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World Cup 2022: Qatar


maqroll

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What began as farce and blatant corruption is now becoming literally deadly, as reports are claiming unsafe and brutal migrant slave labor conditions (over 25 Nepalese workers confirmed dead).

Now Blatter is pushing through with plans to schedule the event over the winter, throwing most of the world's leagues' into utter chaos.

I've said it before, Sepp Blatter needs to be brought before the Hague, and his little dog, too.  (Platini)

I really think the English FA should take the lead on this, form a coalition and boycott a Qatari World Cup. Go back to the ping pong balls and pick again. Or better yet, just award it to Australia.

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Yes Maqroll. I'm currently just hoping completely against hope that all they are currently doing is going through a process where they exhaust all possible ways of resolving the situation sensibly. At the end of which they conclude that there's just no getting away from the fact it was a terrible decision to award the World Cup to Qatar and that it has to go back out to a re-bid because it is unworkable. But as I say, hoping against hope. There's no way Blatter would climb down at that point.

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  • 1 year later...

The Beeb

 

So, according to the BBC, FIFA have completed their in house investigation into the award of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar and have concluded that Qatar are lovely and sweet like your granny but the English are naughty and won't play nicely.

 

Well, that's alright then, now, can we have it every other Tuesday during March and then during the night in April please?

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Upon reflection, there was never going to be any other outcome was there? The alledged corruption was a two-way thing and if Qatar were stripped of it, you can bet your bottom dollar that they would've dragged FIFA down with them.

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independent today - 

 

 

 

Quote
The idea had been to stand at the place where the 2022 World Cup would begin, probably in eight Novembers’ time. I failed. You would have to walk on water.

The Lusail Iconic Stadium will host the first and the last matches of the most controversial World Cup for a generation. However, not only does it not yet exist, they are still building the island that it will sit on. That will hold an 80,000-seater stadium, two golf courses, a couple of marinas and, naturally because this is the Arabian Gulf, a vast shopping complex. Doha, Qatar’s capital, often resembles an endless building site and this is its greatest project.

To see what Lusail might be like, you can go to its sister island, The Pearl. It has a marina that resembles an Arabian Monaco. The only sound on a November night are Ferraris and Maseratis revving outside the showrooms that guard a discreet shopping arcade, where Calvin Klein is the closest you get to Primark. When it is finally finished, it will have cost $15billion. Lusail will cost more.

The most poignant plea to stage a World Cup was made by the head of the Chile FA, Carlos Dittborn, who had seen much of his country reduced to rubble by an earthquake. “Chile must have the World Cup,” he said, “because we have nothing.”

 

Curiously and romantically, Fifa awarded the 1962 tournament to the nation that had nothing. Half a century on, they gave it to the country that has everything.

Qatar has very little in the way of football history Qatar has very little in the way of football history (Getty Images)
Once November is chosen, Qatar will have to plan how to accommodate 300,000 fans in a country of 1.7m. For the 2006 Asian Games, they moored cruise liners by the Al Corniche waterfront, although for the World Cup the government may have to buy up the entire P&O fleet.

The solution may be to stay in Dubai and take the half-hour flight to Doha rather than opt for the strange collection of towns that have been selected to become “World Cup host cities”.

 

Fifa requires eight. Brazil had a dozen because Luiz Lula, the nation’s president when the bid was accepted, had his power base in the north and wanted to reward his backers.

His other promises, a metro system for Fortaleza and a monorail for Manaus, never materialised but it led to what the Italy midfielder, Andrea Pirlo, called “two World Cups, one in the north and one in the south”, won by Germany, the only major nation to realise it and base and acclimatise themselves in the north.

Qatar will be one World Cup, largely based around a single city. Doha will get its metro, the only solution to choking traffic, but, away from the capital, there are the motley “World Cup host cities”.

A proposed new stadium in Al-Wakra, Qatar A proposed new stadium in Al-Wakra, Qatar
My driver had no idea why I would want to travel to Al-Wakra which will stage group and round-of-16 matches in a stadium that critics scoffed was shaped like a vagina. The town has a beach, a striking looking roundabout and rows upon rows of uniform beige houses and the inevitable, frantic building works. It is nothing more than a dormitory town for Doha with a Costa Coffee and a few mini-marts. “That’s it,” my driver said as we arrived.

The driver, who came to Qatar from the horn of Africa “for money, why else does anyone come to Qatar?” was baffled by my decision to visit. Al-Wakra makes Rustenburg, the mining town on the South African veld where England’s footballers went out of their minds with boredom, seem like Paris in the Twenties.

Drive a couple of hours through Qatar’s scrubby, rocky desert with a few telegraph poles and the inevitable cement lorries for company, and you come to Al-Shamal, another “host city”.

It possesses one of the country’s more charming tourist spots, a fort that once guarded the Straits of Hormuz with its Napoleonic-era cannon. It has been granted a 45,000-seater stadium, which will seat nine times more than Al-Shamal’s total population. It will be like staging the Olympics in Nether Wallop.

Qatar’s ambitions are not limited to the World Cup. In a week’s time the state will know whether it has won the right to stage the World Athletics Championships in 2019, in the face of opposition from Barcelona and Eugene in Oregon. They expect to win.

The arguments against it are familiar to anyone who has raged against its award of the World Cup – the heat, the sight of a sport bowing down before the petrodollars and a tournament squeezing itself in to match Qatar’s requirements. The proposal is for the marathon to be run at night.

What the Al-Shamal Stadium in Al-Shamal, Qatar, will look like What the Al-Shamal Stadium in Al-Shamal, Qatar, will look like
Jonathan Edwards competed in a very different Doha 14 years ago. Then, the only prestige hotel was the Sheraton on the Al-Corniche waterfront. The Sheraton is still standing, which would not be true of most buildings in Doha in 2000 – the old town, built when pearl fishing was Qatar’s main source of income, has been moved to another part of the city. But it is dwarfed by newer, bigger, brasher arrivals.

“There is no question they will be able to put on the event,” said Edwards, who was hosting the Doha Goals Sports Forum. “The facilities will be second to none. The issue is the welfare of the athletes.

“I competed in the World Athletics Championships in Seville in 1999. The temperatures rose to 44 degrees; it was like competing in an oven, your head was pounding. They have to be able to look after everyone and that includes the spectators.

“It will be easier for them to stage a World Athletics Championships than it would a World Cup because the tournament is more contained and it would suit athletes more than footballers. We are used to competing in the summer; there are short, explosive events. It wouldn’t, for example, affect my sport, the triple jump, as much as other events. I wouldn’t like to be Mo Farah out there but the idea of staging the marathon at night could be quite dramatic, like the Grand Prix in Singapore. How it will affect the footballers, I am not so sure.”

Edwards is a principled man, a Christian. Did he imagine athletes or footballers, hearing the stories of the heat and the death toll of those who built the stadiums – a number that would have shamed a pharaoh – might boycott either tournament?

“I don’t know enough about the politics,” he said. “What I would say is that the priority of an athlete is the facilities. If those are right, they’ll come.”

Only in a very few cases – the Berlin Olympics, the cricket tours of apartheid South Africa – does sport become overshadowed by politics.

On the auditorium wall where the conference is being held is a line that starts: “All kids around the world want to be Pele,” a modest quote from Pele. The images of the 1970 World Cup are still vividly fresh; a fluid team passing the ball with beauty in the white light of Mexico.  Nobody mentions that the winners returned to Brazil to a reception from a fascist dictatorship.

The moment when Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup, in December 2010 The moment when Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup, in December 2010 (EPA)
Eight years later, when a far bloodier gang of dictators, the Argentine junta, staged the World Cup, the atrocities explained away by an American public-relations firm, only one footballer, the West German midfielder, Paul Breitner, refused to travel. There will be no boycott of Qatar 2022.

The American athletes forced to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan might have wondered what the sacrifice was for when their own country invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

Sebastian Coe, the man leading the IAAF inspection of the bid for the World Athletics Championships, chose to go to Moscow in 1980. “The decision to give the Games to the Soviet Union was made in 1973 and everybody went: ‘errrm I am not sure’. But looking back, I like to think I was part of the infancy of change by going there,” he said. “Big sporting events begin debates about things that politicians never get close to.”

In his appearance at Doha Goals, Lord Coe was clear on two points. The time to judge the success of an Olympics or a World Cup is a decade after it has finished. Barcelona, by his judgement, was a great Olympics because it transformed the city forever.

Coe’s second point is that the Premier League and Fox Television, who have paid $425m to televise the World Cup only to discover a November tournament will clash with the NFL season, will have to swallow it in the name of a global sporting calendar.

Had Qatar been cleverer, they would have involved the whole of the Gulf – Dubai, Bahrain and Muscat. It would have made sense to have had an Arabian World Cup and, given the money Arsenal, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid and Barcelona have taken in inflated sponsorships from the Gulf, few could have argued if, suddenly, the Gulf wanted something back.

But that is to misread the rivalries that split the region. The emirates compete among themselves. The Qatar that won the right to stage the World Cup is not just a country that has everything; it is a nation that wants it all.

 

the stadiums are estimated to cost $16bn, that luisail project is $5.5bn just for the land reclamation, $1.5bn for "entertainment city" on that land, then they have a bridge to bahrain which will cost $5bn, and another bridge called sharq crossing which is another $5bn, a $3bn metro system, a new city called urjuan project which is $35bn...

 

Qatar is happening

 

the only thing i dont like, like i said in the other thread, is that all these deaths are because of the world cup and are a football problem, i completely disagree, all these deaths are because of the construction that is happening regardless and is a construction problem

Edited by blandy
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  • 1 year later...

Just a reminder of how much of a backwards shithole this place is. Women should probably give this world cup a miss.

 

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A Dutch woman is being detained in Qatar on suspicion of adultery after she told police she had been raped.

The 22-year-old, who was on holiday, was drugged in a Doha hotel and woke up in an unfamiliar flat, where she realised she had been raped, her lawyer says.

She was arrested in March on suspicion of having sex outside of marriage. She is due to appear in court on Monday.

The alleged rapist is also being held, but says the sex had been consensual.

A Dutch foreign ministry spokeswoman said the woman, who she named as Laura, had been arrested but not yet been charged.

"We have provided assistance to her since the first day of detention. For the sake of the defendant's case we will not make further comments at this point," the Dutch embassy said in a statement.

'Great horror'

The woman had gone dancing at a hotel in Doha where alcohol was allowed, "but when she returned to the table after the first sip of her drink... she felt very unwell" and realised she had been drugged, her lawyer Brian Lokollo told Dutch broadcaster NOS-Radio1.

Her next memory was waking up in an unfamiliar apartment where she "realised to her great horror that she had been raped," Mr Lokollo added.

The woman may also be charged with an alcohol-related offence, news website Doha News reported.

It is an offence to drink alcohol or be drunk in public in Qatar, although alcohol is allowed at certain hotels and expatriates can obtain a permit for purchasing alcohol.

In 2013, a Norwegian woman in neighbouring United Arab Emirates was given a 16-month prison sentence for perjury, extramarital sex and drinking alcohol after she told police she had been raped.

She was later pardoned and allowed to return to Norway.

 

 

Edited by Davkaus
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The big federations (Germany, England, Italy, Spain, France, etc) should make a stand and boycott the tournament. 

It should have never been awarded to them 

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2 hours ago, kurtsimonw said:

It is illegal to be drunk in Qatar?

I believe so, I was reading earlier about 2 separate cases where women had claimed to have been raped and in both cases they were charged with being drunk and for having sex outside of marriage...

Russia and then Qatar, insanity.

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19 hours ago, Xela said:

The big federations (Germany, England, Italy, Spain, France, etc) should make a stand and boycott the tournament. 

It should have never been awarded to them 

after last few days I think France would have some cheek making that stance ;)

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13 hours ago, Genie said:

I believe so, I was reading earlier about 2 separate cases where women had claimed to have been raped and in both cases they were charged with being drunk and for having sex outside of marriage...

Russia and then Qatar, insanity.

That's insane.

Good luck with having hundreds of thousands of football fans coming to a hot country and not drinking. :crylaugh:

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Always intrigues me how many Brits actually go and work in places like Doha and Dubai.

Are their special areas where you're exempt from punishment if you're caught with booze or with the opposite sex. Can't say I've ever really had the urge to visit these places with cultural restrictions, let alone live there.

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5 hours ago, VillaChris said:

Always intrigues me how many Brits actually go and work in places like Doha and Dubai.

Are their special areas where you're exempt from punishment if you're caught with booze or with the opposite sex. Can't say I've ever really had the urge to visit these places with cultural restrictions, let alone live there.

As one such person, I can tell you I've had no problems in the last 9 years with being drunk off my ass or living with my missus at the time.

Dubai is home to the Rugby 7's, which is sponsored by Heineken and attracts massive drunken crowds. There's also loads of bars and clubs in the hotels (we've seen the images of Gabby and co.) and on the beaches, plus a huge brunch culture (where it's all you can eat and drink from midday - 4pm on Fridays) all across the city. The UAE is used to hosting boozy events, like the world cup horse racing, Abu Dhabi GP, Rugby 7's and concerts and is a melting pot of different nationalities living together in a small country.

If we give short shrift to the football transfers in the Daily Heil, then why believe the earlier pages? Sure there are issues, but as an expat living in a Muslim country, I'm free to eat a bacon sandwich and a pint at a cafe, whilst sat with a girl dressed in a short skirt.  I can't speak for Qatar as it seems a lot less tolerant than here, but even in Ramadan they are servicing booze all day in Dubai long this year. In previous years it was only after sundown.

I agree Qatar should have no business hosting the World Cup, but I wouldn't put people off coming to visit The UAE in the cooler months. It can be ostentatious, completely over the top, but similarly fascinating with loads to see and do. Plus paying no tax and having fuel at 20p per litre certainly helps when living here.

:thumb: 

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  • 11 months later...
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The first of eight World Cup venues in Qatar is officially complete and will host its debut football match this weekend, organizers have announced.

After three years of renovations, Khalifa International Stadium in Al Waab will open to the public for the Emir Cup final on Friday, May 19.

 

Doha News

Creeping along nicely.

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