As Qatar bans alcohol from World Cup stadiums, how many bid promises are being kept?
New York Times“The promise given was a necessity of the past; the word broken is a necessity of the present.” Florentine diplomat, historian and philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli would have been good at winning bids for major sporting events. “A core part of Qatar’s pitch was that this would be a World Cup of firsts — football’s biggest tournament held in the Middle East and in a Muslim country for the first time. The Lusail Stadium will host the World Cup final “It was made clear at FIFA’s July 2009 bidders’ workshop for all bidders that while it required 12 stadiums for a bid, that requirement may not stick,” recalls Mersiades, the founder of the Football Writers’ Festival, which takes place in Sydney just before next year’s Women’s World Cup. “Of course, the nature of the process is that the ‘best’ bid wins, so naturally hosts will put forward the most competitive bid they can, which usually includes flawed understandings of the true social impact sports events actually have on local areas and citizens.” Accommodation That leads us to the question of where the one million visitors Qatar is expecting during the World Cup are going to sleep. They anticipated that a summer tournament in Qatar was impossible — obviously — and believed FIFA would move it here once that idea collapsed, like in 2003, when the Women’s World Cup was relocated after China had an outbreak of the SARS virus.” They were wrong about 2022 but one of the legacies of the controversies caused by the decision to give Russia the 2018 World Cup and Qatar the 2022 tournament was that FIFA played it safe next time and awarded the 2026 World Cup to a joint bid from Canada, Mexico and the US, ignoring the more romantic but riskier pitch from Morocco.