Michel Platini was expecting a private audience with the president of France when he arrived for lunch on a cold day in November 2010. Instead, as Platini, a legendary French player who in retirement had risen to become one of the most powerful men in soccer, stepped into a lavish salon inside the president’s official residence, he noticed immediately that the man he had come to see, Nicolas Sarkozy, was absent.
Instead, Platini was directed toward a small group chatting across the room, and to a conversation that would alter the course of his career, stain his reputation, and forever change the sport to which he had dedicated his life.
Platini smiled as he was formally introduced to the lunch’s guests of honor: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who would, within a few years, replace his father as the country’s absolute ruler. The Qataris had come to Paris to discuss a plan that bordered on the fantastical: Their tiny, impossibly wealthy Gulf state wanted to host the World Cup.
Platini, a vice president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, had long been cool to the idea. A year earlier, he had told friends that he believed allowing Qatar — a country without any meaningful soccer tradition, one lacking basic infrastructure like stadiums — to stage the biggest sporting event in the world would prove disastrous for FIFA. Only two months previously, he had confided to a rival United States bid that he wanted the 2022 tournament to go “anywhere but Qatar.”
At some point that afternoon, though, Platini’s reservations melted away. What happened to change his mind over lunch with a late-arriving Sarkozy and the two Qataris remains, more than a decade later, resolutely obscure and fiercely contested. Platini himself has offered at least two distinct versions of events — in both he said his vote was his own choice, and not reflective of outside influence — and in 2019 he was detained, but not charged, by French investigators said to be looking into the meeting.
By then, though, the deal was done: A week after the lunch, inside a cavernous conference hall in Zurich, Qatar was confirmed as the host of the 2022 World Cup.
The world’s most popular sport has been reckoning with the consequences of that decision ever since.
American investigators and FIFA itself have since said multiple FIFA board members accepted bribes to swing the vote to Qatar. (Platini was not among them.) A broad corruption investigation into how FIFA conducts business led to dozens of arrests. Those cases and others helped bring down the entire leadership of FIFA, and almost toppled the institution itself.
But the decision also irrevocably altered the economics of top-flight soccer. Having won the World Cup, Qatar quickly moved to establish itself as a true power in the sport. Within a year of the lunch at the Élysée Palace, Qatari interests had bought the French team Paris St.-Germain, and a Qatari-owned sports network had begun pouring money into European soccer by buying up broadcasting rights. That influx of cash not only affected what top players earned and where they played: It also briefly threatened to drive an irreconcilable wedge between a handful of the sport’s richest teams and the rest of the game.
At the same time, it inspired a frenzy of construction as a tiny Gulf country was, in effect, remade in a stunning nation-building project that, according to human rights groups, cost thousands of migrant workers their lives, a figure Qatar rejects.
And now, with long-feared cultural disputes playing out, it has arrived at a point that once seemed unthinkable: hundreds of the world’s finest soccer players and more than a million fans gathering in a thumb-shaped peninsula in the Persian Gulf, ready for the tournament that changed the game.
The Bid That Broke FIFA
For much of the 20th century, Qatar was a barren Persian Gulf backwater better known for pearl diving than power politics. Its people were poor, lagging far behind their Saudi neighbors.
Then Qatar struck gas.
The discovery in 1971 of the world’s largest gas field led to the first transformation of Qatar: turning it into one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and emboldening its leaders to see their nation not just as an appendage of its wealthier neighbors, but as a true geopolitical rival. The quest to host the World Cup, then, was just another step: the chance to announce themselves, to tell their story, on a truly global stage.
Qatar has for years rejected criticisms of its effort to win the World Cup as jealousy or, worse, Western racism. But having the money and the ambition to host the tournament was one thing. Winning the right to do so was quite another. And in 2010, that was Qatar’s biggest problem.
A week or so before the two dozen members of FIFA’s executive committee — including Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president, and Platini — were scheduled to decide which of the five competing bids would win the right to host the 2022 World Cup, Harold Mayne-Nicholls landed in Zurich.
A suave, soccer-obsessed Chilean, Mayne-Nicholls wielded considerable power, at least in theory. He had led the inspection team dispatched by FIFA to assess each of the bidders, and the evaluation reports his team created had the potential to swing the vote.
His verdict on Qatar — the product of a three-day visit to Doha in September 2009 — was hardly a resounding endorsement. While the country had scaled back on some of its initial plans, which included building an artificial island big enough to be seen from space, the inspectors still harbored seemingly insurmountable doubts.
No. 1: Qatar was too small. “It was a huge problem for organization,” Mayne-Nicholls said. And No. 2: In the (Northern Hemisphere) summer, the traditional window for playing the World Cup, it was simply too hot.
Qatar had gamely tried to assuage those concerns by building a small stadium to demonstrate the futuristic air-conditioning system it said would ensure all of the games would be played in close to ideal conditions. Mayne-Nicholls was impressed, but the issue remained.
“The problem would be for supporters on nongame days,” he said. It is 38 or 40 degrees Celsius in June, he said, or more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “It is impossible to do anything on the street.”
Even the Qataris believed his verdict was a crushing blow. One official who worked on Qatar’s bid admitted the evaluation report was “embarrassing.”
The more Mayne-Nicholls talked to the various administrators and plutocrats on the FIFA board, though, the more he was struck by how little his presentation had done to diminish support for Qatar among the men who held votes. Only one, he said, had asked to see the full reports. Most seemed to have made up their minds.
“They were telling me that the Qataris were coming really strongly,” he said. “They were the ones that voted. I immediately realized that Qatar would win.”
He was not the only one. On the eve of the vote, a consultant with Qatar’s bid recalled turning to a senior Qatari bid official and asking how things looked. He was shocked by the certainty of the response: “It’s done.”
He was right. Even before Blatter opened the envelope to confirm that the Middle East would host the World Cup for the first time, Al Jazeera, the news network based in Doha, had broadcast news of Qatar’s victory.
The fallout, though, was just beginning. Two members of the committee had not even been permitted to vote, having been suspended after being recorded by undercover reporters trying to sell their ballots.
