The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup

by Heidi Blake

  It was owned by one Ghanim bin Saad al-Saad, who was also the managing director of Qatari Diar, the Emir’s global property investment firm, and a director of the country’s sovereign wealth fund. There were only a handful of men in Qatar who were closer to the Emir than Saad al-Saad. His company made sure Grondona’s Argentine federation was well paid for sending its team to Doha and also made a $10 million investment in a fund called Global Eleven which had a contract to organise and promote the exhibition matches played by Teixeira’s Brazilian team.

  The match itself was a cagey affair between two teams of expensive superstars who were reluctant to overcommit themselves in case they angered their clubs by picking up an injury in a meaningless mid-season friendly. It was settled by a single goal from the world’s best player, Lionel Messi, who dribbled diagonally through the heart of the Brazilian defence before using his incredible balance to cut the ball back across the outstretched goalkeeper, and into the opposite corner of the net. The full capacity crowd of 40,000 cheered and revelled in the celebratory atmosphere.

  The vibrant event was a refreshing break from the hard work on the campaign trail and it encapsulated all Bin Hammam’s hopes for the future of football in Qatar. But just as he allowed himself to relax and enjoy himself, he was winded by yet another body blow.

  FIFA released its evaluation report assessing the suitability of all nine bidders to stage a World Cup on 17 November, the day of the big match, and Qatar was singled out as the country with the highest risk of operational failure. The report by FIFA’s team of technical assessors made Bin Hammam wince. It was a complete demolition of his country’s plans.

  The technical delegation had been led by Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the former head of the Chilean football association, and Doha was the last stop on their round-the-world tour two months earlier. The visit had been a disaster. The team had tried to arrange the trip for August, but the Qatar bid had stood in their way, telling them this was not possible because of Ramadan. The month-long Islamic fasting period had not prevented Bin Hammam carrying on with business in Doha – the secret summit which led to the gas deal with Thailand had taken place that August and it would certainly not have been wise to have FIFA’s inspectors in town at the same time. Mayne-Nicholls was suspicious that the Qataris were using Ramadan as a cover because they did not want his team to experience the extreme heat at the height of the summer, and the distrust coloured his view of their bid from the outset.

  When he arrived in September, however, FIFA’s top inspector could not deny that he found his hosts very hospitable and charming. The rotund figure of Ali Al-Thawadi had been designated to shadow Mayne-Nicholls on the three-day tour of Doha, and the two men got on well in the back of their chauffeured car as they drove between the key sites where the proposed tournament would be held. Mayne-Nicholls joked that his guide had eaten all the puddings for his younger brother, the bid’s slender chief executive Hassan, and Ali giggled obligingly.

  The team were taken to see the American University, the Islamic Museum, the Aspire sports academy and the Qatar Foundation, and were given a boat trip around the bay. The Qataris were doing their best with what few cultural attractions they had, but Mayne-Nicholls took note that there was not much to do or see in Doha. He also observed that a Qatar World Cup would be crammed into the most geographically compact area since the tournament was held in Uruguay, 80 years before.

  More than anything else, FIFA’s top technical inspector was deeply concerned about the climate. When he was being driven to a football match during the trip, the Chilean decided to break free of his handlers and walk to the game as a fan might do. Even in mid-September the street thermometer signs were reading 38 or 39°C and the sun was beating down. Mayne-Nicholls was a fit man who still played football at the age of 49, but he was sweating profusely by the time he reached the stadium. He was convinced the heat was unsuitable for such a major football tournament and remained sceptical about the bid’s bold claims for futuristic air-cooling technology which could supposedly refrigerate a whole football ground using only the power of the sun. The inspectors were shown a solar-cooled five-a-side pitch, but this was a fraction of the size of a stadium.

  On the final night of the visit, the inspection team was escorted to an old colonial building where they were greeted by the Emir, his elegant wife Sheikha Mozah and their two sons. The inspection team were on their best behaviour – it was an honour to be invited to a family dinner with the royals of the world’s richest country. A long table was set with a sumptuous array of dishes and glasses of chilled water, and the guests were invited to help themselves. The Emir was a gregarious host who could barely contain his enthusiasm as he rhapsodised about his love of football. Mayne-Nicholls was taken by his obvious passion for the game: Qatar’s ruler and his sons talked about nothing else for the whole dinner, while Sheikha Mozah listened patiently. There had been an awkward moment when Sheikh Hamad regaled the men from FIFA with a story about how his wife’s repeated interruptions during a World Cup qualifier had meant he missed the deciding goal against Qatar. He turned laughingly to Sheikha Mozah.

  ‘Do you remember, dear?’ There was a silence as his wife’s countenance froze.

  ‘I do not remember that,’ she said icily.

  ‘You do!’ he insisted. ‘You remember, you kept interrupting me!’ She recovered her poise with a tight smile. ‘It must have been your other wife,’ she said. The Emir grinned sheepishly.

  ‘Oh, you’re right, it was!’ and the conversation moved on.

  Eventually the Chilean plucked up the courage to ask why the

  Emir was so determined to bring the World Cup to Qatar, despite all the obvious logistical problems. The answer was simple: ‘I want the tournament to be here in my home,’ he was told. Mayne-Nicholls nervously ventured that it might be prudent to pursue a more realistic ambition: perhaps Qatar could hold a smaller club tournament instead. ‘No! I want the big cake,’ Sheikh Hamad had boomed.

  Mayne-Nicholls might have liked his Qatari hosts, but that wasn’t sufficient to alter his view. His detailed evaluation, published a few hours before the game between Brazil and Argentina, was damning of the Emir’s ambitions and offered few crumbs of comfort for the Qatar 2022 bid team. The bid’s plans were deemed to represent a ‘high’ operational risk, mainly because the country was too small, the infrastructure would have to be built from scratch and the climate was too forbidding. ‘The fact that ten out of the twelve stadiums are located within a 25–30 kilometre radius could represent an operational and logistical challenge,’ Mayne-Nicholls wrote. ‘Any delay in the completion of the transport projects could impact FIFA’s tournament operations. Moreover, it appears to be difficult to test a transport concept prior to the event under conditions comparable to the World Cup.’

  Most damningly of all, Mayne-Nicholls added: ‘The fact that the competition is planned in June-July, the two hottest months of the year in this region, has to be considered as a potential health risk for players, officials, the FIFA family and spectators, and requires precautions to be taken.’ Of the other bids, England had been Mayne-Nicholls’ number one choice to hold the World Cup and it was given a ‘low-risk’ rating. Russia came out second worst overall, receiving criticism for its shoddy airports and poor transport system which was inadequate for a tournament spread across such a large country. Qatar, though, was the only country FIFA’s inspectors had deemed a high risk. They had come out the worst by far of the nine bidders.

  The Qatar team was crestfallen. They had done everything they could to make the world ‘Expect Amazing’, in the words of their enthusiastically ungrammatical bid slogan, but they had clearly not convinced the inspectors. Bin Hammam tried to bolster their confidence with a public statement expressing his faith in the bid’s revolutionary cooling technology. ‘The temperature inside the stadiums in July and August will be 25–26 degrees which is actually a perfect climate to play football,’ he said. ‘In some other countries people complain about
the cold. In South Africa we had one of the best World Cups but the temperature was zero, which was not ideal.’

  Just as Bin Hammam thought things couldn’t get any worse, another bomb dropped on Qatar’s bid. The ink had barely dried on FIFA’s devastating technical report before a second awkward document was commissioned. This one would remain a closely guarded secret for the eyes of the executive committee only.

  Jérôme Valcke had decided to order an assessment of the risks posed by a terror attack in each of the bidding countries. He had asked André Pruis, the deputy commissioner of the Johannesburg police force, who had worked with Eaton on security during the South Africa World Cup, to produce the risk assessment. The brief was for Pruis to ‘work alone and discreetly’ to ‘urgently review and report on each bidding nation . . . in terms of their structural vulnerabilities to co-ordinated or simultaneous multi-site terrorist attacks’. FIFA memos said the work was necessary because of the ‘extremely high global profile of a FIFA World Cup and the potential gravity to the attending public, players, officials and FIFA generally from terrorist attacks during this competition’. Pruis accepted the job despite his reservations about the tight deadline he had been given for such an important piece of work.

  His finished report was based on the mass of information which had been downloaded onto a secure ‘extranet’, detailing all the bidding countries’ plans and proposals. The results threatened to be catastrophic for Qatar. Pruis singled out the Gulf state as the only country where there was a ‘high risk’ of a ‘major incident’ shutting the tournament down. He identified the main danger as Qatar’s close ‘proximity to countries with an . . . Al Qaida presence’ alongside its plans to cram millions of fans and players into a small area mainly based around Doha. Transport-wise, he was concerned about the planned high-speed rail link connecting Qatar to other countries in the Middle East and any threat at Doha’s new international airport, because it served as the only major international gateway to Qatar.

  The risk assessment was particularly wounding because it decimated one of the bid’s chief selling points: the concept of a compact tournament with stadiums, players and fans all close together. This would cause chaos and overcrowding in the event of a major incident, Pruis warned. He wrote: ‘The fact that ten of the 12 stadia are located in a 25–30 km radius will not only create an overlapping of certain security zones but will also cause major crowd management and traffic problems before and after matches. Any incident in a security zone around a stadium may immediately create a spillover to one or more of the other stadia. Such a situation may create immense security challenges if . . . matches are played in close proximity to one another. The fact that the majority of rooms for accommodation will be concentrated in properties not far from each other will cause an over concentration of fans in shopping malls, restaurants and local markets or souks. Such a situation will have a negative impact on the utilisation of a sector security system since even the deployment of CCTV – and other technological systems – may be hampered by an overloading of visuals and data.’

  There were too many opportunities for terrorists to paralyse the tournament, he argued. ‘The proposal for a single competition-related event venue, the Doha Convention Centre, also does not make sense from a security perspective. A single incident can neutralise all event operations as well as event-related services. The proposed Team Base Camp Village approach poses a threat to teams since teams will be accommodated in two villages each containing 16 clusters of luxury housing – up to 16 teams could live and train in each village. Although strict access control may be implemented the possibility of stand-off attacks should be kept in mind. Although the high speed rail network which will connect Qatar to various countries in the Middle East before 2020 will provide excellent opportunities for fans in the region to attend the event, it will also create an opportunity for terrorist movements in the area. The fact that the new Doha International Airport will serve as the main gateway to Qatar during the FIFA World Cup may create not only logistical but also security challenges during the event. Any major incident – aircraft crash or terrorist attack – may lead to the closing of the airport with severe consequences for the event.’

  The security expert concluded: ‘In view of the risks related to the proposed centralised approach Qatar is allocated a risk rating of high. I am of the view that it would be very difficult to deal with a major incident in such an environment without having to cancel the event.’ Qatar stood out. Seven other bidding countries, including England, were deemed to be a low risk and the next worst was Russia which was moderate.

  Qatar’s fragile World Cup dream had already withstood a series of crushing body blows in the last weeks before the ballot, but this one had the appearance of a coup de grâce. The report was due to be handed over to the men on the Exco on the eve of the vote in Zurich at the start of December. However self-interested FIFA’s rulers might be, even they might think twice before casting their ballots for Qatar once they read this chilling document. Surely no one would vote for a World Cup which would put the lives of millions of fans and players at risk. Or would they?

  It ought to have been fatal, but Bin Hammam knew his colleagues well. Some of the Exco might well read the technical evaluation and the terror report and be alarmed by the harsh appraisal of Qatar, but others would leave the documents unopened gathering dust on their shelves. What really mattered was protecting the deals he had done with the men on the Exco. That was where he had to focus all his efforts in the final fortnight before the secret ballot.

  Fourteen

  In Every Crisis, an Opportunity

  The collusion scandal, the loss of two voters and the devastating official assessments of Qatar’s bid had made it a calamitous autumn for Mohamed bin Hammam’s World Cup campaign. He was determined to salvage something from the wreckage. The loss of Amos Adamu was an infuriating setback after the months he had spent coaxing the Nigerian to pledge his vote to Qatar, but blessedly there were other countries smarting from the suspensions caused by the undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, too.

  Qatar’s rival, Australia, was also in disarray after being deprived of its one bed-rock vote: the Oceania president Reynald Temarii. The genial South Sea islander had resisted all Bin Hammam’s attempts at courtship and had eventually been formally mandated by his confederation to back Australia in the first round, and the newspaper’s revelations had made clear his intention to choose the USA second. Therefore, Temarii’s one-year suspension on 18 November had deprived two of Qatar’s main rivals of a key supporter. At least it was a score draw. But then Bin Hammam heard word that Oceania’s officials were lining up a replacement to vote in Temarii’s place, and he resolved to do everything in his considerable power to stop them.

  Temarii’s difficulties had begun two months earlier, in late September, when he received a visit from Jonathan Calvert posing as a lobbyist for the USA bid. It was a Friday morning and a blanket of grey cloud was smothering the sun outside the Oceania president’s office in Auckland. Dressed in grey slacks and an open-collar blue shirt, the Tahitian had relaxed back into a brown leather armchair as he listened to the visitor who had flown across the world from London. The ‘lobbyist’ explained that he was representing a consortium of companies who were willing to provide cash to finance football projects in the Oceania region if Temarii gave his vote to America.

  Temarii had leaned forward to give his analysis of how the ballot would unfold. He was candid: he would be voting for Australia in the first round, as he had stated publicly, but the antipodean bid would not survive the initial rounds and the real ‘battle’ would be between Qatar and the USA. In other words, his second preference would be the choice that really mattered. He then returned to the offer made by the lobbyist. ‘Talking about your proposal, for sure, it’s interesting,’ he said. ‘For me I just tell you that when the people come to see me I usually say: “Okay, what will be the impact of your bid in my region?” If there is something concrete on
the table, then it’s interesting to discuss. If not, forget it.’

  He went on: ‘So right now we have a special project, here, in this area.’ His fingers circled the air to indicate that he was talking about the buildings and football pitches around his office. ‘We need to improve the academy, we need to extend with the rooms, with the boardrooms. We need to have an artificial pitch. The English FA have already sent us someone to work on it. He leaves tonight. He came here to give us some idea of the cost.’

  England had signed a memorandum of understanding with Oceania to assist with football development in the region, and its officials were there to cost-out the improvements Temarii wanted. They reported that the work would require someone to pay NZ$3 million (US$2.3 million), and Temarii thought that might be a project which could be financed by Calvert’s fake consortium. ‘Yes, this kind of thing I am keen to discuss, because this technical centre is the one which will accommodate all of our referees, best players, coaches, teams of the Pacific,’ he said. Other bid committees had offered to finance the project, but Temarii would not be drawn on who they were: ‘I cannot tell you, but there is two bid committees who offer us huge . . .’ The sum he was alluding to was much more than the NZ$3 million. ‘I cannot talk to you about that, but for me this is a basic approach when I talk with someone who wish to get my vote.’

  Any deal would have to be ratified by the Oceania executive committee. There was then a pause in the conversation as Temarii looked to Tai Nicholas, his general secretary, who had been sitting quietly as the FIFA Exco member talked. Nicholas wished to clarify ‘just for the regulations’ that the cash offers to the confederation were not ‘formally linked’ to the voting. ‘We are asking the bid teams to talk about “If you win, what would you provide Oceania as a region?”’ he said.