2022 World CupThe Qatar organizers of the 2022 Soccer World Cup are tied to terrorist groups
Qatar bribed FIFA officials so they would vote to award it the 2022 Soccer World Cup. In addition to the likely corruption investigation, FIFA is also grappling with the question of the temperature in Qatar in the summer. Several state football associations, and many medical specialists, said that the summer heat in Qatar is such that it would be dangerous for players to play for ninety minutes, and risky for spectators to sit in the stands during games. Now news has emerged that leading figures inthe Qatar World Cup committee are supporters of terrorism, contributing millions of dollars to al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
Three years ago, when FIFA announced that the tiny desert sheikdom of Qatar, a place with no soccer history – and, observers note, with no soccer present or future — would host 2022 soccer World Cup, one thing was clear to students of FIFA – and, for that matter, for students of Qatar: The ruling family of oil-rich had bribed enough FIFA officers to secure their vote.
This is what we wrote in February 2011:
FIFA, the world’s soccer governing body, has awarded tiny Qatar — a country of 1.7 million people — the coveted prize of hosting the World Cup games in 2022.
There are few who doubt that Qatar managed this feat by bribing enough members of the readily “bribabale” FIFA board. Every couple of years, a few members of the board, typically from African states, are brought up on charges of taking bribes to vote this way or that, and are replaced by new members who do not wait too long to receive their own bribes.
This reminds us of a story told by Larry Scott, now the commissioner of the Pacific-10 collegiate conference, but twenty years ago a top tennis official.
At the first Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournament in Qatar in the early 1990s, the country’s head of state, known as the emir, met with the ATP’s president, Mark Miles, for a formal exchange of gifts.
The emir handed Miles a solid gold watch worth tens of thousands of dollars. Miles turned to Larry Scott, his right-hand man, to reciprocate. Scott sheepishly handed over a white T-shirt with an ATP logo.
“Let me put it this way — it didn’t surprise me when they won the FIFA World Cup bid,” Scott said of Qatar (Ben Frankel, “Reflections on a tumultuous week in Egypt,” HSNW, 4 February 2011).
What we wrote three years ago was a guess – since it was about FIFA and bribes, it was an educated guess – but now the Telegraph has come out with the facts about Qatar’s bribery campaign of FIFA officials (see Jim White, “Qatar World Cup 2022 investigation: Surprised that Jack Warner appears to have been paid $1.2m? Not a chance,” Telegraph, 17 March 2014; and Ben Rumsby, “Fifa must investigate Qatar payments to Jack Warner, insists former chief of failed England 2018 World Cup bid,” Telegraph, 18 March 2014)
