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

by Heidi Blake

  By the afternoon it was time for the five 2022 bids to unveil their expensively made videos and deliver their final presentations to the executive committee. The photographers shivering outside on the FIFA hilltop came to life as a fleet of limousines drew into world football’s headquarters. The Qatari royal family had arrived. Sepp Blatter stepped up to the podium at 4pm to announce the distinguished guests who would present the Gulf bid to the Exco and the assembled media: the Emir, his wife Sheikha Mozah, the chairman of the bid Sheikh Mohammed, and the president of the Qatar FA Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani. ‘They are all the same family,’ Blatter said with a smile. ‘It is now up to you to present your bid and try to convince the executive committee, I wish you well.’

  Sheikh Mohammed took the stage first, and appealed in fluent French to the Exco to back his country. But it was the final speaker, his mother, who captured everyone’s attention. Sheikha Mozah looked like a finely sculptured mannequin in her tightly tailored burgundy silk dress, the national colour of Qatar. ‘Mr Blatter, members of the executive committee, I would like to ask you a question. When? When do you think is the right time for the World Cup to come to the Middle East?’ she began.

  Not a hair was out of place; not a mannerism ill-judged. Her delivery was slow and winsome: ‘Based on my feelings not just as a mother of my own children but as a mother for an entire generation of youth across the Middle East, for us football is not just a game. It is a sport for our time, anytime. In 2022, more than half of the population of the region will be under twenty-five and the World Cup here will have a different impact here than anywhere in the world. You can help us realise this elusive dream. You can help the youth of the region accomplish a lot.’

  It was a masterpiece of controlled elegance which Michel Platini was later to claim was the thing that had won him over. She ended with the same question: ‘When? When do you think is the right time for this,’ – she motioned around the room – ‘to come to the Middle East? Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come. The time is now.’

  It was a measure of her performance that she managed to eclipse two of the world’s greatest communicators. On next was a video with President Barack Obama rooting for the US bid, followed swiftly by a real-life former American president on the stage: it was Bill Clinton, a man renowned for the head-spinning power of his personal magnetism in any given room. The Americans had also rolled out Morgan Freeman, but even Hollywood’s most distinguished voice failed to move the FIFA audience. The commentators found the Americans insincere, perhaps because football was not a game the country’s luminaries had ever really played or watched.

  The Australians had pitched in earlier with their own world-renowned beauty, the supermodel Elle Macpherson. As one antipodean blogger quipped, ‘Who needs bungs when we’ve got The Body?’ South Korea argued that a World Cup would help bring peace to their divided peninsula, although it wasn’t clear that North Korea had officially signed up to that idea. Japan outlined a futuristic vision for the tournament, promising to deck out 400 grounds around the globe with giant Sony 3-D flatscreens to give hundreds of millions of fans the opportunity of watching. But Sheikha Mozah had stolen the show. Bin Hammam sat back in his auditorium chair and relaxed. The butterflies had subsided. He had completed his groundwork with what felt like a million air miles and more illicit payments than he cared to recall, and now his country’s beloved first family had given the campaign the last lick of royal gloss it needed to sparkle on the night.

  The four European bids for 2018 would be given their opportunity to make their final pitches the next morning before the ballot at 1pm, but Bin Hammam could sleep easily that night in the knowledge that everything was going to plan. He had been out for dinner with the whole Exco that evening and there was frenetic activity afterwards when the group spilled out into the bars and lobby of the Baur au Lac. The fixers and bid teams were button-holing the Exco members hoping for a scrap of new information or the chance to make a last pitch that might seal their vote.

  The England bid had developed something of a Blitz spirit. Even if their cause was hopeless, they were going to fight to the bitter end. Maybe, just maybe, they could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as the London 2010 Olympics team had done when they pipped the French five years earlier. The British prime minister David Cameron had flown out to Zurich earlier in the week, popped home briefly to attend questions in the House of Commons, and was now back again. Exco members would be given a gentle tap on the shoulder before being escorted to a suite upstairs at the Baur au Lac where they were greeted by Cameron and Prince William. FIFA’s rulers lapped up the attention from a prime minister and an heir to the throne, and several made all the right noises about supporting England. It would have been rude not to. The premier and the prince weren’t to know that, in this murky world, a promised vote wasn’t worth the ballot paper it was not yet written on.

  In the same suite, Andy Anson, the England bid chief, and his sidekick Simon Greenberg were still shuffling around the counters on their improvised gaming board, trying to work out how the ballot would finally play out. There were a mind-boggling number of permutations but, even if the handful of votes they had been promised came good, hardly any of them worked out well for England. Greenberg’s heart was no longer in it. He had read the Hakluyt intelligence report warning that his country was likely to get only two votes, and he had long since told his colleagues they had all been ‘royally fucked’.

  England had never been popular with the FIFA executive committee, and the recent intrusions by the British media had merely provided the men on the Exco with a justification for their inclination to cold-shoulder the country’s bid. The England 2018 team publicly attacked the BBC for airing Panorama in the week of the ballot, but it left them in no-man’s land: they were always going to be losers, and now they had conceded the moral high ground as well.

  In the quiet of the night, once the whisky glasses had been drained and the hotel bars had emptied, many of the bid teams were already reflecting on what might have been. Five out of the nine understood that it was all over. Japan had given up the ghost on a victory long ago. Its Exco member Junji Ogura had struck a reciprocal vote-swapping deal with Belgium’s Michel D’Hooghe, but his country would be lucky to progress beyond those two votes. The Netherlands–Belgium bid had always been an outsider and its cycling-friendly green bid was now peddling furiously to avoid being humiliated in the first round. Australia had lost Reynald Temarii and could now count on only Franz Beckenbauer’s support. Sepp Blatter was promising to back them, but they knew his word of honour held about as much water as a didgeridoo. Chung Mong-joon was still doing deals, but it was all about damage limitation for the South Korean. All that mattered now was to muster a respectable number votes to keep his political ambitions at home alive and if that meant offering his support to more than one country, then so be it.

  There was a small glimmer of hope for England when the country’s own voter Geoff Thompson finally came good and announced he had made a deal to exchange votes with Chung. The deal had looked golden when the South Korean had even promised his vote to Cameron and Prince William. But then, on the morning of the ballot, a senior member of the England bid team had spied him at breakfast with the Russian voter Vitaly Mutko in the Baur au Lac. He watched as the two men retreated to a discreet table and chatted for a while, before standing up and shaking hands decisively. ‘He’s just fucked us!’ the England official reported to colleagues. ‘He’s going to vote for Russia!’

  So as the winter sun came up over a bitterly cold snow-fringed Lake Zurich, there were only four bids with real reason for optimism on the day of the ballot. The Americans were quietly confident because Blatter had said he was backing them. They were a commercial powerhouse which would generate more billions in television revenues than any of their rivals. Spain knew it could rely on the solid seven votes from the collusion deal with Qatar and that was a great platform to build on.

  The Russians w
ere gaining momentum at just the right moment. The country’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, had decided against attending the ballot, but had issued a statement twisting the knife in a tender wound for England: their media. ‘Recently, we have been saddened to see an overt campaign unleashed against members of the FIFA executive committee, who are being smeared and compromised,’ Putin lamented. ‘I see this as unfair competition in the run-up to the vote to choose the host of the World Cup.’ He added: ‘I should refrain from attending out of respect . . . for members of the FIFA executive committee, in order to give them an opportunity to make an unbiased decision calmly and without any outside pressure.’ The England bid had picked up intelligence that he and the FIFA president were jointly lobbying Exco members to back the Russians over the phone and the Kremlin-supporting Izvestia newspaper was reporting that ‘Blatter is our ally’.

  And then, of course, there was Qatar. Bin Hammam’s plan had been perfectly executed and barring a last-minute disaster, the Emir would have his ‘big cake’ at last.

  Snow was swirling around the FIFA hilltop when the 22 voters filed into the snoozily warm boardroom at 2pm on 2 December 2010. The door was shut firmly behind them and blackout blinds were pulled down. In front of them were a notary and an observer from the KPMG accountancy firm who had been tasked with making sure that the ballot for the two World Cups was fair and proper. This was the moment that Bin Hammam had been working towards for two years. He could hardly wait for the voting to start, but he would have to be patient for a few minutes because the ballot for 2018 was first.

  It was hardly a surprise that the first act of the FIFA executive committee was to kill off the England bid. The birthplace of football and home of the Premier League received only two votes, just as Hakluyt predicted, and they were out. Issa Hayatou had kept his word and voted for England in return for the FA’s support for his presidential bid back in 2002. The second vote was Thompson’s, who would honour his promise to vote for South Korea in the 2022 race, but Chung had double-crossed him and gave his ballot to Russia. When he was angrily confronted over the betrayal later by an English official, the South Korean would reply serenely: ‘That’s football.’

  The last-minute lobbying for Russia by Putin and Blatter had clearly paid dividends, as its bid stormed straight into the lead in the opening round, with nine votes. Moscow had been relying upon Vitaly Mutko, Chung, Franz Beckenbauer, Jack Warner, Chuck Blazer, Jacques Anouma and Blatter in the first round, and it looked as if they had all come good. They were followed closely by Spain who had exactly the seven votes guaranteed by their collusion pact with Bin Hammam. The Netherlands–Belgium bid defied expectation and survived the opening round, notching up four votes. D’Hooghe had made a vote-swapping deal with Ogura, which accounted for two of those, but the identity of the other two remained a mystery.

  The ballot then went to a second round, when a clear winner emerged. The margin between Spain and Russia had been tight enough to make it tough to call which way the votes had shifted. The victor would be announced in a ceremony that afternoon, but the nervous 2018 bidders would have to wait until the 2022 ballot had run its course first.

  Now it was Bin Hammam’s big moment. He opened his notebook and glanced down at the names of the members he hoped would have voted for Qatar by the final round, ready to tick them off as the ballot progressed. There were the seven voters from the Iberian collusion pact – him and Spain’s Ángel María Villar Llona, then his own supporters Worawi Makudi and Hany Abu Rida and the three Latin voters the Spaniard had brought to the table, Julio Grondona, Nicholas Leoz and Ricardo Texeira. Then there was Michel Platini, who had promised the French president Nicolas Sarkozy he would vote for Qatar, as well as the other two remaining Africans Issa Hayatou and Jacques Anoua, and his well-paid brother Jack Warner. These were his core supporters.

  He hoped very much that the ‘bilateral relations’ he and Vitaly Mutko had been discussing between Russia and Qatar would bring him another vote, and he had done his best to remind Franz Beckenbauer of the debt of gratitude he owed Qatar after the German World Cup, so he hoped Der Kaiser would switch over his support once Australia was out. He wondered whether his efforts to woo Michel D’Hooghe of Belgium would bear fruit. One certainty lay in his pact with the Asian voters, Junji Ogura and Chung, who he knew would transfer their votes to Qatar once Japan and South Korea crashed out.

  The voters handed in their ballots, and the notary sifted through them before announcing the results. Qatar had stormed straight to the head of the pack with 11 votes – exactly half the total and just one short of instant victory. Bin Hammam’s heart swelled with joy. It would be almost impossible not to win from here. The Iberian pact had held good with seven votes and he also ticked the names of Platini, Anouma and Hayatou on his list. After chewing contemplatively on his pencil for a moment, he also checked off Warner. South Korea were second with four, including votes from Mutko and the guileless Thompson. Both the USA and Japan polled just three votes each and Australia were knocked out with a paltry one. Later, Blatter and Beckenbauer would both tell the Australians that this solitary vote had been theirs.

  Now Australia were out, Bin Hammam was hoping for Beckenbauer’s vote and he put a tick next to Der Kaiser’s name. That would hand Qatar victory. But when the second-round results were announced, his heart sank. Rather than gaining the one extra vote it needed to win, Qatar had lost ground and dropped down to ten. Which of his colleagues had abandoned him? Still, he remained well ahead. The USA and South Korea progressed to five each, and Japan dropped out. Qatar gained Ogura in the third round and went back up to 11 – once again just a tantalising single vote from the 12 needed to reach a majority. Just as he hoped, South Korea dropped out after being pipped narrowly by the US, who now had six votes. That meant Chung’s vote belonged to him.

  It was nearly time for the fourth round, and Bin Hammam was staring down at his notebook again. He added a tick next to Chung’s name, alongside marks against Abo Rida, Anouma, Beckenbauer, Grondona, Hayatou, Leoz, Ogura, Makudi, Mutko, Platini, Teixeira, Villar Llona and Warner. He was so close to victory, but the disappearing vote after the first round continued to perplex him. Qatar’s tally stood at 11, but there were 14 names now ticked off on his list, not including his own, which meant three of the supporters he had been counting on had not behaved as he had hoped. What if more of Qatar’s voters dropped away in the final round?

  In his state of nervous excitement, the Qatari hadn’t stopped to think that he was sitting next to Chuck Blazer, who was representing the last rival still in the ballot, America. Blazer could not resist glancing over Bin Hammam’s shoulder to get a peek of what he was up to, and one of the names on the list made his blood run cold with fury: Jack Warner. The president of CONCACAF had to vote for the USA. So why had Bin Hammam ticked his name? It was a moment that was to shatter the once inseparable friendship between Blazer and Warner forever. The US bid leader, Sunil Gulati, would never speak to the man from Trinidad again. It was such a little error by Bin Hammam, allowing the CONCACAF general secretary to read his list over his shoulder. It was just a momentary lapse in concentration as he got caught up in the big moment he had been working towards for two long years. And yet the consequences of that split-second misjudgement would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Bin Hammam crossed the box next to Qatar on his ballot paper for the fourth time and handed it in. He scrutinised the faces of his colleagues as they made their marks. The papers were counted, and then it was all over. The Exco were informed that a winner had emerged, and the victor would be named at a ceremony to follow. Barring an implausible collapse in the final round, Bin Hammam knew Qatar must have triumphed, but he wouldn’t quite believe it till he heard Blatter say it. The names of the winners were printed on two cards and placed in white envelopes which were sealed with red wax. The notary, with the observer in tow, then took them by car to the Messe conference centre where the world’s media and all the bid teams were waitin
g anxiously in the auditorium.

  The heat of the television lights were burning onto an empty podium waiting for Blatter to step up onto the stage at 4pm and reveal the results of the election. It was a room adorned with princes, prime ministers and presidents. The Emir’s family waited patiently three rows back on the left side of the vast room, with Bill Clinton and the sparrow-faced Gulati directly in front of them. The Russians were on the right flank alongside the England bid, who were already looking stony faced. All along the front row were the real overlords of the occasion, the FIFA executive committee. Bin Hammam looked relaxed as he leaned back in his chair but Mohammed Meshadi, many rows behind, was so nervous he had almost not been able to bring himself to attend. ‘That bugger didn’t dare go to the conference centre for the announcement,’ Bin Hammam’s assistant Jenny Be would later tell Michelle Chai. ‘I had to drag him there.’

  With half an hour to go, Al Jazeera was already reporting that Qatar had won, but the sage football journalists in the media centre were dismissing the reports as speculation. Surely, even FIFA’s wonky executive committee wouldn’t choose such a preposterous candidate? Blatter was now up on the stage and had placed the golden World Cup trophy on the podium next to him. He was keeping the suspense with one of his long, meandering speeches about how FIFA represented a billion people who were involved ‘directly’ or ‘indirectly’ through their families in football – a reminder to the heads of state in the room that Blatter’s fiefdom was bigger than theirs. He was still waffling about football teaching ‘fair play’, ‘discipline’ and giving ‘hope to the humanity’, when a tweet from Dmitry Chernyshenko, the chief executive of the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, started doing the rounds in the press centre. ‘Yesss! We are the champions! Hooray!!!!’ he had tweeted. And sure enough, a few moments later, Blatter pulled the winner’s name card out of the 2018 envelope and announced that Russia had indeed triumphed, with 13 votes.