Decision to expand Qatar 2022 World Cup to 48 teams proves Fifa will do anything for more money
The slogan for the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar has long been, as we know, “Expect Amazing”, although a personal preference would be one built from an original concept from Jerome Valcke, the long-since discredited Fifa general secretary under the Sepp Blatter regime.
It was just an observation, from a man with security clearance at the biggest carve-up in football history, that he chose to share with Jack Warner in an email that the latter would later leak in 2011 after Mohammad bin Hammam’s aborted run at the Fifa presidency.
Perhaps, Valcke pondered, Bin Hammam “thought you can buy Fifa as they [Qatar] bought the World Cup”. Spikey, but hard to deny that it would be a buzz to see something along those lines adorning the desert stadiums and official merch. “Qatar 2022: we thought we’d buy the World Cup”.
Alas, the organisers have so far refused even to workshop it. Valcke denied that he was discussing any more than the vast amounts of money invested by Qatar in lobbying to win 2022 and not the industrial-scale corruption that has been widely alleged.
Of course, it would be interesting to get his thoughts on Qatar 2022 as we approach the ninth anniversary of that lamentable Zurich stitch-up, but like much of the dethroned Fifa corruptocracy, he has said very little in the aftermath. Banned for 10 years from any involvement in football, he has not even updated his LinkedIn.
As for Qatar 2022 itself, there is now stiff competition from Brexit as the premier primetime man-made cluster-catastrophe, but the project that started more than a decade ago is putting up a good fight.
The latest from the recent Fifa Congress is a resounding yes – yes, they will press ahead with plans for a 48-team World Cup in 2022 which would be too big even for Qatar’s infrastructure to accommodate. And we know how hard they like their construction operatives to work.
Just one problem being the issue of a co-host, with diplomatic relations between Qatar and the rest of the United Arab Emirates, as well as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, suspended over Qatar’s unfortunate relationship with certain Islamist extremist groups. But then, discouraging details such as a major diplomatic blockade in one of the world’s most politically sensitive regions are really nothing to Fifa when the prospect of a World Cup group game between Luxembourg and the Cape Verde Islands is at stake.
So it was with this can-do mood that Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, addressed the prospect of this World Cup expansion, little more than three years away from the final delivery of the worst idea his organisation has ever had.
“If it happens: fantastic. If it doesn’t happen: fantastic, also,” was his thoughtful summary. “Feasible”, was how he described the plan, and frankly given that Qatar 2022 once seriously claimed that it could install stadium air conditioning that would make a summer tournament possible in 50 degree Celsius temperatures, it would be fair to say that Fifa has a pretty low benchmark for 'feasible'.
In fact, as part of what was a fairly bold original legacy programme, Qatar once suggested that, post-World Cup, its stadiums could be dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere, although nine years on, details are sketchy in that regard.
The Al-Wakrah stadium is donating 20,000 seats to “football development projects overseas” and there are unspecified plans to recycle the Ras Abu Aboud stadium, which is to be built chiefly from shipping containers. Come to think of it, give Queen’s Park Rangers half a chance and one could imagine Tony Fernandes trying to get planning permission to throw a flat-pack Ras Abu Aboud up in a car park by Wormwood Scrubs.
But we digress. The enduring feature of the Qatar 2022 story is that just when you thought it could not get any worse, it somehow magically does, a kind of “Expect Appalling” approach to tournament management. Migrant workers denied basic human rights, dying in desert-heat working conditions, remains very much top of the league in that regard but Qatar 2022 has also managed to tick a few other boxes. It is a host nation with no history of democracy, a state where being gay is against the law and domestic violence is not a criminal offence. Compared to that, two years of domestic football being re-arranged to allow the game’s greatest showpiece to be crowbarred into the Christmas office party season seems relatively low-key.
It just gets worse, and as the tolerance for the corrupting of the process continues, it is possible to become indifferent to the liberties being taken. The expansion of the World Cup is no more than Infantino’s attempts to shore-up support among the 211 member nations who now have an equal say in his election. The political preservation of the current Fifa president is at the heart of this process, and nothing more than that – certainly not the quality of the tournament itself.
It is the same with the proposed expansion of the Club World Cup, a Fifa project that aims to earn the organisation more money which in turn can be dished out to members and will reflect well on Infantino in the eyes of his voters. The Fifa scandal that came to a head in 2015 did not so much teach Blatter’s successors that they could never go down that path again, more that if a tiny Gulf state with boiling summers and no football heritage can host the World Cup, then you can pretty much foist anything on the football public.
A World Cup at the wrong time, in the wrong place because of the wrong weather, now may well have the wrong number of teams, some of them playing in the wrong host country. There goes the “Expect Amazing” mantra, although Valcke had it right the first time. If you can afford to pay for it then you can pretty much do whatever you like.
Quiet man Gracia right for Watford
It has been a remarkable season for Javi Gracia, eighth in the Premier League and now in an FA Cup semi-final with Watford in this, his 10th senior job in management in 12 years. The manager at Watford is like any of his players, insomuch as if the Pozzos feel that he is under-performing then they simply replace the man in question. No hard feelings, it just happens to be the way they operate.
Unusually for such a pragmatic ownership, they had tended to pick individuals who, for all the club’s success in the Premier League, felt temperamentally incompatible with this system in the long-term, from Walter Mazzarri to Marco Silva and also going back to Quique Sanchez Flores. Gracia seems the ideal fit, although you do not hear him spoken about in terms of bigger jobs. Is this polite, low-key, unassuming coach simply ideal for Watford or could he go even higher up the hierarchy?
