For Qatar, the World Cup’s Glamour Is the Payoff

There have been times, over the last 11 years, over a decade of acrimony and accusation and controversy and scandal, when it has felt entirely reasonable to ask whether, deep down, in private moments and surreptitious whispers, some of those involved in winning the 2022 World Cup for Qatar might have wondered whether it has all been worth it.

The cost of the project, the stadiums summoned from dust, the cities imagined out of nothing, the thousands of acres of grass and trees grown in desert sand, was all anticipated, built into the proposal. But those hundreds of billions are not the only price that has been paid.

That one decision changed soccer on some fundamental, irrevocable level. This week, when the Premier League revealed its calendar for next season, it proudly claimed that it had hit upon a way to “limit” the impact of World Cup 2022 to a single campaign. In one sense, that is true. In another, the impact of the tournament is such that it has shot through the very fabric of the sport.

Awarding the tournament to Qatar brought down an entire court of grasping, grifting princelings at FIFA. It led to sweeping anticorruption investigations and dawn raids on luxury hotels. It landed more than a few people on wanted lists and in jail. It ended the career of Michel Platini. Ultimately, it toppled Sepp Blatter.

More than that, it undermined trust — perhaps fatally — in the body that is supposed to represent the best interests of the game. It violently ruptured the relationships between FIFA and all of the organizations that feed into it: the confederations, leagues, clubs, unions and fans.

The vote for Qatar in 2010 is not quite soccer’s original sin: The antipathy and mistrust that characterizes the sport predates the moment Blatter, to an audible gasp, revealed that Qatar would stage the biggest — second-biggest, for readers in the United States — sporting event in the world. But it is difficult not to believe that, from that day on, those divisions became more pronounced, more concrete, more bilious, and that the game has never recovered.

Those involved in the vote, those targeted by the investigations, those hounded out of office or raised from their beds by the Swiss police would, most likely, be of the view that perhaps it might have been better if Australia had won.

So, too, of course, would those migrant workers who have died during Qatar’s unprecedented building spree in the years since it won hosting rights. Estimates of how many have lost their lives for a nation’s quixotic ambition vary: 38, apparently, according to the event’s organizing committee; 6,500 from five South Asian nations alone, according to a less invested investigation. Tragically, the latter report is likely to be the more accurate. Either number is too high.

But if next year’s tournament has not been worth it for soccer, and has not been worth it for those whose lives were lost — or the many tens of thousands more whose safety has been put at risk — it has also been hard to make a case that Qatar has emerged well from the project.

In one light, after all, these last 11 years have brought nothing but scrutiny: on the system of indentured labor that compelled all those migrant workers to go to work in searing heat on projects of triumphal scale and Midean hubris, and prevented them from leaving the country, from going home, without their employer’s permission; on Qatar’s abysmal human rights record; on its intolerance of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.

This was not, it is likely, the reaction that Qatar expected when it won the vote, when the streets of Doha filled with a delirious populace, when it seemed to take top billing on the world stage. Its aims may have been more subtle, more complex than just one blast of good P.R., but it is safe to assume the feedback has not quite been as the bid’s masterminds would have hoped.

And yet, it is now that they might start to feel that — for all the trouble, for all the fury, for all the glaring spotlight — they will, somehow, still, get the return they wanted. There is a glamour to a World Cup: a dazzling, bewitching quality, so strong that even now, a year out, it is possible to sense its first glimmers.

This is the week, after all, that the tournament’s field will finally start to take shape. Only four teams have qualified so far — the host, Germany, Denmark and, after a win on Thursday, Brazil — but by next Wednesday, more than half of the European contingent will have been decided. Spain and England, surely; most likely France, the defending champion, and Belgium; possibly Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands.

Now that Brazil is in, Argentina should be following in its rival’s wake. Mexico should be in a strong position. Iran and South Korea are almost there. Saudi Arabia may well have joined them.

The draw remains months away, of course, but that is not the World Cup’s only appeal. This will be the last time either Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi graces soccer’s biggest stage; it will be the final chance for both to cement their legacies. It may be the moment England’s golden generation blossoms. It might prove the stage for South America, for the first time since 2002, to wrest the crown from Europe.

It is impossible not to be intrigued by all of those possibilities, to feel the slightest judder of anticipation at what is to come. There is an atavistic thrill to the World Cup: its appeal lies in what it makes you remember, where it takes you back, to your first encounter with its great carnival spirit, the first moment you clapped eyes on this great, global festival.

But there is a danger there, too, because that is why Qatar went to such trouble to claim the tournament, why it endured all of the criticism, why it placed all of those workers’ lives in jeopardy: because the World Cup’s power is to make you remember, and in doing so, to make you forget.

That is what Qatar has spent $138 billion to acquire: that feeling, that giddy excitement, that irresistible smile. For that, it determined there was no price too high. And that means it is more important now than ever, as the soccer itself begins to work its amnesiac magic, that we do not lose sight of what this tournament has cost.

No Next Step on the Ladder (Reprise)

There was something telling about the way Steven Gerrard’s appointment as Aston Villa’s manager was framed. A promising young manager’s taking a considerable step up — in terms of quality of opponent, at least, if not necessarily scale of club — accounted for a portion of the coverage.

So, too, did a historic, ambitious — and expensively assembled — team appointing a relative neophyte at a delicate stage of its season, at least partly because of his illustrious playing career (this is a plan that never, absolutely never goes wrong, of course). But more than anything, Aston Villa’s union with Gerrard was presented as a story about another club entirely.

It is no secret that Gerrard wishes, one day, to manage Liverpool, the team he supported as a child, and the team he gave the best years of his career. It does not require any great detective work to establish that, in his mind, leaving Rangers — the club to which he delivered the Scottish championship last summer — for Aston Villa is a step on that journey.

But it is not a sign of an especially healthy culture that a major decision at a team of Villa’s scale and scope should be seen through the lens of what it might mean for Liverpool. That is a sign that England’s current elite, perhaps, occupy rather too much conceptual space in soccer’s never-ending discourse.

That Gerrard sees Villa as a springboard, the logic goes, is good for the club: If he succeeds Jürgen Klopp at Anfield when Klopp’s contract expires in 2024 — the point when Klopp has made plain he intends to leave England — it will be because he had lifted Villa from its current station into a better one.

That is not quite the whole story. There is, of course, a risk for Villa in the appointment: It is possible Gerrard will not be able to succeed in England as he did in Scotland. But the greatest risk is for Gerrard, for two reasons. First, it is not entirely clear what Villa regards as success: Is it finishing in the top 10? Is it qualifying for Europe? Is it winning a cup?

And second, even more opaque is what form of success he would need to enjoy at Villa to convince Liverpool that he is ready not only to do the job on which he has his heart set, but that he can do it well. Would taking Villa to seventh make him a more compelling candidate than — say — a coach who has won a Bundesliga title, or thrived in the Champions League, or managed a phalanx of superstars? Probably not.

It is tempting to believe that, for Gerrard, it may not matter. His bond with Liverpool may be strong enough that anything other than abject failure is the only proof his alma mater requires. But Fenway Sports Group, the club’s owner, is not the sort to be distracted by sentiment, or dazzled by stardust. It will want Gerrard to show he is up to the task. The problem is working out whether it is possible.

Just Getting Started

Marta Torrejón does not betray even the slightest hint of envy. She is only 31, but she knows that is old enough, in women’s soccer, effectively to belong to a previous generation. When her career started, she was not fully professional; nor was the game she played, not in Spain. She did not have access to state-of-the-art training facilities until her mid-20s.

She has still built an impressive career: she has represented her country — 90 times, no less, before retiring after the 2019 World Cup — and she has been, for eight years, a cornerstone of the Barcelona team that has risen inexorably to become the pre-eminent power in the women’s game.

She knows, though, that those who follow in her footsteps may well cast her into shade. What was most striking, talking to those involved with Barcelona Femení last month for an article The Times published this week, was their conviction that they have barely scratched the surface of their potential.

“There are girls here who have been in a professional environment since the age of 12,” Markel Zubizarreta, the club’s sporting director, said. “The talent is the same, but when they turn professional, they will be much better prepared.”

Torrejón has seen that firsthand, as the first products of Barcelona’s investment in youth start to drip feed into the club’s first team. “The players who are 15, 18, 20 have had a physical training that will help them compete at the professional level,” she said.

The same process, of course, is playing out at dozens of clubs across Europe, where the first generation to have been given access to the sort of resources their male equivalents have enjoyed for decades are only just emerging. And that raises a compelling question: What if the boom in women’s soccer — in Europe, at least — is not actually the boom at all? What if this is just the prelude?

Correspondence

It might seem an exaggeration, but this newsletter may have finally reached its zenith, thanks to a single sentence from Shane Thomas. I have an overwhelming sensation of despair, because I am self-aware enough to recognize that I will never write a sentence more compelling than this: “The biggest criticism of Batman is that he uses all his wealth to fight crime, but comparatively little of it to tackle crime’s underlying causes.”

It would spoil it, just a little, if I told you how that sentence came up — it was in a thoughtful, cogent email related to last week’s column on the problems caused, and solved, by the presence of outsize individuals in the context of a team — so I will not. Better, I think, to use the time wondering what more Batman could be doing.

Leon Joffe, on the other hand, leapt to the defense of a different superhero, though one who, if we are all being honest, also did very little to combat the underlying causes of crime.

“I have a different recollection of Roy of the Rovers than the one you describe,” he wrote. “Goals were not only scored by Roy, but always a team effort, with one of the teammates usually passing expertly to the goal scorer. Blaming a young soccer captain’s playing style, years later, on the comic book, is quite weird.”

Lana Harrigan, meanwhile, pointed out that Ronaldo can hardly be blamed for Manchester United’s defense. “I’m no tactician,” Lana wrote, “but the defense looks pitiful at times.” Gary Brown went one step further, arguing that “the argument that Ronaldo and the pressing game don’t mix would be stronger if United had routinely played a pressing came before his return. Which we didn’t. Perhaps CR7 makes it difficult to improve that part of the game, but I don’t think he’s single-handedly turned off something that in truth was scarcely ever turned on.”

And we’ll finish, in finest newsletter style, with one of the blue-sky ideas that — until we got into the business of critiquing Batman’s methods — has long been this missive’s strong suit.

“I am bothered by the intentional use of fouls to benefit a team,” wrote Paul Sumpter. “It is a real detriment to the excitement of the game, but issuing red cards risks ruining the contest, as it did during the Liverpool-Atlético Madrid game. The hope would be that the threat of a red card would largely stop players committing professional fouls. I am not so sure. So, I would like to see an experiment whereby the offending player is sent off but the team can replace them with a substitute, if they have not already used all their allowed substitutes.”

This is an idea worth exploring — as is an orange card, where a player guilty of a tactical foul is taken out of the game for 10 minutes, say — but my immediate worry would be that this basically guarantees three significant tactical fouls per team, per game.