Qatar World Cup - one last party before the world burns
There are many firsts about the Qatar World Cup. The first Arab nation to host the tournament. The first held in a Northern winter. The first country to host despite having never qualified previously. The first to have all stadiums air-conditioned. The first to have dozens (maybe hundreds) die building its infrastructure. The first to be held in a desert enabled by the burning of fossil fuels.
Qatar has been able to play an outsized role in world affairs thanks to hydrocarbons. It earns tankers of money from fossil fuels. It’s the world’s second-largest exporter of natural gas. This has made it one of the richest countries in the world on a per-person basis. But its wealth sits on a racialised hierarchy with those at the bottom working in forced labour and those at the top contemptuously enjoying their privilege. At the apex of the pyramid are Qatari citizens, of which there are only around 300,000 out of a population of 2.8 million. Next are white Westerners who are happy to indulge in the riches around them and ignore the plight of those below. At the bottom are poor south Asians and Africans who’ve built much of the infrastructure and facilities the rest enjoy while having no rights, unpaid wages and are disrespected by the society in which they live.
The disrespect extends to nature and the earth. Qataris idolise the desert - an area where their ancestors lived, toiled and developed their culture. But “it feels less like the desert is being respected and more like it’s being conquered”:
The peninsula is dotted with hundreds — possibly thousands — of camps, making true wilderness hard to find. Another popular pastime is ‘dune bashing’ — using four-by-fours or buggies to drive fast up and down huge sand dunes. On weekend afternoons the mounds of Khor Al-Adaid, a UNESCO nature reserve, echo to the roar of engines. Maybe it’s not the desert but the technology that is the star of the show. This expanse of barren land totally shaped life on this peninsula for millennia. Now, with air conditioning and four-by-fours, it feels like people no longer have to respond to its diktats.1
Doha, the capital, is a temple to cars. Very few take public transport and the lack of pavement makes walking unpleasant. Vehicles are often the only signs of life. Owners of SUVs and jeeps bully the road. Ostentation is everywhere. Qatar topped a 2015 survey of luxury spending2. The average person spent $4000 a year on extravagant goods, transported by the fossil fuel machine of aeroplanes and tankers.
The rich world is complicit in this petrostate’s rise. The precursor to BP, Anglo-Persian, discovered oil in 1940 thanks to a concession from the ruling family. This was guaranteed by Qatar’s status as a protectorate under the British Empire. The abuses of Qatar’s kafala system have been well documented by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Migrant workers are exploited under this system as their residency and employment are controlled by a sponsor. But this was devised by the British. In the 1920s they created work sponsorship schemes. The discovery of oil led to massive migration and sponsorship delegated to locals:
Omar AlShehabi notes… (modern kafala) was an early British foray into outsourcing - a way to control labour and police empire on the cheap.3
The Global North is all too happy to continue sucking from the pump. One-quarter of Britain’s gas imports come from Ras Laffan, the world's largest gas field. South Korea, Japan and Singapore are some of the largest importers of Qatari oil and gas. Germany, Italy and the US are happy buyers too4. Western defence and security companies have been active in Qatar since the 1950s. The country hosts America’s largest military base in the Middle East.
The rich world have also been enablers of Qatar as it burnishes its reputation around the world. Qatari organisations are owners or investors in football clubs, Harrods, Porsche, Louis Vuitton and the Empire State Building. The country has washed its slavery and pollution so thoroughly the president of FIFA basks in its capital5. Armies of expats enjoy five-star accommodation and service on the backs of forced labour and get paid thanks to the burning of fossil fuels. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President in 2010, even forced Qatari investment in his country. In the run-up to the vote for the 2022 World Cup, he put a price on France’s support for Qatar6. Not long after, Qatar bought Paris Saint-Germain football club, acquired the rights to France’s Ligue 1 games for $500 million and purchased $14.6bn worth of Mirage Fighter Jets7.
Qatar, and its hosting of the World Cup, is peak globalisation. Our environment cannot support an international tournament in the desert - the players arriving in chartered aeroplanes and other bigwigs landing in private jets; teams training in air-conditioned compounds and armed convoys escorting them to sealed stadiums; the heat kept out thanks to always-on refrigerants spewing carbon into the air. It is only made possible by fossil fuels. They pay for foreign fans to act as spies and PR mouthpieces for an autocratic regime8. For security to keep away the undesirables. For FIFA’s pleas to “only focus on the football”9. For live matches streamed in super-high-def-ultra 4D to distract us from the travesty surrounding us.
As a football fan, I feel wretched. It is not only that this World Cup has interrupted the domestic season with its weekly twists and turns. Nor that the World Cup is something to look forward to in the summer and fans are already well served by the feast of football in the winter. Will it even be good to watch - with only one week of preparation time and little rest for the players? My misery is that we already know the winner of this competition: fossil fuels. A football tournament in the desert has been made possible by oil, gas and the subjugation of nature. As someone who’s wanted to see England win something all my life, how tarnished will it be if they lift the trophy amidst this perversion.
I hope this will be the last World Cup to see a victory for fossil fuels. The last built on the exploitation of vulnerable people. The last to serve the foreign policy agenda of an autocratic state. The last to require the ripping up of our environment to host it. The last to be enabled by never-ending rich world consumption of oil and gas.
McManus (Chapter 4)
The Fall of the House of FIFA - David Conn
