Lincoln Allison - Understanding International Sport Organisations: Principles, Power and Possibilities

On 3 December 2010 a twenty-two person executive committee of FIFA (Fdration Internationale de Football Association) chose Qatar as the location for the 2022 mens football World Cup. The other countries on the short list had been Australia, the United States of America, Japan and South Korea. All of these except Australia had previously been hosts or joint hosts. The Russian Federation was also selected as host for the 2018 tournament. The case for Qatar, as put by Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA (though he had, apparently, voted for the USA himself), was primarily that one of twenty-two predominantly Arab countries should be offered the chance of hosting if the tournament were to be considered a genuinely world event. Qatar was one of the richest of these countries and believed to be one of the most stable. The emirate had already staged the Asian Games and the Asian football championships without mishap and established its capacity to deal with major events. Sport, along with tourism and art, was a major strand of its national strategy and economic planning, to guarantee an affluent future after the oil ran out.

Football fans, institutions and constituencies were enraged. Qatar is not, technically, the smallest place in population to host a World Cup because it has a current population of 1.9 million and Uruguay in 1930 had only about 1.7 million. But it is, of course, ridiculously small for such a purpose compared with immediate predecessors such as Germany and South Africa. In 1930 at the inaugural event in Uruguay, the away fans were measurable in dozens; in 2014 England alone took more than 10,000 supporters to Brazil. One estimate has it that Qatar is spending 138 billion on the World Cup, more than sixty times what was spent in South Africa. Any legacy of such investment, to invoke the criteria used by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is likely to consist entirely of white elephants. The time zone in Qatar is two hours different from most of Western Europe, but eight hours behind most of East Asia and at least six hours ahead of South America, those being the three main global markets for televised football. Qatar is an Islamic autocracy whose laws are based on Islamic principles and is, therefore, in fundamental opposition to Western liberalism and democracy. Homosexuality is illegal and there are normally only a few places where alcohol can be consumed and a bureaucratic process or insider patronage is required for access.

The problems posed by the climate are even greater. During the period of the tournament temperatures can rise as high as fifty degrees Celsius. (Both of us have spent time in the United Arab Emirates and it is obvious that the July period established for the World Cup within the global sporting calendar is barely thinkable in such conditions.) It was argued that forms of air conditioning might be able to lower temperatures by as much as twenty degrees, but this would not, of course, alleviate conditions for fans outside of match times. Nor would it do anything for the workers who had to bring the infrastructure into being, numerous of whom were reported to have died whilst working in conditions of quasi-slavery.

The December 2010 World Cup decisions brought the attention of the world, and of the world media, to the nature and workings of international sports organisations such as FIFA, in an amplified version of the scandals revealed in the practices of IOC members in the later 1990s. It has become clear that the Qatar decision has had broad and permanent consequences for the international governance of sport. The decision was a kind of