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What’s driven Qatar’s extravagant spending for this= year’s World Cup? Sarath K. Ganji on a powerful strategy for global = influence and the subtle tactics of “sportswashing.”

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Game Within the Game

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What’s d= riven Qatar’s extravagant spending for this year’s World Cup? <= strong>Sarath K. Ganji on a powerful strategy for global influence= and the subtle tactics of “sportswashing.”

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Nasif Tazwar

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Twelve= years ago in Zurich, the international football federation FIFA a= warded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, an Arabian Gulf state well known for it= s oil wealth—and quite unknown at the time for any established associ= ation with the sport of football. Since, the Qatari government has spent no= t only billions of dollars developing stadiums and other sporting facilitie= s for the tournament but hundreds of billions on supporting infrastructure&= mdash;from elaborately renovated airports and highways to advanced new tran= sit systems and luxury hotels. Holding a World Cup has long meant significa= nt investment from a host country, but even by historical standards, Qatar&= rsquo;s has been enormous. Meanwhile, over the more than a decade the count= ry has spent preparing for the tournament, it’s also been expanding i= ts football presence globally. Through majority state-owned corporations su= ch as Qatar Airways, it’s directed billions into sponsorship deals wi= th high-profile European clubs like FC Barcelona, FC Bayern Munich, and AS = Roma. Through its state media conglomerate beIN Media Group, it’s put= billions more into contracts for global broadcasting rights. And through Q= atar Sports Investments, a subsidiary of its sovereign wealth fund, it boug= ht the French club Paris Saint-Germain in 2011—just months after winn= ing the 2022 World Cup bid—for US$58 million, transforming the French= team into one of the most valuable sports properties in the world, valued = today at US$3.2 billion. What’s motivated all of this?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Sarath K. Ganji is a foreign-policy= analyst based in the United States, previously in the Arabian Gulf, and a = recent Penn Kemble Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. As Ganji= explains, Qatar’s investment in football belongs to a strategy that&= rsquo;s emerged across the Gulf monarchies—and among autocratic regim= es globally—to win the hearts and minds of Western publics and, ultim= ately, secure the allegiances of Western elites. It’s a complication = for these regimes that the strategy can also bring unwanted attention to th= eir human-rights transgressions—but so far, that’s not getting = in the way.

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——= —

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Eve Valentine: How did the World Cup end= up in Qatar this year?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Sarath K. Ganji: It won the bid back in = December 2010. That was despite being relatively new on the global sports s= cene—and really, despite not having a particularly deep football hist= ory or culture at all. But by then, Qatar had been investing a lot of money= in football as part of a strategy of economic diversification. Why? This i= s a country with the third-largest oil fields in the world—and the nu= mber-one exporter of liquefied natural gas. Hydrocarbon wealth has been the= driver of Qatar’s economic development—and hydrocarbon wealth = is inherently limited; it’s only going to last for so long. That&rsqu= o;s the context for the country’s interest in investing in sports&mda= sh;and its campaign to host the 2022 World Cup.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Originally, Qatar’s investment in football goes bac= k to the 1970s, when it got involved in a regional cup featuring a number o= f Arabian states. Gradually, that interest expanded over into auto racing, = which is very big in the Middle East; then global sports broadcasting, with= Al Jazeera Sport; and from there, sports sponsorships—and eventually= the full acquisition of the French football team Paris Saint Germain, PSG,= in 2011. At the same time, Qatar was investing increasingly in big multi-s= port competitions and state-of-the-art sporting infrastructure. In 2006, it= hosted the Asian Games—the second largest multi-sporting event in th= e world, behind the Olympics—which was a major success. The previous = year, it opened the Aspire Zone, a world-class 250-hectare sporting complex= in Doha.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Qatar made a few unsuccessful bids to host the Olympics t= hemselves along the way, but the Asian Games and the Aspire Zone gave its l= eadership a lot of confidence by the time the country secured the World Cup= for 2022.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09Valentine: Why did it win the bid?

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Ganji<= /strong>: When Sepp Blatter became the president of FIFA in 1998, he announ= ced that he wanted to take the World Cup to places beyond Europe, North Ame= rica, and South America—its traditional settings. So Africa was to ge= t a World Cup; the Middle East was to get one; East Asia was to get one. Th= e notion was that every part of the world has a football culture and can ac= commodate an event like this, given the chance. That’s the ideal Blat= ter articulated.

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=09=09=09=09=09=09But for decades now, there’s been a shift in FIFA&r= squo;s business model from professionalization to, you could say, commercia= lization. That began under FIFA’s president João Havelange in = the 1970s and continued with Blatter into the ’80s—all the more= after he became president in the ’90s. There’s been a lot of r= eporting—corroborated by documents leaked in the FIFA Files, Football= Leaks, and the Pandora Papers—on the machinations behind the FIFA ex= ecutive committee’s decisions on broadcasting rights for World Cups a= nd on who gets to host them.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09Since 2010, this reporting has uncovered evidence of brib= es and payouts, along with a broader pattern of collusion and corruption, a= ssociated with Qatar winning the bid. A lot of the reporting centers on the= Qatari billionaire Mohammed bin Hammam, who was able to use his position a= s the president of the Asian Football Confederation, as well as his close c= onnections to the Qatari royal family—the House of Thani—to dir= ect funds to the African Football Confederation, for example. He was able t= o influence CONCACAF—the Confederation of North, Central America and = Caribbean Association Football—through their former head, Jack Warner= . And so on.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09At the same time, the Qatari royal family held meetings w= ith Michel Platini, then the head of UEFA—the Union of European Footb= all Associations—as well as France’s then-president Nicolas Sar= közy. Altogether, these connections and lines of influence swung enoug= h votes in Qatar’s favor.
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=09=09=09=09=09=09Ultimately, Qatar used its wealth, and the shortcomings i= n FIFA’s governance, to buy the World Cup—despite well founded = questions about the country’s ability to create eight new stadiums, p= roperly accommodate swaths of fans in the heat of the summer, and put on a = carbon-neutral, logistically sound tournament overall. On all these questio= ns, the technical documentation had rated Qatar quite poorly—certainl= y behind the United States, which many believed should have won the 2022 bi= d. And all the logistical concerns have since borne out to one degree or an= other—with relatively low attendance across a number of stadiums and = with accommodation difficulties, including whole fan villages having to iss= ue refunds because they weren’t in the end finished or even functiona= l.
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Moosa Moseneke

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More from = Sarath K. Ganji at The Signal:

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=09=09=09=09=09=09“The goal with all these investments has been to tie Qatar so closely to its target western states that it ca= n count on them as reliable allies if its territorial integrity or politica= l economy should end up being threatened in the future. One of Qatar’= s guiding premises has been that these target countries—both their pu= blics and their policy makers—will never care about you, a small stat= e in the Arabian Gulf, if they don’t have a reason to. So Qatar wants= mindshare in these places. To Qatar, the World Cup is a way to ta= ke up and capture that mindshare—and, the Qataris hope, irreversibly = deepen the interdependencies they’ve been creating since the 1990s to= assure their economic and geopolitical security.”

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=09=09=09=09=09=09“I can’t see sportswashing unwinding = as a strategy for authoritarian regimes anytime soon. One reason i= s that it succeeds, for the most part, very gradually. Autocratic states li= ke Qatar have become so adept at scaling the value chain in their sportswas= hing operations in ways that sustain their investments. They host tournamen= ts; they sponsor kits; they buy teams, and then they transform these teams,= with enormous resources, into steady champions and global brands. It&rsquo= ;s incremental, and it works.”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09“The authoritarian approach to globalizatio= n you see in sportswashing isn’t, as a whole, actually uniqu= e to sports. So my broader concern with this approach is about how much we = see it in different areas—such as higher education or health care, fo= r example. Here, autocratic states have been forming bonds with the Georget= owns or the NYUs of the world, or the Cleveland Clinics of the world—= first through student exchanges, then through teacher exchanges, then throu= gh curriculum development, and eventually by bringing entire brick-and-mort= ar locations to Abu Dhabi. You’re seeing the same scaling of value ch= ains across a range of sectors—which is allowing autocracies to stren= gthen and diversify their economies in the ways they want to, while also pr= ogressively influencing foreign publics and foreign elites.”
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The Signal exp= lores urgent questions in current events around the world—to support = it and for full access:

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