Every World Cup has tournament-defining moments that fans will remember in the same way they remember meeting the love of their life. Or the Kennedy assassination.
I’m a casual football fan at best, but I can still tell you that when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France, I was standing next to friends from my summer job with a half-drunk glass vodka and cranberry juice that had turned pale and watery from melted ice. I remember the silence that hung in the air when it took the crowd around me a moment to realize what had happened, the murmurs of confusion quickly turning to fits of rage. And I remember feeling inexplicably hurt by the Italian fans, who seemed unbearably smug about their team’s victory after their player was so mistreated.
But when it comes to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, it’s not clear that any moment on the pitch will be more defining than that of December 2, 2010, long before the tournament started. That was when Sepp Blatter, then the president of FIFA, football’s governing body, stood up in a Zurich auditorium and announced that Qatar had won the competition to host the 2022 tournament, even though the country had no infrastructure for mass tourism, football stadiums and summer weather in which it was safe to play football. That was when, in the eyes of much of the world, this World Cup became irrevocably linked to corruption.
The announcement was meant to mark the beginning of a new era for Qatar as a major player on the global stage. But with the small country appearing so blatantly unsuited to the needs of the event, Qatar’s win instead sparked a new era of investigations into corruption within FIFA itself. In the intervening years, most of the people who made the bid have been charged, sanctioned by football authorities for ethical violations or charged with corruption.
But as I’ve written many times in this column, corruption is about systems, not just individual bad actors. And so I called my colleague Tariq Panja – who has covered this story from the start – to talk about the system that brought the World Cup to Qatar. Our conversation has been edited and shortened.
Amanda Taub: Start by giving me the high-level version. If someone just has a vague, fuzzy awareness of corruption within FIFA somehow affecting this World Cup, what are they supposed to know about what happened here?
Tariq Panja: In June 2009, Qatar, a small country in the middle of a desert, decided to bid for the World Cup. But first it had to convince a majority of the members of FIFA’s board, then composed of men and women, from six regional governing bodies. There would be 24 board members, but two were expelled after being exposed by undercover reporters from the Sunday Times of London newspaper for offering to sell their votes.
On December 2, 2010, we all gathered in an auditorium in Zurich. The anonymous vote took place and Sepp Blatter, then the President of FIFA opened the envelope for 2022 and Qatar had won.
Cue claims of corruption.
There was nothing about this country that made it a likely candidate to host the world’s greatest sporting event. It had virtually no infrastructure, not just stadiums, but rail, subway, hotels and transit – anything imaginable, they didn’t have.
And Qatar offered to hold this tournament in June and July, which FIFA’s own technical inspector said posed a health risk to fans, players and officials due to the heat.
But FIFA chose it.
In the decade since, nearly everyone who voted for this bid has been charged with corruption by authorities, banned or sanctioned for violating ethical guidelines, or charged with massive corruption. Almost all.
A brief guide to the 2022 World Cup
What is the World Cup? During this four-yearly event, the best national football teams compete for the title of world champion. Here’s an introduction to the Men’s tournament 2022:
BEE: Those charges and sanctions are the result of multiple investigations in different countries into corruption within FIFA in general, not just this bid. But what did they find out about how Qatar’s bid worked?
TP: The French are investigating one thing encounter on November 23, 2010, nine days before the vote, at the Elysee Palace, the official residence of the French president.
In the room are then-Crown Prince Sheikh Tamim of Qatar, currently the Emir; HBJ, the Prime Minister of Qatar; a few French government officials; and Michel Platini, the head of European football. Just a few months earlier, Platini said he hoped someone other than Qatar would win, but later said he would tell Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president at the time, that he had already decided to vote for Qatar.
Platini influences the votes of the other European members on FIFA’s executive committee. So he brings a lot of votes.
And Qatar agrees to buy Paris Saint-Germain, this football club that went nowhere and has now turned into a basket of celebrities. BeIn Sports, then a regional television station in the Middle East, is starting to expand its presence in Europe, pouring billions of euros into French football and European football more broadly.
Soon after, France sells for billions of dollars Rafale military fighter jets and Airbuses to Qatar, and the business relationship only expands after that. So that’s the kind of level we’re talking about.
And here’s another example: a US charge, which is unrelated to the French meeting, states that three South American football officials, from Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, received an undisclosed amount of money to vote for Qatar. Don’t say whose. Qatar has always denied this.
BEE: me often to write about how corruption is not something that happens because of the bad decisions of bad individuals. Rather it happens because corrupt systems call for corruptionand encourage corruption so that you end up with a situation where everyone thinks participation in corruption is their only option. A corrupt balance.
TP: Right. Qatar just played the game everyone was looking for, they just had more resources to do it. Whoever would win would never win this cleanly. There may have been no way to win this cleanly.
The FIFA system created the perfect conditions for this. And that system has been around for at least four decades.
BEE: What happened four decades ago?
TP: A system has been created where the only people who really have a say are the 211 FIFA members and the FIFA president they vote for. Most of them represent countries that are either small or insignificant in a football sense. But it’s one member, one vote. That is an enormous amount of power for each of these small countries.
And then some of them can group together. The Caribbean has many small islands, but 37 have grouped together in the Caribbean Football Union. When they vote in a bloc, they are one of the most powerful voting banks in football.
And that was in the clutches of Jack Warner from Trinidad, now sued by the US and fighting extradition from Trinidad. Everyone turned a blind eye to him because he was so important. He could deliver these 37 votes!
And that system of one member, one vote still exists.
BEE: One thing that sometimes does seem to make the difference to systemic corruption is when there is an outside prosecution or investigation. An expert I spoke once called independent prosecutors “islands of fairness,” and said that under the right circumstances, they could upset the balance that perpetuates corruption.
In 2015, there was a major persecution by the United States, which sued more than a dozen football officials on bribery and tax evasion charges, including Jack Warner. Did things change after that?
TP: Here’s something I love. The US has dismissed this charge and shook the place to its foundations. And yet, in many, many ways, FIFA has largely remained unchanged.
This very powerful president is still here. The system of one member, one vote is in effect. The commission systems are in place. And the US seems to have lost interest. Because guess what? Guess who will host the next World Cup?
It reminds me of Terminator 2. The bad guy in it, every time his head got cut off or an arm fell off, it just turned into this metal and regenerated itself. It just kept composing itself. And this reminds me of FIFA. That no matter how bad things get, it just comes back to the old ways.