The Anatomy of a Party

Merry times

The season of frost and fairy lights is here again, and I am reminded of Max.

Max and his group of ten friends - they called themselves the Eagle Gang - lived within a few kilometres of each other. One evening, fuelled by several pints of beer, they decided to formalise plans for their annual Christmas house party. They made a cocktail of the simple with the unnecessary, and came up with a process. Every summer, they’d spend a weekend together to choose the host. Four hopefuls would come with PowerPoint slides and present their cases as the best host for that year. The rest of the gang would be the jury.

Space, decor, food, drinks, logistics, ease of travel - everything would be scrutinised with parliamentary gravitas. Music, too, was of key importance, although bound by one iron-clad rule: acoustic guitarists with an obsession for Wonderwall were banned.

Once all the presentations were closely evaluated, the voting process - by which I mean writing the name of a friend on a piece of torn paper - would begin. The winner would be announced after a tea break.

**

This week, FIFA announced Saudi Arabia as hosts for the 2034 Men’s World Cup.

The FIFA World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world. The 2022 edition was watched by nearly 5 billion viewers across platforms, the final alone attracting 1.5 billion of that. David Goldblatt was accurate when he called football the most popular language in the world.

Hosting rights for such an event are, obviously, deeply coveted. And it’s not just about the tourism money flowing in. For one month, a nation becomes the world’s focal point, its culture and people advertised in the soft, breathable clothing of sport. An event of this scale gives a chance to shape narratives, to present a carefully curated image to those billion-plus eyes.

The FIFA Congress of 1974. At this meeting, the men’s World Cup was expanded from 16 teams to 24, laying the first bricks for a truly global, full-sized tournament. Source: The Independent.

The process of selecting a host is usually done well in advance. A bunch of bidding nations file their nominations for a specific year’s World Cup. Instead of shoddily-made slides, they have to submit thick dossiers about their plans - everything between infrastructure, tourism, sponsorship laid out with atomic granularity. An executive committee within FIFA shortlists the bidders, and then opens the voting process to the member nations.

Sounds a lot like Max’s party, but the Eagle Gang didn’t have to bother with billions of dollars of taxpayer money. They just needed a simple plan to secure the best plum cake and wine every year. So the rules, although agreed on by everyone, allowed for some looseness. For example, during the evaluation and voting process, all bidders can freely hang out with the rest of the gang, and even lobby for themselves.

Now, imagine if Richard - one of the bidders for 2024’s party - is loaded. He bribes Max and a few others with a crate of Budweiser each, in exchange for a vote. Then he takes them out to watch Deadpool vs Wolverine. And, voila! On D-Day, everyone agrees that Richard’s house is actually a mini version of Buckingham Palace and it is stupid to think of any other venue for this year’s Christmas party.

**

In 2010, Michel Platini - French football legend and UEFA chairman - received a lunch invitation from President Nicolas Sarkozy. He arrived at the venue to find Sarkozy hanging out with the Prime Minister and Emir of Qatar. Over a long lunch, the two men laid out their plans: Qatar were bidding to host the 2022 Men’s World Cup, and were seeking France’s vote. Platini’s stature and position in European football meant that a lot of smaller countries would follow his contrails, so they were actually asking for a bagful of votes through this one “deal”. In exchange, they’d invest generously in France and French football.

Both parties kept their promise. Platini campaigned for Qatar. And, within a year of that meeting, Qatar Sports Investments - a fund bankrolled by their government - bought Paris Saint-Germain. From struggling to stay afloat at the top of French football, PSG were soon dishing out million-dollar cheques to David Beckham, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and Neymar. Some years later, they paid a transfer fee of $154 million for a teenage sensation, one Kylian Mbappe.

Some thousands of miles away, the Qatari and Thai governments were negotiating a natural gas trade deal. Within the delegates was an odd member: the Thai representative at FIFA. Guarantee a vote at the hosting process, and we will sign off on a better deal right here.

Oh, and one more, just for the road. Qatar’s own representative at FIFA, Mohammed bin Hammam, paid Jack Warner, the Trinidad & Tobago rep, nearly $1.5 million in bribes alone. You can safely assume that Warner wasn’t the only beneficiary of bin Hammam’s largesse. Whistleblower Phaedra Almajid claimed that a similar amount was paid to around at least ten such officials.¹

At the FIFA congress, Qatar won by a landslide. Each of their competitors - Japan, USA, and England - had filed more compelling bids. While the USA and England showed ready infrastructure and audience, Japan’s bid went one further. They promised innovation unlike anything seen in football before. For example, one of their plans was to use the footsteps of the in-stadium audience to generate electricity.

None of those bidders, however, could match Qatar when it came to the green, and not just for its ability to facilitate favours.

The economics of hosting a World Cup is a poisoned chalice that few nations can afford. Host countries end up spending billions during preparation. From stadiums and highways to hotels and subways, everything gets a makeover. And that is still just the infrastructure cost. There is so much more to hosting an event of this scale.

I added the Qatar numbers for effect, but key to note here is that Brazil and Russia still spent ~$15 billion. Brazil actually ended up spending more than Russia. A lot of their new stadiums and training camps lay dormant today.

When countries like the USA, Japan, or England bid, they automatically become strong contenders. Because of healthy economies and a dense football tradition, their infrastructure is well-maintained, their stadiums are ready, and they have a home audience primed for the experience.

Some traditional powers, however, are bad choices for hosting such events. Brazil 2014 is an interesting case.

To understand Brazil and football is to understand love in its most primal form – the kind that you are almost born with, that ends up becoming a second skin. In a land where economic graphs have always resembled a cardiogram in distress, football offers a different, more spiritual, kind of wealth. When a Brazilian child first touches a ball, they inherit not just a sport but a civilisation’s pride, passed down through generations like a family heirloom. Excellence and flair are sacred duties.

Brazil have won more World Cups than any other nation, and are the only team to qualify for every edition since the first one in 1930.

But in all that time, they had hosted just the one edition: in 1950. And that was a momentous tournament. It was football’s comeback after the Second World War, and Brazil’s announcement of athletic and technical pre-eminence. They looked destined to win - the press had already announced them as champions - until they fluffed their lines in the final minutes of the last act. That heartbreak took years to get over.²

The World Cup coming back to Brazil felt like a touch of romance. That is, for everyone living outside the country. Within the borders, there was only one emotion: fear. Their economy was in no position to host a tournament of this size. To add salt to a festering wound, they had also won the right to host the 2016 Olympics. This was like someone with a ruptured cruciate ligament choosing to run back-to-back marathons.

The streets lit up in agony. The protests started small, then swelled like a wave, soon becoming ten thousand-strong in the major cities.

“A law which requires local governments to balance their budgets was suspended for cities hosting soccer matches, clearing the way for huge public spending which allegedly lined the pockets of politicians. In Cuiaba, five public works projects were begun on the same day. None of them will be finished in time for the tournament. It's all fiction. Nobody can really say what is being spent.

Hospitals and schools are falling down while stadiums are rising up. The government in Rio tried to demolish one of the best elementary schools in the country to make room for a parking lot near the Maracanã Stadium, where the World Cup final will be played.” - Wright Thompson, here.

The protest outside Brasilia's World Cup stadium in June was about much more than the World Cup itself. Gustavo Froner/Reuters

Qatar came to FIFA with a heavy suitcase. They promised to build a paradise in the desert. New, air-conditioned stadiums would defy the sun itself; and massive public spaces would accommodate every tourist flying into Doha. And they’d do all of that without hurting the nation’s economy. Saudi Arabia now makes similar promises, though they start with more pieces already on the board from a longer tradition of football than most give them credit for.

So, what’s the problem?

While bribery and lobbying can be seen as byproducts of an environment that understands only the language of money, inhumanity can neither be ignored nor dismissed.

As an exercise, type “Amnesty International Qatar World Cup” on Google’s search bar and watch the autocomplete results fill out within a blink. Click through the reports, and the tragedy will reveal itself layer by layer. A Nepali worker’s last letter home, the exact temperature of a midday shift, the width of a bunk bed shared by three men. The videos, shot by brave journalists on shaking phones and uploaded in mortal fear, show what statistics cannot: the dust-filled barracks, the queues for water, the crumbs that were given for lunch.

By the time Lionel Messi lifted the golden World Cup trophy into Doha’s winter sky, nearly 500 workers had died building the theatres of this roadshow – a number that feels simultaneously too vast to grasp and too small to capture the true scale of the loss.

Do you want to hazard a guess about how well those workers were paid? The tragedy of Qatar’s World Cup wasn’t just the loss of life - it was how these deaths became footnotes in FIFA’s grand narrative of progress. A collateral of business in football’s new frontier.

This time, with a move equal amounts predictable and tragic, they have raised the bar for shamelessness.

The masthead for Saudi Arabia’s bid for the 2034 World Cup, the man on the poster of many official announcements, is Mohammed bin Salman. Among a catalogue of items that get murkier with every page, he is most well known for ordering the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi Arabian government even ordered Netflix to take down the episode of Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act which focussed on MbS and his authoritarian empire.

Like Qatar, Saudi Arabia is a popular tag in Amnesty International’s archives. In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2024 report, Saudi Arabia received a score of 1 out of 40 for political rights and 7 out of 60 for civil liberties.

“The award of the 2034 World Cup to what campaign group Reprieve describes as “one of the world’s most brutal authoritarian regimes” is an act of structural violence under the eyes of the world. “People will die,” Amnesty has said. We know this. We have data. We have had 21,000 migrant worker deaths since 2016. We have the absence of proper reforms governing how the next 10 years of feverish construction are supposed to work.” - Barney Ronay, for The Guardian.

Barney Ronay is an excellent writer, one of the best, and The Guardian can usually be trusted for good reporting. But the western media’s outrage, while well-directed, carries its own strain of hypocrisy. They speak of Qatar and Saudi Arabia with passionate indignation, their hearts apparently breaking for migrant workers and women’s rights. They can’t believe that an entire republic could be so dismissive of the LGBTQ+ community in big 2024.

Fair enough, but at no point during any of this is irony allowed to enter the room, for nothing else but to open a conversation about the USA - hosts of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympics - and their rate of gun violence. Their coverage went from Qatar to Saudi Arabia without even taking a pit-stop at the United States of Mass Shooting.

Completely safe country. No notes.

There was barely a whisper about Russia 2018. Forget the whataboutery from the past - Hitler’s Olympics, Videla’s World Cup etc - the current narrative carries more than a hint of selective vision.

Football is Eurocentric. Europeans formalised and organised the game, and then spread its gospel across the world. Today, they watch uncomfortably as their beautiful game is purchased by those who learned capitalism’s lessons a bit too well. I guess everyone’s a bully until the real bully enters the room. Truth is, in this story, no one wears white.

The other problem - definitely the more damning one - is that Saudi Arabia won the 2034 bid uncontested.

Asia was likely to get the hosting rights - World Cup 2026 is in North and Central America; 2030 will be shared between Europe, Africa, and South America. Ideally, Japan should’ve been frontrunners, given they submitted a bid for World Cup 2022 and have a mature football ecosystem ready to tap into. But, early in the bidding process, the FIFA and Asian Football Confederation (AFC) chiefs decided on a “united” bid for 2034. One by one, every country fell in line, throwing their weight behind Saudi Arabia. China withdrew, Japan withdrew, and Indonesia had no choice but to become an ally for Team Green.

Unsurprisingly so.

Recently, the research foundation called Play the Game uploaded a report that lined up Saudi Arabia’s hold in sports. The first two numbers immediately pop out at you: 910 sponsorships in sports, 194 in football alone. But that’s just the cover page. The report is 45 pages long, and it gets better.

Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, heads a finance company called The Public Investment Fund (PIF). According to Play the Game’s research, the fund now boasts a portfolio of 346 sponsorships in sports, including ownership of massive football clubs like Newcastle United. PIF also owns four of the ten clubs playing in the Saudi Pro League. One of those teams, Al-Nassr, is captained by Cristiano Ronaldo, who is on a base salary of more than a million quid per week.

The report found another key figure in Ahmed al-Khateed, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Tourism and chief of the tourism bureau Visit Saudi. The company has its tentacles spread across all popular sports, touching everything from Formula One to La Liga.

And here’s the cherry on the cake: Visit Saudi is also an Official Global Partner of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC). On a scale of evening-stroll to Sisyphus-carrying-a-boulder, how tough do you think it was for Saudi Arabia to convince those within the AFC to get behind their bid?

Between Neom, Aramco, Riyadh Air, and all the companies built to carry out the Kingdom’s sportswashing, the writing on the wall was in large font, capitalised letters, and a dark shade of blood. A World Cup in Saudi Arabia was a question of when, not if.

And there will be more, all around us. Aramco are already major sponsors of the Indian Premier League. The recent player auctions happened in the epicentre of Indian cricket - you know, Riyadh. Dubai and Abu Dhabi have already hosted a T20 World Cup. Maybe a new tennis Grand Slam can happen in the Middle East too. The groundwork has already been laid.

Such a brazen ecosystem can only be achieved by operating within a carefully built bubble. Over a century, from those first bricks of an Italian team giving the fascist salute, sport has built an edifice so hermetically sealed that even the faintest whisper of dissent or public disenchantment cannot get through to the core chamber. You have to admire the craftsmanship, if nothing else.

What does this mean for the future? Nothing, really, apart from the needle moving further in its programmed arc. With every such event, that pure thing we once called sport unravels a little more, revealing more of its flesh where everything is up for barter. Convicts and rapists get platformed because their persona attracts audience, mass murderers are allowed to organise tournaments, all good.

Besides, they have us where they want us - sport’s appeal remains timeless, the viewership keeps growing, and even the cynics can’t look away. Our outrage lasts till the referee’s first whistle. By the time the ball rolls, we would’ve moved on to the next bleak thing anyway.

As for Max and his Christmas party, I heard that the plum cake was incredible last year, but everyone got food poisoning after.

1. Check out the Netflix Documentary FIFA Uncovered. It is based on David Conn’s book, The Fall of the House of FIFA.

2. The final against Uruguay, thought to be a formality for Brazil, turned on its head in the second half. At the Maracana Stadium, 173000 people watched as Brazil’s dream crashed, and then burned. Millions more shed their tears at homes and pubs. You’d think seismic is too strong a word for a lost final, but it isn’t. The 1950 World Cup final remains a major event in Brazil’s football history.