JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) — With the 1984 Olympics a spectacular success, Time magazine waxed poetic. The U.S., it wrote, had turned its back on a past of “gas shortages, hostage crises, presidential scandals and a lost war” in order to embrace a future “full of endless possibility.”
A generation on, with those Games indeed accepted as an early sign of the Cold War’s aftermath, and with rulers and rebels sparring across a smoldering Middle East, a question arises: How will history recall Soccer’s World Cup 2022, which was assigned to a corner of the Middle East several weeks before the region caught fire?
Spectator-sports mega-events involve a lot more than athletics. The 1984 Olympics were capitalism’s victory, the 1952 Olympics highlighted brave Finland’s recovery from Stalin’s invasion the previous decade, and the ‘60 and ’64 games celebrated postwar Italy’s and Japan’s pacification and prosperity, images that Russia and Brazil now hope to foster when they host two World Cups and one Olympiad.
Fahaid Al-Shammri (right) of Qatar's Al-Gharafa fights for the ball with Khosro Heidari of Iran's Sepahan during an April 20 AFC Champions League match in Doha, Qatar.
And then there were the games that served reaction, from the Berlin Olympics in ’36 through the Soviet Olympiad of ’80 to the Argentine junta’s World Cup in ’78. Now, as revolutions and civil wars shake the Arab world, the selection of Qatar as host of World Cup 2022 might again leave soccer and its ruling body, FIFA, on the wrong side of history.
Qatar’s bid was controversial from the outset.
Though the Cup was previously hosted by relatively small countries like Switzerland and Sweden, none was a city-state half the size of New Jersey with a population the size of Milwaukee’s.
Moreover, those smaller countries hosted the World Cup decades before satellite TV turned it into the world’s most widely viewed event, and a light year before sponsorships and rights sales turned it into the corporate binge that generated for FIFA some $3.65 billion in revenue at last year’s South Africa tournament alone.
Protesters are killed in separate rallies as the president's political opponents agree to take part in a transitional government.
Yes, Qatar is rich. With the world’s largest per-capita mineral deposits, the oil sheikhdom has the $75 billion with which it promises to deliver the elaborate public-works projects this World Cup will involve, including a revamped airport, a deep-sea port, highways, hotels and ultramodern stadiums.
And, yes, it can even afford its plan to hang above the stadiums artificial clouds that will temper the 100°F (38°C) heat in which Qatar boils daily between June and September. (And those figures are averages — highs can reach 122°F, or 50°C.)
In fact, Qatar’s resources are so deep that some suspect it actually bought rather than won the right to host the ’22 Cup.
To be a truly Arab World Cup, 2022’s matches must also be played in Tunisia, where this wave of upheaval began, and in Egypt, the heart of the Arab world.
While there is no evidence of outright bribery, a Wall Street Journal report indicated that competing bidders Australia, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. were much better prepared for the task economically and logistically; that Qatar made questionable investments in “soccer academies” in voting executives’ home countries; and that it deployed a publicity budget far higher than those of its rivals, including, for instance, aggregate payments of $3 million to French-Algerian soccer celebrity Zinedine Zidane for endorsing the Qatari bid.See report on speculation surrounding the FIFA host-country decisions at WSJ.com.
All these alone made the ’22 Cup an oddity at best, a scandal at worst. A World Cup held in a sparsely settled desert patch adorned by a recently sprung forest of skyscrapers concealing a minuscule population — where foreigners outnumber natives — made many expect an event as authentic as the gondolas that decorate a local shopping center’s fake Venetian canals.
Such was the criticism during the brief weeks when Qatar’s improbable victory had already been announced and the Middle East had yet to quake.
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