June 2022 should have seen sofa-based sports fans getting worked up about a summer of World Cup football on TV. There is none – it all happens in mid-winter, in Qatar, a tiny sheikdom on the Arabian Gulf. A peninsula jutting out from the coast of Saudi Arabia, Qatar is about half the size of Munster.

Much in the news lately, Qatar has enormous reserves of natural gas and is increasing its exports of LNG, making up for the drop in European purchases from Russia.

The capital Doha, home to three-quarters of the 2.7m population, will become the focus of the world’s attention for a few hours on 18 December, the date for the 2022 final.

The tournament lasts for five weeks and the major European football leagues close shop in the middle of the season to accommodate the decision.

There will be no Premier League games in England from the second week in November through to 26 December.

World’s biggest sporting extravaganza

FIFA decided back in 2010 to award the world’s biggest sporting extravaganza to a country where summer temperatures reach 400C. Held every four years, the World Cup is always scheduled for June and July, in the European off-season and in a country with tolerable temperatures.

The initial intention was to stick with the normal timetable but objections from all sides, especially team doctors, yielded the first ever winter World Cup.

Qatar is not a country as the term is commonly employed but more like a family business, as are the other Gulf sheikdoms including Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia itself. The business is oil and gas.

Qatar is ruled by the Al-Thani family who, like their counterparts elsewhere in the Gulf, control the oil wealth and parcel out all political offices.

Decision by FIFA

FIFA’s decision to allocate the 2022 World Cup finals to Qatar was not the first time the honour was bestowed on an autocracy. The 2018 renewal was awarded to Vladimir Putin’s Russia in 2010 and played four years after the first invasion of Ukraine – the Crimea annexation and the separatist wars in the Donbas region occurred in 2014.

Numerous FIFA officials have been indicted, embarrassingly in the US quicker than in Europe, for bribery and corruption around the awarding of World Cup finals to Russia and Qatar.

Some have been banned from the game and some have done time as guests of Uncle Sam.

A statement from the office of the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William Sweeney, summarised the position: “The profiteering and bribery in international soccer have been deep-seated and commonly known practices for decades.

Over a period of many years, the defendants and their co-conspirators corrupted the governance and business of international soccer with bribes and kickbacks and engaged in criminal fraudulent schemes that caused significant harm to the sport of soccer.

Their schemes included the use of shell companies, sham consulting contracts and other concealment methods to disguise the bribes and kickback payments and make them appear legitimate.”

One banned FIFA executive committee member was alleged to have sold his vote for $5m, others for just $1m.

As regular visitors will know, the most popular game in the Gulf states is cricket, not soccer

Qatar won the right to host the 2022 tournament over the US by a vote of 14-8.

The decision was extraordinary for many reasons aside from the impossibility of playing in summer, including the availability of dozens of fine stadiums in the US.

Qatar is spending 10bn on eight new stadiums, eight brand new Bertiebowls, and all will be white elephants inside a month.

As regular visitors will know, the most popular game in the Gulf states is cricket, not soccer. The population of Qatar with Qatari nationality is just 300,000 and they like soccer, but 80% of the population hails from cricket-mad south Asia, the expatriate workers who have been building the stadiums and a further 10bn worth of supporting infrastructure.

The champion soccer club, Al Sadd, rarely draws crowds of more than a few thousand. The chair is called Al-Thani, unsurprisingly.

Waste of resources

It is an extraordinary waste of scarce resources to build these stadiums for a few once-off matches, secure in the knowledge that they will never see a large crowd again.

The Qatari government has the money to waste, and sports washing of the national reputation has become popular with several of the world’s less savoury governments.

The winter Olympics of 2014, held in Sochi, Russia, cost $50bn of which about half was absorbed in corrupt payments to Putin regime cronies.

It is irresponsible of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to award these events, with or without bribery, knowing the likelihood of waste.

There are empty stadiums in both Brazil and South Africa, countries less able to afford waste than Qatar, as permanent burdens from hosting World Cup finals.