The shock kickstarted a raft of raids, recriminations, resignations and the near-collapse of FIFA itself. But Qatar held on. So how did it win the WorldCup bid? ✍️ mjshrimper
/Holland four and England two. No majority, England out. But in the second round, Russia got a winning total of 13, Spain/Portugal seven and Belgium/Holland two, which means the latter’s support halved and two voters in the first round backed a bid they did not believe was the best available.
But it should also be stated that as far as the Qataris are concerned, the story really is that simple. It was a good speech but former US Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller, who was part of the US bid delegation in Zurich, does not buy the idea that any ExCo minds were changed by the final presentation.
But Garcia did not uncover the crucial piece of evidence FIFA would have needed to defend itself from a Qatari lawsuit. Qatar would say — and has, many times — that he did not find it because it does not exist. Meanwhile, Qatar’s hold on the World Cup grew as every new construction milestone was ticked off and most fans lost interest. Even the belated decision to move the tournament out of the Gulf’s blast-furnace summer to the more comfortable climes of November and December, causing havoc for many domestic leagues, was greeted with resigned shrugs.
Another example is the timely deal Qatargas did with Thailand to renegotiate a contract for supplying liquified natural gas — and the apparent involvement of Thai ExCo member Worawi Makudi’s advisor. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund buying a strip of land in Cyprus for £27million was another transaction that raised eyebrows as the land belonged to the family of ExCo member Marios Lefkaritis.
“It feeds into the stereotype of Arab sheikhs throwing money about, doesn’t it? This is why this World Cup is important. We need to break down that stereotype. The Netflix documentary retells this story at length but does not mention that Garcia’s report dismissed her account as unreliable. Al-Thawadi simply calls it “inherently false”.
But Garcia’s was a mild rebuke and even Qatar’s bid rivals told him they thought the Gulf state had been “smart” in spotting a “loophole” in the rules about what you could and could not sponsor. This is the central idea in The Ugly Game, the 2015 bestseller by Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, The Sunday Times journalists behind the “FIFA Files” splash that broke on the eve of the 2014 World Cup. Those files were actually millions of documents and emails hacked from an AFC server and they appeared to show that Bin Hammam, a football fan who made a fortune in Doha’s construction boom, “was the true architect of Qatar’s astonishing and improbable victory”.
Fat lot of good it did Bin Hammam, though. Blatter would see to it that his former ally would be banned from football for life in 2012.
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