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      To Get the Best Perks at the World Cup, You Have to Be a V.V.I.P.

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      Every sports venue has its own tiered system of luxury. The World Cup in Qatar is providing a reminder that there is always a higher level.AL KHOR, Qatar — With its haughty aura of exclusivity, the red-carpeted, velvet-roped V.I.P. entrance at Al Bayt Stadium seems designed to inspire maximal awe and envy. As regular fans were herded through their gates at the England-United States game on Friday, the V.I.P. guests were welcomed by an exotic figure dressed as some sort of antelope, covered head to toe in shimmering golden squares.(When pressed on its identity, the figure, who was not supposed to speak, muttered under its breath: “Oryx.”)But this is the Qatar World Cup, where there is something even better than the V.I.P. entrance: the V.V.I.P. entrance.Not that it is available, or even fully visible, to you. Flanked by barriers and cut off from the normal road system, Al Bayt’s V.V.I.P. entrance is a sweeping thoroughfare on which the most important fans, starting with Qatar’s emir, who arrives by helicopter with his entourage and then hops into a Mercedes, are chauffeured directly into their special enclave in the stadium. That way, they are never required to interact with, or even occupy the same general space as, regular fans.Aat Al Thumama stadium, the most high-profile fans enter on a red carpet.Tasneem Alsultan for The New York TimesOn the way to Education City Stadium, drivers select a lane based on their V.I.P. status.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesEvery sports venue has its tiered system of luxury — the owner’s box, the business lounges, the special-access elevators, the ridiculously expensive seats, the even more ridiculously expensive seats. But at this year’s World Cup, the convergence of two entities awash in luxury and entitlement — Qatar, where all power and privilege flow from the emir, and FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, with its vast wealth and patronage network — provides a bracing reminder that there is always a more rarefied degree of exclusive.The main difference between the luxury and non-luxury seats at this year’s World Cup is alcohol. In a shock to fans (and to Budweiser, the official beer of the tournament since 1986), Qatar reversed itself and decreed just before the event began that the sale of alcoholic beer (indeed, alcohol of any kind) would be banned in and around the stadiums.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Qatar’s Loudest Fans Aren’t from Qatar

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      A heaving mass of flesh and energy has brought life to the host nation’s matches at the World Cup. They are Qatar’s loudest fans, but they’re not from Qatar.DOHA, Qatar — Midway through the second half of Qatar’s match against Senegal at the World Cup, the drumming stopped as a man in a bucket hat and sunglasses rose and asked for quiet.Moments earlier, a section of the crowd — more than a thousand strong, almost all men, all of them in identical maroon T-shirts with the word “Qatar” in English and Arabic — had been chanting in unison at the direction of four fan leaders. But now the sea of men understood what was expected, and they followed the order and fell into a strange silence as the match noise swirled around them inside Al Thumama Stadium.Then a signal was made. And the crowd exploded back to life.“Play, the Maroon!” they chanted over and over in Arabic, a reference to the nickname of Qatar’s national team. The men linked arms in long lines and jumped up and down. The floor below them shook.The scene was more reminiscent of soccer stadiums in South America and Europe than in Qatar, and the cheering section evoked those of the ultras, a highly organized soccer fan culture with roots in Italy that can be found across the globe, including in North Africa and the Middle East.That was the point. The fans’ noise filled the stadium, as it had five days earlier during Qatar’s opening game against Ecuador. Their numbers conveyed strength. Their relentless energy was infectious. But the body art on many of them gave them away.The tattoos, which are extremely rare and highly frowned upon in Gulf society, seemed to suggest the fans weren’t Qatari. So who were they? And where did they come from?An energetic supporters section has brought life, and noise, to matches played by Qatar.Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesImported SoundThe plan was hatched at the start of 2022, as the World Cup was finally coming into view. Qatar had been besieged by criticism ever since it won the rights to host the World Cup: over a corrupted vote that delivered it, over its treatment of migrant workers, over the ability of the tiny country to host and house more than a million visitors. But in the background was also another common criticism: that the country had no soccer culture.Qatar had never qualified for a World Cup on its merits. The Qatar Stars League is one of the richest in the region, with state-of-the-art air-conditioned stadiums. But the crowds for teams like Al Sadd and Al Rayyan often number in the hundreds rather than the thousands. Who, the organizers wondered, would fill the stadiums when Qatar played? Who would provide the soundtrack?The answer was to tap into the region’s already fertile ultras culture and import it.But that same culture is an unlikely fit with the commercialized reality of Qatar’s World Cup. The code of ultra culture is antagonistic and deeply anti-authority, and in constant conflict with the police and the news media. In the Middle East and North Africa, ultras have been politically influential, too: Egyptian ultras played a key role in the 2011 Arab Spring that toppled Hosni Mubarak as president, and such was their street power and popularity that ultras were barred by one of his successors, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after he came to power in a coup.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Saudi Commuters Descend on Doha for an In-and-Out World Cup

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      A victory over Argentina inspired a kingdom’s soccer fans. And when Qatar is just a short flight, you go.DOHA, Qatar — Planes were landing, from all around the world, every few minutes. They came from London and Tokyo, Hong Kong and São Paulo. There would be about 300 scheduled passenger flights landing at Hamad International Airport on Saturday.But among them were dozens of planes that had not come far, sometimes just a few hundred miles from the west and after barely reaching cruising altitude. They came from Saudi Arabia, Qatar’s next-door neighbor, and they carried excited people in green jerseys and with no bags to check.These World Cup commuters would not stay long. Kickoff was at 4 p.m. They would wake up back home on Sunday, a work day, in their own beds.They were soccer fans, and they carried only what they needed: banners, flags and a passport. And they brought a renewed sense of collective expectation as they arrived to cheer Saudi Arabia, the unlikely darling of the tournament, if not the entire Middle East.Beating Argentina will do that. Every game, now, is bigger than the last. After losing to Poland, 2-0, the next, against Mexico on Wednesday, will decide if Saudi Arabia reaches the round of 16. That hope will generate another day like this one.By midmorning, the airport in Doha was spilling out bursts of green. Among them were the brothers Faris and Salman al-Hassan, fresh off a short flight from Riyadh and wearing green jerseys and scarves.They could have come by car, they said — Doha is about six hours from Riyadh — but Qatar, nervous about car traffic, disincentivized that idea for the World Cup. It created a temporary toll of 5,000 Saudi riyal (about $1,330) for those driving across the border during the tournament.An alternative was to park at the border and hop on a bus at the Abu Samra, Qatar, checkpoint, as thousands of others had done over the past week. The no-frills bus ride is little more than an hour, but the bus is not the hard part: Abu Samra is hours from any major Saudi city.So the choice was made by thousands: Commute by air.Get in. Cheer. Get out.“We will go straight to the stadium and come right back,” Salman al-Hassan said.About 20 flights arrived in Doha from Saudi Arabian cities between dawn and 1 p.m. on Saturday, timed just for the afternoon kickoff.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      What We Learned About the U.S. In Its Match Against England

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      A feisty 0-0 tie against World Cup contender England gave the U.S. a chance — and perhaps the courage — to advance in the tournament.AL KHOR, Qatar — The chant came from deep in one corner of the stadium, ringing out loud and clear for a few moments before fading back into the general cacophony of the night.“It’s called soc-cer!” the United States fans bellowed at their England counterparts. “It’s called soc-cer!”As the United States has seen its soccer culture develop in recent decades, it has always used the great powers of Europe as a handy measuring stick, a mark of how far it has come and how far it still needs to go. Yet it is England, a country that prefers to call the sport football and definitely believes it is better than the Americans at playing it, that has always served as the reference point that matters most.The evidence is visible across the United States soccer landscape: American fans, old and new, now spend weekend mornings watching matches from England’s Premier League on television. In American soccer stadiums, they borrow liberally from English sports culture, making it their own, refracting it through a U.S. lens, but leaving no question of its DNA. And the best American players still dream of one day going overseas, anywhere at first, but eventually to stardom in Britain’s most storied stadiums.On Friday night, the United States got a rare opportunity to measure the shrinking distance between the countries’ teams, and by most assessments performed admirably, scrapping to a scoreless tie that left the Americans holding their World Cup destiny in their hands.The result — and small moments like the fans’ sassy chant — sent the message that the United States was ascendant and ambitious for more.“There’s a lot of people that obviously thought we were going to get blown out,” said the American midfielder Weston McKennie. “We went into this game, to the outside world, as obvious underdogs. But we didn’t feel like an underdog at all, because we know our capability, we know what we can do, we know what talent and fight and spirit we have.”A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      Qataris Say Criticism of Country Amid World Cup Is Rooted in Stereotypes

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      Many in the country say the barrage of criticism about its human rights record and the exploitation of migrant workers is laced with discrimination and hypocrisy.When the singer Rod Stewart was offered more than $1 million to perform in Qatar, he said, he turned it down.“It’s not right to go,” Mr. Stewart told the The Sunday Times of London recently, joining a string of public figures to declare boycotts or express condemnation of Qatar as the Gulf nation hosts the soccer World Cup.In the prelude to the tournament, which started this past weekend, Qatar has faced an increasing barrage of criticism over its human rights record, including the authoritarian monarchy’s criminalization of homosexuality and the well-documented abuse of migrant workers.Yet Mr. Stewart voiced no such disapproval when he performed in 2010 in Dubai or 2017 in Abu Dhabi, cities in the nearby United Arab Emirates — a country that also has an authoritarian monarchy and has faced allegations of human rights violations but that has more successfully cultivated a Western-friendly image. Mr. Stewart declined a request for comment through his public relations firm.That kind of dissonance is one that has increasingly frustrated Qataris as they face the glare of the international spotlight that trains on each World Cup. The tournament has brought a disproportionate burst of negative coverage, they say, and spawned descriptions of their country and people that feel outdated and stereotypical, painting an image of Qatar that they barely recognize.Qataris say that they are calling out the double standards. Why, they ask, do Europeans buy natural gas from Qatar if they find the country so abhorrent that they cannot watch soccer there? Why don’t some of the international figures who have spoken out against Qatar do the same for the United Arab Emirates?They have also said that they hope the first World Cup to be held in an Arab nation will challenge stereotypes about Qataris, Arabs and Muslims.Instead, it sometimes seems to have done the opposite.A “fan village” in Doha, made up of shipping containers converted into small accommodation units.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIn a speech last month, the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, called the opprobrium “an unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced.” Speaking to a German newspaper, the Qatari foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, said that some of the criticism was racist and arrogant.Organizers have said that at least 15,000 journalists are expected to visit Qatar, a country with a population of three million, for the World Cup. The torrent of reporting has been overwhelming for a country that rarely makes global news. That is partly why Qatari officials wanted to host the tournament. It fits into a broader, decades-long push by Qatar’s rulers to turn the once-obscure country into a prominent global player, a strategy funded by vast natural gas wealth.A Brief Guide to the 2022 World CupCard 1 of 9What is the World Cup? More

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      How Do You Pronounce Qatar? Probably Incorrectly.

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      WORLD CUP 2022 Sooner or later the moment will arrive for everyone, or at least everyone who doesn’t speak Arabic but hopes to discuss this year’s World Cup without sounding like a total idiot. What happens when conversational circumstance forces us to utter the word “Qatar” in public? Is it Kuh-TAR, like guitar? Or Kuh-TAH, […] More