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Nov 21

3:20PM EST

AssociatedSepp Blatter reveals Qatar as the 2022 hostnation.

Inside Doha: Give Qatar a chance to shinePosted by Phil Ball

GettyImagesThe Doha Port Stadium as presented as part of Qatar's successful bid.

DOHA, Qatar -- It's kind of difficult to write about Qatar 2022 at the moment because whatever you say,you'll annoy somebody. The issues are so wide-ranging that if you focus only on the football, you'll beaccused of political naivety. If you focus only on the workers' conditions and the alleged corruption ofFIFA officials, you'll get the bird from those who want a full analysis of the summer-winter debate.

Nevertheless, I'll have a go, given that I just got back from four days in the capital, Doha -- revisiting thecountry where I lived in 2009 -- as one of a handful of journalists invited on an all-expenses paid trip tosee the inner workings.

It's significant that the current witch hunt of the Qatar '22 project and everything that it involves hascome from several Western journalists who have never set foot in the country. It's not a necessaryqualification for comment, but it helps. The investigative team that exposed the systematic abuse ofworkers' rights deserves praise, but it's the subsequent fevered reaction from other less objectivekeyboards that has turned the issue so sour, obscuring the potential advantages and positives that thisevent might spawn -- still a substantial eight years in the distance.

The feeling now in Doha, that you're at the centre of things, isquite extraordinary. The city hasn't changed much since 2009.Apart from the amazing West Bay complex, which was stillunder construction when I left, it all looks pretty familiar.The traffic is still a disaster -- a product of the previouslyorganic urban planning, which the coming World Cup is aboutto change forever. The Metro, for which the ground has beendug, is scheduled to open around 2019 and will change thetraffic snare overnight. The cooled shopping malls still smell

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of soap and fresh coriander, if you can get that. They're the life of Doha, an urban concept, built on a tinydesert peninsula that only a few fishermen and pearl divers could previously be bothered to inhabit --and we're talking about the 1940s.

It was only in the next decade that something resembling civic communities began to emerge. Touristshave never come here for the landscape, however, and when they come for the World Cup, they'reunlikely to be gawping at the country's small flat patch of desert either. (There are a few dunes, butthey're not great.) They're going to be looking at the country's whiz-bang urban aesthetic, because it isamazing.

I was in Doha for the Aspire4Sport Conference, now on its fourth edition since the date of the successfulbid (Dec. 2, 2010). All the great and good were here, and Qatar's almost limitless budget means it caninvite anybody it wants, for the simple "domino" function of attracting the media to an event where theycan see the likes of Shaquille O'Neal, Alonzo Mourning, Dennis Rodman and Alan Shearer in the fleshbut also listen to some serious stadium-based architectural discourse at the conference proper, wherejust about all the main companies were present, in a corporate frenzy of talks, bids and networking.

This week, Sunday in fact, I was ushered into what looked like a stainless-steel portakabin, isolated overon the far side of the astonishing Aspire sports complex. Once inside, I was shown into the room wherethe FIFA inspectors gathered to see the digital pitch of the 2022 bid package. Qatar was the last of thecandidates that they visited, which may or not be significant. The room seemed overly dark and almostbleak, with a set of black soft armchairs arranged in serried rows. I sat right at the front, and the showbegan.

I was suddenly surrounded on three sides by the slickest, smoothest presentation I have ever seen.German-made, it was simply impeccable in every aspect -- length, special effects, information, clarity,volume and political correctness. When it was turned off, I was overwhelmed by its brilliance. O'Neal,Lennox Lewis and Shearer all said the same the next day, and its effectiveness (apparently the inspectorsasked to see it again, in a sort of childlike trance) probably won the bid there and then, not just for itstechnical brilliance but because you emerge from the room convinced that if the Qataris can pull off whatthey claim they can pull off, then the cynics might eventually be put to rest.

Why bribe the officials if you know your sales pitch is the best? It makes no sense. The Harvard-educated Qataris at the head of this bid are many things, but they are not stupid.

What you see is a bid that is not just the preparation of a sporting event, but the remodelling of an entirecountry, a small one maybe (11,000 square kilometers, about the size of Connecticut) but one that couldcertainly do with a face-lift.

Its desert is not particularly attractive, and there's no sense of Arabian nights stuff here. What you get isa certain urban aesthetic, built up recently from a country that really began to develop any meaningfulcivic structures only after the discovery of oil in 1940. As a British protectorate until 1971, things stillwent pretty slowly, but in the past 15 years, the place has begun to assert itself as a global player, largelybecause of its natural gas reserves.

Some people seem to find this problematic -- a country-bumpkin state with a medieval absolutistmonarchy system, putting on a World Cup? What's going on?

Well, Qatar hosted the Asian Games (very smoothly) in 2006, but that's not really the main point. Whydid it win the 2022 bid? Because FIFA thought it would be a good idea to shift the World Cup from itslargely Western-centric context? Probably not. The reason was simple and seems to have been missed bya whole swathe of steaming Western keyboards. Once you see the video sales-pitch, you realise that thiswill be the most outsourced event in human history.

The Qataris have neither the expertise nor the local manpower (only 250,000 of them, and few need toactually work) to carry out a project of this dizzying reach, and so the entire $140 billion fest will bedistributed among a wide-ranging set of suppliers, architects, engineers, builders, transport companies(bus, boat, rail and air), advertisers -- you name it, they'll need it. Once you take this on board, the ideathat backhanders secured this World Cup appears even more absurd.

Geopolitical influence has determined the destinies of the next three World Cups, and that's about it.Brazil's growing GDP helped its bid, and a certain footballing tradition (ahem), but the country's wealthdistribution remains appalling and its school marks for the various ethical issues for which the Qatarishave been rumbled are equally poor, but just on a greater scale. Because we know about thefavelas, weaccept them as part of Brazilian culture. Anything pertaining to Islamic culture, on the other hand, seemsto be a problem for the anti-Qatar brigade. Russia too is hardly a paragon of political and moral virtue.But it does have lots of natural gas.

World Cups didn't used to be the victims of such intense political and moral scrutiny, but times havechanged. Football is a massive corporate business, and as such, it looks to where the money is. It's notentirely wise, of course, and you could argue that it is absurd to award two rich countries (Qatar andRussia) a tournament that will make them even richer. Why not wait until nearer the time and give theWorld Cup to a poor country that needs the infrastructure that the investors would provide in return forthe publicity and long-term benefits that they might accrue from helping a poor nation to get off itsknees? There's an idea for 2026, but it will take more than the occasional article to make it happen.Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to get off Qatar's back and try to consider the interesting things thatmight come from this venture.

I talked about all this and more with Roberto Olabe, ex-goalkeeper and director of football for RealSociedad, now working at Aspire with the Qatari football academy. The idea is to get a decent local croptogether for 2022, or even 2018. Olabe oversees the coaching and education of the academy kids alongwith Mikel Antia (also ex-Real Sociedad) and works from an office five yards away from Raul's.

The great man is actually there, door ajar, as I sit opposite Olabe in a plush armchair. He knows me fromSan Sebastian, Spain (where I live), but I tell him that I worked on an educational project in Doha in2009 and that the main problem was that the boys in the state schools (the sexes are segregated) saw noreason to study or work, because the emir's law of providing every family with a decent stipend,regardless of qualifications and achievements, made for a passive nation.

Was it the same problem for the footballers, all of them Qataris? Olabe nods.

OtherPhil meets Alan Shearer in Doha.

"There's not much hunger here. That's what usually makes greatfootballers," he said. "Not many internationals in any country have comefrom comfortable backgrounds. But we're working on it. There are otherways to motivate, and we have these kids here morning, evening andnight."

The full-time academy boys are in the 12-18 age range, but Olabe admitsthat they've scouted kids as young as 6.

"Even at that age, if a kid's exceptional, it shows," he said. "We don'tdiscount anyone."

Of course, money means they can afford to send the best two from eachyear group to Spain on training camps, with the possibility of playingcompetitively in Spain's youth leagues. Valencia and Villarreal are twoprominent hosts, and the list is growing.

Also, several top clubs (Bayern, PSG, Schalke) send squads to Doha for training periods due to theamazing facilities and mild-weather window from October to March, and their youth teams also come todo sparring with the academy kids. I ask if there are any real gems in the treasure chest.

"There's one in the under-16s [declining my request for the player's name], but there are enough tosustain the project -- enough to make me feel we're not wasting our time," Olabe said.

I ask if he feels any pressure and if targets have been set. He has managed to survive two years therealready.

"Of course there's pressure," he said. "But targets? Well -– I suppose there are some, but they haven'ttold me any. Win the World Cup in Russia?" He grins rather alarmingly.

Qatar know they won't win the World Cup, but the scale of this operation suggests that they'll need toavoid losing face, a big thing in the Arab world. In a sense, they're already seeing to this, making 2022into a "conceptual" event if nothing else, and it can serve as a prototype for various legacies.

Indeed, "legacy" is one of the buzzwords of the Aspire4Sport Conference. The conference is a fest ofsnazzy suits, big-name marquee media slots and the world's top stadia architects and engineers. Some ofthem have already secured their contracts and seemed relaxed on stage, in a slightly condescending sortof way, while others were doing the hard-sell. The latter was slightly undignified, but that's the way theworld goes round. The aforementioned stars talked affably about what it was like to play in grand arenasand were whisked back to their hotel by fleets of limos.

Some of the architectural discourse was interesting, and some of it was cheesy and corporate, as if thewhole shebang was going to take place without a single hitch, conforming to their beautifully chosenphrases. There were some classics, among them the description of the Al-Wakrah prototype stadium: "a

carbon-neutral footprint in the sands of time."

The company behind this model scheme, the eponymous Zaha Hadid, a celebrated Anglo-Iraqi femalearchitect, was particularly smooth, floating phrases such as "vernacular architecture" (Al-Wakrah'sshape is based on the Arab dhow), "community hub" and the slick description of the air-cooled"precincts" that were to be built around the stadia as "an overflow from the public realm into thecommercial realm." Right on! We'll leave the jokes about it looking like female genitalia to otherjournalists, who couldn't be bothered to do their research properly (not even realising Hadid is awoman).

It's too easy to be cynical (and that's without seeing some of the worst affected areas in the country). TheAl-Wakrah project, which basically involves converting a fishing village south of Doha into the firsttemplate stadium community (it should be completed by 2017), contains all the components to makethis a rather different experience, so that the "spectator realm" can be enjoyed "comfortably,economically and sustainably." I'll go for that.

The 40,000-capacity stadium will be reduced to 20,000 post-event by disassembling the upper tier andsending it off to some developing nation -- the international legacy. Meanwhile, the Al-Wakrah club andtransformed community get a rather nice stadium to use, the local legacy.

It's all pretty neat, and one can only hope that Qatar can really make local use of these facilities andperhaps allow a wider range of its expatriate work force to avail this stuff. They are building nine newstadia and remodelling three. The metro system will connect them all, meaning the first "compact"World Cup.

OtherAl Arabi versus Al Rayyan was not taken in by many locals.

In Brazil, if you want to travel from south to north for a game, it's going to require an eight-hour flight,with all the accompanying expense and hassle involved. In 2022, you can get to see two live games on asingle day, at a solar-powered 26 degrees Celsius. Sounds good to me.

Workers' rights? The Guardian investigative team did get that one right, for which it deserves variousmedals. At the news conferences I attended, especially the one following the Amnesty report that came

out Sunday, the Qatari front men took it on the chin.

"We are a young nation. We're learning too." There were no lame excuses proffered. They said theywould put it right. The new workers' charter, rather hastily assembled, is a step in that direction, but thesystematic abuse of workers' rights has not been an active Qatari policy. They've just looked the otherway, which is just as bad, but they have the power and money to fix it almost overnight. There is nocongress, no bureaucracy. At the swish of the emir's gold pen, new laws come into effect.

They were there anyway, but the foreign middle men just ignored them, largely because they were ableto. The Qataris are not malicious people, but the civic maturity of the nation is at best adolescent. Onething is a new futuristic concept, another is to see through the entire process ethically. It's not as easy asit looks, and Qatar is hardly the only country with these problems. It's just more under the spotlight.

The World Cup will be played there, and probably in the summer. The cooling system, already in place atAl-Sadd's stadium, will work. Alcohol? You can drink in many of the hotels, and a prominent Americanbeer is one of the main sponsors. But why should 2022 be considered a venue for a Western drinking-fest? The first World Cup in a Muslim country invites consideration about other people's values, whetherwe like them or not. Hospitality is the greatest virtue of the Muslim world, but the host-guestrelationship needs to be 50-50 -- a fact recognised by the Qataris, as opposed to many of their critics.Why worry about the availability of alcohol? A month on water and fruit juice might even improve somefolks' health.

It's an ambitious project, and it deserves to be given a chance. If it succeeds, the template might justmake a contribution to the future. If it fails, then like Shelley's Ozymandias, the "colossal wreck" will beeroded down the centuries by the desert sands as a tribute to human folly. The anti-Qatar brigade wouldlike nothing less. I say give them a chance. The only way is up from here.