Four years to go: #Qatar on course for its improbable World Cup | Football | The Guardian

Four years to go: Qatar on course for its improbable World Cup | Football | The Guardian:

It began almost a decade ago as the most unfeasible bid ever to host a World Cup: an outlandish proposal for “air-cooled” stadiums in the desert summer heat of a tiny, obscure-seeming Arab emirate with one city, Doha, populated by just 300,000 citizens. Qatar is though, the richest per capita state on earth, and on that cold Zurich night in December 2010 its bid succeeded in garnering a majority of Fifa executive committee votes, and claimed the right to host the 2022 World Cup.

Since then Qatar’s planned hosting of the tournament – its ubiquitous slogan in Doha is “Deliver Amazing” with its stated mission to unify people in the Middle East and project a positive Arab experience – has survived a hurricane of challenges. There have been waves of corruption allegations, which the secretary general of the “supreme committee” organising the World Cup, Hassan al-Thawadi, repeatedly denied, denounced and angrily dismissed as anti-Arab prejudice.

Intensive Fifa inquiries into the vote did not find Qatar’s bid more irregular than Australia’s – or England’s for 2018 and the FBI’s criminal investigation into American Fifa football barons has produced nothing solid against Qatar. There has been international condemnation of Qatar’s regime for migrant workers, now part of a reform process the government is conducting in partnership with the International Labour Organisation. In June last year, political hostilities erupted in the immediate region and Qatar remains subject to an actual blockade led by its much bigger, looming neighbour, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.