“Enjoy yourself, darling, but I can’t say I approve of you going.” Those were my mother’s parting words as I set off for a four-day, two-match stint at the World Cup.
I have been to every World Cup, bar one, since 1994. But I have never experienced the wave of disapproval that accompanied my trip to Qatar. In the past, when I told people that I had tickets for the greatest football show on earth, I was met with excited congratulations. When I mentioned to friends that I was going to Qatar, I was more often met with a raised eyebrow and a “really?”.
Looking out of the plane window as I flew into Doha, I could see three football stadiums with their lights blazing into the night sky. That summed up the peculiarity of staging an entire World Cup in and around a single city. Travelling between games in South Africa, Brazil and Russia had involved flights or long train journeys. In Qatar, the longest trip I would have to undertake would be a 40-minute Uber ride to see England versus France. In some ways, it was delightfully convenient. But, for Qatar’s critics, the fact that the country had constructed seven new stadiums for a month-long tournament summed up the waste and rich-kid extravagance of the 2022 World Cup.
This tournament has been dogged by controversy ever since Fifa, which governs world football, voted to award the 2022 World Cup to a tiny Gulf state with no footballing history and a climate that makes it impossible to play the games in summer, as normally happens. More than half the officials who voted in the bidding process have since been arrested, fined or prosecuted for corruption. Last week’s arrest of a member of the European parliament, accused of taking bribes from Qatar, has given fresh oxygen to those charges.
In the run-up to the World Cup, the focus of most western outrage was on the treatment of migrant workers constructing facilities for the tournament. As the football kicked off, LGBT+ rights became the flashpoint. Gay sex is illegal in Qatar. Team captains were told not to wear a rainbow armband, and fans trying to carry flags and other items displaying the rainbow symbol were asked to remove them.
But, as I discovered at the first game I went to in Qatar, none of this has stopped Fifa from posing as a champion of human rights. My companion at the Netherlands-Argentina quarter-final was my 23-year-old son Adam. As we settled into our seats at the Lusail stadium, a “No Discrimination” message was displayed on the big screens. The stadium announcers loudly proclaimed Fifa’s opposition to “all forms of discrimination”.
“I notice they don’t enumerate the various forms of discrimination that they oppose,” remarked Adam.
The hypocrisy got even thicker during the half-time break, when the entertainment was provided by Julian Marley, son of Bob — singing “Get up, stand up / Stand up for your rights”. Unless you are gay, in which case please sit down again while we confiscate your rainbow flag.
In theory, all flags with a political message were banned from the games. But one banner that you did see quite a lot — particularly at Morocco games — was “Free Palestine”. As a prominent Qatari explained to me with a smile: “The security guards are mainly from Turkey and Pakistan. They’re not going to confiscate pro-Palestine banners.”
The Qatar World Cup is the first time the tournament has been held in the Middle East — which has given a new set of fans a better chance to go to the games. But it has also meant that European supporters and teams have had to adjust to local mores.
There was something slightly naive about European horror that their hosts do not share western attitudes to LGBT+ rights. Qatar is one of 67 countries around the world where homosexuality is illegal. By contrast, there are, so far, 32 countries that have legalised same-sex marriage.
The World Cup stadiums themselves are the subject of one of the most explosive allegations about Qatar: the charge made in the Guardian that more than 6,500 migrant workers had died in the country over the course of a decade, many of them working on preparations for the World Cup. That number, however, included deaths from natural causes. The Qataris responded that the actual number of workers who had died working on stadiums was three.
Shortly before the tournament began, the story changed again — when a Qatari official in charge of delivering the World Cup came out with a much higher figure of between 400 and 500 deaths of migrant workers between 2014 and 2020. The government hastily clarified this as a number for “all-work related fatalities nationwide in Qatar, covering all sectors and nationalities”.
That figure still sounds dreadful. But construction deaths are not unknown elsewhere. There were, for example, 123 workplace deaths in Britain in a 12-month period from 2021-22 — with 30 fatalities in construction. Qatar is a much smaller place than the UK. But it has been going through an unprecedented construction boom involving skyscrapers, stadiums, shopping malls, a new metro and an airport expansion, and upgrades to the port.
Then there is the history. If there were a league table of morally questionable World Cups, I think that Qatar 2022 might struggle to get into the top four. The decision to proceed with the World Cup in Russia in 2018 seems incredible in retrospect, given that Vladimir Putin had annexed Crimea in 2014. Watching the picture of Putin’s rally after invading the rest of Ukraine earlier this year, I recognised the venue. It was the Luzhniki stadium — where I saw Russia eliminate Spain on penalties in the round of 16 in 2018.
Perhaps I was wrong to go to Russia that year. But, like many a fan, I was reluctant to give up my World Cup habit simply because Fifa had the bad taste to award the tournament to a country with a criminal government. And, as a journalist, I am used to travelling to places I have qualms about.
Russia 2018 was by no means a unique aberration. The 1978 World Cup took place in Argentina in the middle of the military junta’s “dirty war”, when thousands of dissidents were killed, tortured or disappeared. Political prisoners later reported being able to hear the cheering crowds from their prison cells in Buenos Aires. The Mexico World Cup of 1970 is often remembered as the most joyous tournament of the lot. It took place less than two years after the Mexican government had shot dead hundreds of unarmed demonstrators. The 1934 World Cup was staged in fascist Italy, with Mussolini attending the final to see the Italian victory.
So why does Qatar arouse such outrage in the west? In Doha, there were plenty of people — including the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino — prepared to blame western arrogance and racism. But I suspect the real reason may be that Qatar is the perfect embodiment of the unjust and arbitrary distribution of wealth and power around the world.
The total population of Qatar is around 3mn people — of whom just over 300,000 are actually Qatari citizens. The country’s GDP per capita is one of the highest simply because the world’s richest field of natural gas lies off its coast. The millions of migrant workers who have moved to Qatar to service the needs of the locals were born into less fortunate circumstances. They come from poor countries. They need to travel, leave their families and endure harsh and sometimes risky conditions — in the hope of a better life. The International Labour Organization says that Qatar has significantly improved the treatment of migrant workers in recent years. But the gap between their lives and those of the Qataris they serve is still stark.
World Cup fans (me included) are also members of a privileged class. You have to be rich to fly across the world to watch a couple of football matches. We too benefited from cheap migrant labour. At every step of the way, there were workers with foam fingers, shouting “Metro this way” — which became an informal tournament slogan, after a particularly spirited rendition by a Kenyan worker. And Qatar’s facilities, from the shiny, efficient metro to the stunning Lusail stadium, were superb.
Of the seven World Cups I have now attended, the fan experience in Qatar struck me as the safest of the lot — in both a good and a bad way. Both games I went to ended after midnight and it was nice to be able to walk back to the hotel at two in the morning without any fear. That is not something you could say in Joburg or Rio.
In line with Islamic principles, but contrary to their agreement with Fifa and sponsors, the Qataris banned the sale of alcohol in the stadiums. That probably contributed to the friendly atmosphere. The Netherlands-Argentina and England-France games that I went to were tense, and full of controversy. The fans at both games were passionate and noisy. But they also sat side by side, without any hint of crowd violence that I could see.
But the Qatar World Cup lacked the edge and frenzy of previous tournaments. When it was held in Germany and Brazil — countries with strong teams and passionate supporters — the whole nation was visibly gripped by the tournament. I can still remember taking a walk in a São Paulo park on the morning of a Brazil game in 2014. Everybody was in the colours of the national team — including the dogs on leads. In Germany in 2006, the streets emptied when the national team took to the field, and klaxons and cheers erupted across the big cities when they scored.
There was not much of that in Qatar. The national team went out lamely in the first round. What little street passion was in evidence was supplied by supporters of Saudi Arabia and Morocco — as well as the roughly 40,000 Argentines who flocked into Qatar. Journalists in search of atmosphere tended to flock to the Souq Waqif — where they sometimes ended up interviewing each other. (I scored poorly on a sports quiz, put to me by an Argentine radio station.)
Part of the pleasure of World Cups is exploring the country in between games. But Qatar is a tiny place. The IM Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art is magnificent. But once we had visited that and the National Museum, walked along the Corniche and visited the souq, we were slightly stumped — although a parade of camels outside the main government offices provided an unexpected highlight.
In one crucial respect, however, Qatar 2022 has been a resounding success. The football has been spectacular. The Netherlands-Argentina game was probably the most dramatic World Cup match I have ever witnessed. It featured a superstar, Lionel Messi, performing near his peak; a dramatic Dutch comeback to level the match with the last kick of the game; and then a penalty shootout.
As a fan, you always hope that the best bits of the game will unfold in front of you. Here we struck lucky. A few yards from our pitch-side seats, Messi beat a couple of players and angled a pass through the Dutch defence to set up the first goal. It all happened so fast that I had to watch it back later on television to see exactly what he had done.
When it became clear that the penalty shootout at Netherlands-Argentina would take place at our end of the stadium, the people around me erupted in cheers — as if we ourselves had just scored a goal. A Dutch fan, wearing an inflatable orange windmill on his head, high-fived me.
From close by, I was gripped by the emotional rollercoaster ride of the Argentine goalkeeper, Emi Martinez. After he made the second of two crucial saves, he danced and strutted towards us, his arms stretched up to the night sky. But his own players still had to convert their kicks. Martinez could not bear to watch and stood a few yards in front of me, staring into the stands. When the crowd noise told him that Enzo Fernández had missed, Martinez blew his cheeks out and turned back towards the goal to face another kick. Argentina’s next penalty offered a second chance to clinch the game. Once again, Martinez could not watch. This time, Argentina scored. While his teammates raced to embrace each other, Martinez collapsed face down in the turf, before Messi ran over to pull him to his feet.
For me, however, Netherlands-Argentina was just the appetiser. The main course was England-France on the Saturday night. One of my remaining ambitions is to see England win the World Cup before I die. (We all need goals.) Without being too morbid about it, I may be running out of time. Such was my fervour that I sang the national anthem lustily before the kick-off. An amused Adam filmed this strange sight, to share on the family WhatsApp group.
WhatsApp has changed the experience of watching a big match. Throughout the game, I was getting a stream of texts from relatives watching on television — one son in Munich, another in London, my daughter in New Haven and a cousin in New York. At the end of the game, with England defeated, the one-word verdicts and emojis streamed in — “devastating”, “tragic”, “grim”, crying face, vomiting face.
My personal conclusion is that I should be banned from watching England World Cup games — not on the usual grounds of hooliganism, but because I am obviously some kind of unlucky charm. I have seen England play in the World Cup three times, and they lost on each occasion: to Romania in 1998, to Croatia in 2018 and now to France in 2022. My personal curse does not extend to the Euros — I was there at Wembley in 2020, when they beat Germany 2-0 — and I can confirm that winning is definitely preferable to losing.
As I sat on the plane back to London, the morning after the defeat, surrounded by dejected and exhausted England fans, I did ask myself why I keep going.
I think it is as much to do with memory, nostalgia, friendship and family as football itself. Many lifetime memories fade. But I can still recall more or less exactly where I was during every World Cup since 1974. I remember watching the Netherlands-West Germany final that year in my father’s front room — and mourning the defeat of the “Brilliant Orange” team of Johan Cruyff. The 1978 World Cup I watched largely in the company of my cousin, Reuel, whose text messages about England’s performance have accompanied me in Brasília, Moscow and Doha. In 1986, I was alone in a bar in Barcelona, for Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal.
My father and I were actually in the stands for the first time for USA 1994. Under a bright California sky, we saw Brazil walk out on to the pitch in those famous canary-yellow shirts — as Santana played live on the pitch. In 2006, the two of us made it to the final and saw Italy defeat France in Berlin. In 2018, I took an overnight train from Moscow to Kazan — with my three sons. We were travelling to watch Brazil vs Belgium. It was a great game. But the train trip was in, some ways, even better.
It would be wonderful if England won the tournament one day. But, in World Cup football, it is the journey that really counts.
Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist
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