Hadid, Zaha

From a desert tent to a golden bowl, the spectacular arenas Qatar has built in and around Doha showcase the majesty, and the folly, of this World Cup.AL KHOR, Qatar — It’s hard to convey how strange it is to come upon Al Bayt Stadium, an enormous stylized tent decorated with black stripes, for the first time. Designed for the World Cup as a homage to traditional nomadic dwellings, Al Bayt, the centerpiece of a manicured park 22 miles north of Doha, rises as if from nowhere and seems at once apt and incongruous, spectacular and otherworldly — an oasis in the desert, or maybe just a mirage.Completed just last year, Al Bayt is one of seven new stadiums built for the World Cup in and around Doha, the capital of Qatar. (An eighth is a spruced-up version of an old stadium.) Each is more spectacular, more unexpected than the next. Each contributes to the relentless sense of cognitive dissonance that pervades this World Cup.Qatar spent a reported $220 billion preparing for the tournament, conjuring new buildings, new neighborhoods and even an entirely new city. To be here now is to exist in a bubble of high unreality: a place in which everything is newer and better, and which exists, for the time being, only in reference to itself.On match days, it takes nearly an hour by bus to get to Al Bayt. All of the other stadiums are easily reachable on the underground metro system, or connected to it by free buses, so this has become a commuters’ World Cup, an event more reminiscent of an Olympics than previous tournaments. In Russia in 2018, for instance, some fans had to travel to Yekaterinburg, nearly 1,000 miles from Moscow, for a handful of matches. In Brazil four years earlier, the trip from Manaus to Pôrto Alegre was more than twice as far.But here you can visit all the stadiums in a single day.Education City Stadium in Al Rayyan.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesStadium 974 in Doha.Clive Mason/Getty ImagesTake the train west on the green line, for example, past the Qatar National Library (architect: Rem Koolhaas), and you find yourself in Education City, a 2,900-acre campus comprising schools, research centers and incubators. Walk a little way along the path and there is the 40,000-seat Education City Stadium, looming like a spaceship from a superior civilization whose inhabitants have a taste for bling. During the day, it changes color as the sun moves across the sky; at night, disco-style lights streak across it, fueled by thousands of diodes.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More