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

by Heidi Blake

  Eckert did accept that Bin Hammam had persuaded Reynald Temarii to appeal against his ethics ban in order to ‘eliminate a vote for Qatar’s competition’ with the huge payment for legal fees and that his actions had therefore ‘influenced the voting process’. But this straightforward example of vote-rigging was waved aside on two grounds. First, the judge pointed out that there was no ‘direct link’ between the payments and the Qatar bid. Second, he reasoned that the illicit deal was just a trifling matter because it affected only one vote out of the 13 needed to win.

  Eckert also acknowledged that the financing and contracts relating to the Brazil vs Argentina friendly game in Doha ‘raised concerns’ under the ethics rules, particularly in relation to payments to Julio Grondona’s Argentine Football Association. But the judge didn’t find a clear breach because the cash had been paid through an unnamed conglomerate owned by a wealthy ‘private individual’ in Qatar and he saw no connection to Qatar’s bid or its football association. Eckert’s summary neglected to mention that the individual in question was Ghanim Bin Saad al Saad, a key agent of the Qatari royal family as both a director of its sovereign wealth fund and the managing director of its giant property company.

  The upshot was that four members of the executive committee would come under further investigation over their behaviour during the World Cup contest, but the Qatar and Russian bids were in the clear. Franz Beckenbauer, Worawi Makudi, Michel D’Hooghe and Ángel María Villar Llona were all facing individual scrutiny. Blatter was content that the matter was now finished, despite Garcia’s protestations. He was quoted on FIFA’s website a few days later saying: ‘There is no change to Judge Eckert’s statement that the investigation into this bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups is concluded.’

  FIFA’s investigator was still furious with the judge for twisting his work and made a complaint to the FIFA’s appeals committee in an attempt to have Eckert’s findings overturned. Ironically, one of the committee members was Ahmad Darw, the president of the Madagascan football association, who had picked up a wad of Bin Hammam’s cash from Amadou Diallo in Paris in 2010. It was no surprise that Garcia’s appeal fell on deaf ears and in December the committee ruled that it had no power to alter Eckert’s findings.

  This was the final straw for Garcia. He quit FIFA on 17 December and issued a scalding resignation statement. ‘No principled approach could justify the Eckert Decision’s edits, omissions, and additions,’ he wrote. ‘And while the November 13, 2014, Eckert Decision made me lose confidence in the independence of the Adjudicatory Chamber, it is the lack of leadership on these issues within FIFA that leads me to conclude that my role in the process is at an end.’

  The next day, the executive committee met in Marrakech, Morocco, to address the crisis. After two days of wrangling, they agreed that an ‘appropriate’ version of Garcia’s report would be published in a heavily redacted form at some time in the future. ‘We have always been determined that the truth should be known,’ Blatter said piously afterwards. ‘That is, after all, why we set up an independent Ethics Committee with an investigatory chamber that has all necessary means to undertake investigations on its own initiative.’ He said for what felt like the thousandth time the troubles of the past were at last behind and now it really was time for the FIFA family to reunite and move forwards. Qatar was keeping its World Cup, and that was final. ‘The report is about history and I am focused on the future. We will not revisit the 2018 and 2022 vote,’ he said.

  The sins of the past could never be swept aside so easily. FIFA had become a toxic brand, synonymous with corruption, greed and duplicity the world over. The revelations in the FIFA Files had shaken the very foundations of world football’s governing body and the edifice was still crumbling. The European leagues were up in arms at the prospect of having to move the World Cup to the winter to avoid the height of the scorching desert heat, and the presidents of UEFA associations had started calling for Blatter’s head. They were even ringing him directly to tell him to resign.

  There was mounting international fury about the deaths of hundreds of migrant workers in appalling labour conditions in Qatar, with predictions that 4,000 more could perish before the 2022 construction work is complete. FIFA’s sponsors were deserting in droves – already five had withdrawn their multi-million-dollar sponsorship deals since the story of the Qatari plot to buy the World Cup was exposed. The calls for reform grew louder and louder. But, for once, Blatter was sticking to his word. He had promised the Emir that the World Cup would remain in Doha, and he was not backing down.

  The FIFA president was all smiles in Marrakech, pink cheeked and giggling with misplaced excitement throughout the press conference in which he announced that the 2018 and 2022 World Cups would remain untouched. There was always at least one journalist who had to rain on his parade, but Blatter was in robust spirits.

  ‘Do you believe that FIFA is in a crisis right now,’ the tired old question came, ‘and are you the right man to lead FIFA into the future past the next election?’

  Blatter beamed. ‘I am not a prophet,’ he said modestly. ‘But I repeat what I have said today. We have been in a crisis. With the decision of the executive committee today, the crisis has stopped.’ A thrust of the hand gave emphasis to his words. ‘Because we have again the unity in our government.’ He gestured heavenwards. ‘I believe in the Lord . . . If they give me health, and let’s say good luck, yes. I will bring back the FIFA. But not alone. I need my executive committee and then I need also the football family . . . I trust in myself and I trust in my colleagues. And together, we will do it.’

  Epilogue

  Mohamed bin Hammam is at the window of his majlis, wondering who might arrive to take coffee with him tonight. Outside, the light is dimming and the sky is as grey as the wing of a desert dove. The dissolving sun tinges the distant shore with a coral haze, and the air cools. A little wind is whipping up. Today the memories took hold and he could not shake them. It is best to forget, he knows. But this afternoon, he has been leafing through his old letters again; taking out the commemorative watches one by one to weigh them in his hands; lingering in the hall lined with old photographs. By the grace of God, he is a lucky man and there is much to be thankful for. But solitude is a strange thing for one who was once so rarely alone.

  In his heyday, Bin Hammam was abroad much more than he was ever at home, jetting from city to city to be greeted so graciously, always accompanied by his attentive entourage. Now he has no reason to travel and has not left Doha for a year. His beautiful young wife Nahed has tired of him and left, and Fatima is the only wife who remains at his side. So many of the children have gone abroad. At least his pretty Aisha is at home still, doing her charitable work in the local Indian school and helping out with the clerical affairs at Kemco. Jenny Be is here too, and so is Amelia Gan. They work in the city and dine at his table, and both are kind enough to call him Mr President, even now. Michelle Chai phones as often as she can, to see how he is faring. And then, of course, there is gentle Najeeb Chirakal. Bin Hammam hopes his kindly aide will never leave him, but as old age draws nearer Chirakal begins to pine for the Keralan backwaters where his life began, and one day soon he may wish to go home.

  Soon Meshadi will be here, he hopes, and the servant will bring in the cardamom coffee. Maybe a few other locals will grace him with a visit, too. From time to time, some of his friends in world football still get in touch. Not often, but it is pleasant to hear from them when they find time. His brothers in Africa and Asia still need a bit of financial assistance on occasion. A little help funding their national leagues, or their children’s school fees, or this new artificial pitch, or that new car. He gets so few letters these days, but the presidents of a smattering of associations write to him once in a while. Sometimes, rarely, they will even come to dinner – if he arranges the jets and the hotels to get them here. There’s nothing to be gained now, but he still helps them when they ask, just out of the goodness in his h
eart. Michelle tells him she does not understand it.

  She asked him once: ‘President, when these people come to you always asking for things, don’t you think that they are taking advantage of you, always wanting more?’

  ‘No, Michelle.’ He shook his head and gestured around. ‘God has given me all this wealth. It’s my responsibility to help people if I can.’

  She tutted. The trouble with Mohamed, she knew, was that given his time at the top again, even after everything, he would do exactly the same things. He didn’t know another way to be. When he saw what The Sunday Times had written about him, he just laughed.

  There is nothing he can say. A new Emir is in the palace now – Sheikh Hamad stepped down to make way for his heir, Sheikh Tamim, and the son runs an even tighter ship than his father. Bin Hammam has no quarter. It is his job to stay in the shadows, not to cause any more fuss. Outside, a whole new city is being built for the World Cup he brought to Doha, but a storm is raging at the gates and his country’s ruler wants no more trouble. So Bin Hammam must stay silent. Still, he is proud of what he achieved. He is proud to have turned his country’s daydream into a real future. He is proud to have brought the old Emir his big cake. That is enough.

  Outside, the wind is stirring up faint eddies of the fine dust that blows in from the desert. It dissolves as it swirls in the thick grey air so when it reaches the rooftops it is almost invisible – a phantom shamal. Bin Hammam watches the dust diffusing. You can hardly see it but, like the man in the majlis, it is still there. It hangs in the air and when the trade winds catch hold of it they will carry it across the whole world.

  A single gust sweeps it seaward over the Doha cityscape, past the Diwan Palace where the new Emir stalks the corridors and across the shoreline where little Mohamed once watched the riggers play. The dust drifts across the bay to the north shore where the Olympic Tower glints in the setting sun and, in his sky-high office, Hassan Al-Thawadi is slotting a sheaf of stadium plans into his briefcase after another long day at the helm of the 2022 supreme committee. It floats on northwards to Lusail, where the foundations are being laid for a brave new world. This will be the home of the World Cup finals: a gleaming city of 19 districts with lagoons, marinas, hotels, golf courses, zoos, fine restaurants and designer stores.

  At its beating heart will be the Lusail Iconic Stadium, its 90,000 scarlet seats glistening like the flesh of a sliced fig. Qatar’s crowning moment is just seven years away and Lusail is one of nine sparkling new football stadiums which will soon bejewel the tiny country. Now night is falling, the migrant workers who have toiled away all day building the World Cup city are retreating to their grim camps on the outskirts of Doha. They have flocked there in their thousands from India and Nepal, but their dreams of joining a land of golden opportunity were soon dashed. They often go unpaid for months and the desert heat is harsh. They must labour all day under the scorching sun, often with no drinking water or food. Their employers have taken their passports so there is no escape, except in a coffin. In the summer, the migrant workers in Qatar can die at a rate of around one a day, mostly of heart attacks in the fierce temperatures. More than 1000 fell in just two years. There have been warnings that thousands more will perish before the World Cup arrives in Doha.

  When borne high on the trade winds, the fine dust from the Arabian desert will blow across the whole of Africa. Far below in Cameroon, Issa Hayatou still rules the continent’s football confederation, having seen off a presidential challenge from the ambitious Jacques Anouma in the Ivory Coast. The two officials still regularly fly to Zurich to pick up their salaries as FIFA executive members alongside Bin Hammam’s one-time stalwart, Hany Abo Rida from Egypt. Qatar’s three voters from Africa emerged unscathed from the corruption scandals which claimed so many of their colleagues. Their Nigerian colleague Amos Adamu had been an unfortunate casualty of the World Cup race, but now he had come out of his three-year suspension a reformed man. ‘I went through some transformations which have been worthwhile. I am now a different person, wiser than before,’ he swore. Adamu saw the light as he reflected at home in his pink Park View villa. It is time to shun football administration for good and devote his energy to making serious money from the business side of sport.

  When the wind picks up again it buffets the dust high into the turbulent weather systems of the Atlantic. It swirls in seemingly endless circles over Central and North America, falling in invisible particles over the land and the sea. Down in Port of Spain, a resurgent Jack Warner is marching along the beach under the hot midday sun, at the head of a troop of youths in matching green t-shirts and baseball caps. Warner has reinvented himself as an ‘agent for change’ in Trinidadian politics after being forced to quit his government job when the full scale of his CONCACAF fraud was exposed. The ‘Youths for Warner’ brigade is the junior arm of the new Independent Liberal Party which Jack set up as a vehicle for his own ambitions. Today, his teenage followers are bopping along behind him singing their Calypso anthem ‘Rockin’ with Jack’ on a litter-picking excursion along the windy shore. Their t-shirts carry the ‘Y4W’ logo on the front and the slogan ‘Dawn of a new era’ on the back. ‘I rockin’ with Jack, one step forward, one step back!’ the group chants. ‘Hear what I say! Jack’s the man to lead the way!’

  On the northern edge of the tropics, the winds have ceased and the sun is shining. At an elegant hacienda in the grounds of the Palm Beach Polo club in Florida, another of Qatar’s World Cup voters lolls on a lilo and toasts his wonderful life with an ice-cool caipirinha. Ricardo Teixeira left football and the Brazilian tax authorities behind in 2012 when things became too hot to handle during FIFA’s investigation into the ISL scandal. His secret is now out – the world knows about the millions of pounds in bribes he had gladly pocketed from the company which bought the World Cup TV rights. The bad publicity had been a bitter pill to swallow, but it was more than amply sweetened by the fact that he got to keep the money. What’s more, he slipped away from FIFA without facing any censure because he’d taken the kickback before the ethics code had been introduced. So no rules had been broken! Teixeira takes another sip of his cocktail. ‘Saúde FIFA!’

  On a bench in a shady plaza of Asuncion, an elderly man sits in deep contemplation, his features frozen in a frown. After the glory years and the countless honours, it all ended badly for Nicolas Leoz in April 2013 when was forced to resign ‘because of ill-health’ a week before he was criticised for taking bribes in FIFA’s report into the ISL affair. The investigators had seemed sceptical about Leoz’s story that he had donated his bribe to a school, eight years after receiving it. One thing had softened the indignity of having to leave world football under a cloud. Paraguay’s national football association had kindly made him its ‘honorary’ president for life. Another accolade to add to his long list of cherished titles.

  The third member of the South American collusion deal lies in a grand marble mausoleum in the Avellaneda Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Julio Grondona died aged 82 of an aortic aneurysm shortly after the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Sepp Blatter joined the long cavalcade for his funeral and tried to capture the spirit of the sharp-tongued Argentinian football boss: ‘He was a man of few words,’ the FIFA president eulogised, ‘but when he did speak he always got to the point and made sense.’ Were he alive to read it, Grondona would certainly have a few angry words to say about the claim in Judge Eckert’s report that his federation received irregular payments from Qatar for its friendly match with Brazil just before the World Cup vote.

  On the east coast of America, a large bearded man huddles in his Trump Tower apartment, straining to hear a muffled audio recording crackling through the speakers. When Chuck Blazer realised the net was closing in after years of creaming off millions of untaxed dollars from the CONCACAF coffers, he had signed up to work as an undercover informant for the FBI to get off the rap. He had travelled the world secretly recording his fellow FIFA officials with a keyfob specially wired for sound to help his new friends fro
m the Bureau with their ongoing investigation into football corruption.

  Blazer was hoping to save his neck by betraying his colleagues, if he could only get them someone to say something incriminating. The trouble was, it had been hard to get people to open up ever since he was forced out of all his football positions in 2013 when that CONCACAF ‘integrity report’ had exposed his embezzlement of the confederation’s funds. As Blazer scans through his barely audible tapes, the already-muffled sound is drowned out by the din of that pestilential parrot. ‘You’re a dope!’ it squawks. ‘You’re a dope! You’re a dope!’ That goddamned bird is even more abusive than his ex-wife. Why can’t he get a minute’s peace?

  The tiny molecules of Arabian dust swirl high in the atmosphere, spreading further and further into the slipstreams drifting across oceans and continents. In the middle of the Pacific, on the tiny island of Tahiti, Reynald Temarii leans back in his leather chair in the offices of his football association, tapping away on his MacBook in a pastel blue and peach Hawaiian shirt. His pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears and his ban from football was upheld, despite the hundreds of thousands of euros he took from Bin Hammam to fund his appeal in exchange for blocking Oceania’s World Cup votes. The three-year exile is over but Temarii’s jet-set days in FIFA boss class are behind him and now he is reduced to running his tiny island’s lowly football association from this little office close to the turquoise shore.

  Sweep east across the ocean to Tokyo and the gentle Junji Ogura is fast asleep, dreaming of the delicious rack of chicken yakitori skewers he has left marinating in the fridge for his family’s lunch tomorrow. He has all the time in the world to pursue his hobbies of cooking and reading these days, having retired from the Exco at 72 the month after finally backing Qatar in the World Cup vote. A short leap across the Sea of Japan and Chung Mong-joon is shifting restlessly under silk sheets in his Seoul mansion. He is still smarting bitterly after his political ambitions were thwarted once again, when he lost his campaign to become mayor of South Korea’s capital city in June 2014. Still, it is some small consolation that he remains an honorary vice-president of FIFA, thanks to the efforts of his friend Bin Hammam. Chung’s vote in the final round was crucial to Qatar’s victory, after all. He knows he will always have a friend in Doha.