for us as journalists investigating this kind of thing is, you know, this kind of thing. People are normally careful enough not to leave a paper trail. But in this case, Mohammed bin Hamam had a very punctilious assistant who kept meticulous records.

And so every time Mohammed bin Hamam paid one of these bribes, Najib would email a copy of the bank transfer slip to the official concern saying, please find attached for your records. And, you know, and Mohammed bin Hamam, thanks you for your support for the Qatar 2020 World Cup. And so, I mean, I've never seen graft and corruption documented in this kind of detail ever before. So from a repartorial point of view, this giant cash of dispositive evidence not for one of trying, I'm sure, but fell into your laps and what it took most of all was the patients to sift through it. Yeah, that's right. I mean, it really was three months of sitting and trawling through the documents.

We used forensic search software, used this, you know, often used by law enforcement in cases like these, to kind of piece together the evidence. And we were triangulating documents like we had sort of internal messenger logs from the organizations we were looking at. So we could see members of staff kind of gossiping about things. We could see emails. We could see flight manifest. We could see accounts documents. We could see bank transfers. So we spent three months building an enormous timeline of all of the documents we could see.

We kind of mapped out a network of slush funds that bin Haman was using, including his daughter's bank account and within the accounts of the Asian Football Confederation that he controlled to root these payments to football officials. And just to find that kind of long. trail of documented bribes was one of the more thrilling moments for me as a journalist, because it's so rare to see bribery and corruption documented like that. I mean, it just doesn't happen. Unbelievable. You know, the first matches of the World Cup are about to begin in Qatar, very, very soon. How is it possible after what you uncovered? How is it possible that they held on to the

World Cup? Well, I mean, that is the $6.5 billion question, I think, those being the projected revenues for this World Cup. You know, it's extraordinary and it's very depressing, actually. You know, the way that FIFA responded when we published our evidence was to deny that there was any evidence. And actually, you know, at the time I remember being very shocked by the sort of cognitive dissonance of dealing with an organisation

where we had published all this evidence, and they were saying the evidence doesn't exist. there is no evidence. Now, I think, in 2022, we're a little more used to dealing with powerful organisations and individuals who just deny the truth and, you know, kind of muddy the waters in that way, but it was unusual. And even now, that 17 of the 22 FIFA Executive Committee members who were in place at the time Qatar was awarded the Cup have now been arrested or indicted or charged or accused of corruption and bribery. This is not just a journalistic inquiry, this is, you know, established fact.

What became of Muhammad bin Hamam? Well, that is a kind of extraordinary coda to this whole story. He did this for his country, and he's now being cast out of the Royal Circle. Katari royal family and Setbleta did a deal whereby it was agreed that he would go quietly, take the rap, and never appear again in relation to football or to the world.

Cup. And so he now lives in Doha, but he doesn't appear publicly. And meanwhile, you know, the Qatari Royals and the Supreme Committee who were organizing the World Cup are kind of reaping those rewards and having their huge victory lap. And bin Hamam has been totally cast aside. Now these matches are going to begin. Who cares? In other words, do the fans show any, disaffection, disappointment, skepticism, in the aftermath of your pieces and then the book? You know, I think that what people actually care about now is not so much the bribes and the corruption, but is the human cost of that corrupt decision, I know. And for me, this is an object lesson in why corruption matters, because it results in terrible decisions that have real impact.

on the lives of people. You know, it's not just about cash in brown envelopes. It's about migrant workers who've died building stadiums in the desert. And it's about LGBTQ fans who are going to go to the World Cup and feel unsafe because they've been told not to make public displays of affection because homosexuality is a crime in Qatar. It's a place where journalists have been detained for trying to report on the abuse of migrant workers and on World Cup corruption.

So fans are showing outrage at that. But nonetheless, the tournament is happening, and Qatar got its way. And it's a real shame that such a blatantly corrupted decision was not reversed. Heidi, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Heidi Blake is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and she wrote and published The Ugly Game, along with Jonathan Calvert. Now, a couple of things we need to note here, Fiva later denied that there was any sort of deal between and among bin Hamam, Sep Ladder, and Cutter's royal family.

And Qatar has denied that bin Hamam was tasked with promoting the nation's bid in an official or unofficial capacity. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabuele. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May.

And we had assistance from Harrison Keith Line, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment. and fund.