By Alaa Abdel-Ghani
Qatar gets the World Cup. So does Russia. The first World Cup in the Middle East and the first in East Europe. This is what FIFA decided Thursday, the Russian bid being picked ahead of England, Spain-Portugal and Holland-Belgium to host the 2018 event. Qatar got the better of the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea to stage in 2022.
Not many people saw all this coming and we have not even started to find out the full reasons why. After being praised as the best technical bid to host World Cup 2018, England’s bid crashed out in the first round of voting after picking up two — yes, two — votes. How do you go from being favorites to first out?
As for Qatar, it was widely regarded as the shakiest and riskiest of all the bidding nations. Yet it was no-contest as it beat out the mighty US 14-8.
FIFA’s reputation as a shady organization, it is easy to look at Thursday’s winning bids and think that FIFA votes were bought and paid for by countries which have tremendous oil wealth. Remember that seven of the original 24 men who decide the destiny of these World Cups were recently implicated by the British media in vote-selling allegations. Two were indeed barred from voting but the remaining five went to the polls on Thursday. Of course, FIFA cannot depend on news reports charging its members with financial irregularities; it must conduct an internal investigation of its own. But you have to wonder why FIFA banned some on the strength of media stories and not others who faced similar allegations from the same news outlets.
On the same issue, you ask yourself what were the Sunday Times and the BBC’s Panorama program thinking when they made these allegations of kickbacks so close to the vote. True, media people wear a badge of honor and must report the news, good or bad, whenever and wherever it is. But just as surely, there was a danger of payback time, of FIFA not giving the nod to the country from which emanated news so damaging to the organization’s people.
Running two World Cups together was also clearly a mistake, as FIFA admitted.
It inevitably led to people with votes in 2018 doing deals with people involved in 2022.
So you could go for the sinister scenario (vote rigging appears the thing to do these days, and not just in sports) or something nobler like FIFA really wanting to help establish the sport in places like the Middle East and Eastern Europe, a move in line with recent World Cups (South Korea/Japan in 2002 and South Africa in 2010.) This could have been more about prepared countries against two unprepared countries that happened to come from regions FIFA was eager to embrace.
“We go to new lands,” FIFA President Sepp Blatter said. Indeed, it is unchartered territory. Qatar is the smallest nation to ever host a Word Cup, probably the hottest and the most barren entertainment-wise. Russia is virtual, so ill-prepared for a World Cup that its bid was based on computer graphics and blueprints to give FIFA executives some idea of what stadiums and transport infrastructure might look like by 2018.
Whatever problems these two hosts will have, and whatever you want to say about FIFA, the choices put an emphatic capstone on the legacy of Blatter who has taken the cup around the planet in an effort to broaden the game’s social and political legacy. Blatter delivered an African World Cup and now leaves with two more grand ventures that would have been inconceivable not just two years ago but two days ago.
While FIFA allowed us to see the voting process in its stages we do not know who voted for who. We do know Egypt gave the thumbs up to Qatar in the persona of Hany Abu Reida, our Egyptian who has a FIFA vote. From the time Qatar announced it was bidding, Egypt publicly stated it was behind it. As such, in our newspapers and TV we rejoiced when Qatar won. But along with the admiration was mixed a palpable sense of envy. When Egypt bid for the 2010 World Cup we were rewarded with a big fat zero. Qatar, on its first attempt, swept its more advanced opponents away. Qatar apparently knew what it was doing; Egypt had not a clue.
