Qatar’s stock market has taken a hit in the wake of the ongoing criminal investigations into FIFA and the resignation of FIFA president Sepp Blatter, which has thrown doubt on Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup, The Wall Street Journal reported (Google link) today.
Tuesday’s decision by Mr. Blatter—the biggest champion of Qatar’s controversial bid—to step down, amid a spending spree on stadiums, roads, rail and real estate, has sparked speculation about the economic hit the loss of the World Cup would bring.
“A potential change in venue would be a setback for Qatar’s economy,” said Giyas Gokkent, a Dubai-based economist at the International Institute of Finance. He said business confidence, tourist arrivals and, ultimately, economic growth in Qatar face risks.
The news of Mr. Blatter’s resignation sent the Qatar Stock Exchange’s main index down 3% early Wednesday, led lower by construction firms and the banks financing them—two sectors heavily involved in the World Cup. But the index recovered to end slightly lower at 12182.09.
The Journal reported that in the wake of last week’s arrests of a dozen FIFA officials and sports marketing executives, the United States is building a case against Blatter. Swiss authorities are investigating how Russia and Qatar won their bids for hosting the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments, respectively. Qatar is currently building five stadiums for the 2022 tournament amid charges that it treats migrant workers as slaves, hundreds of whom have died working in harsh conditions.
In The Fruitful Game: How Qatar Uses Soccer to Polish Its Image, which was published in the October 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine, associate editor Ben Cohen wrote about the corruption charges that have dogged Qatar’s World Cup bid and could now endanger its winning bid in the wake of Blatter’s resignation.
As a result, the lengthy run-ups to the next two World Cup competitions are set to be dogged by allegations that the staging rights were secured through corruption and bribery involving top FIFA executives. In the case of Russia, concrete evidence of these misdemeanors is admittedly sketchy; even so, representatives of England’s bid to stage the 2018 tournament claim that the only a handful of FIFA executive committee members bothered to read the documents they submitted, while the political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, an opponent of Vladimir Putin’s regime, has alleged that the Kremlin was told a week before the actual FIFA vote that its bid had been successful.
When it comes to Qatar—the wealthiest country in the world, with a $200 billion budget to spend on stadiums and infrastructure for 2022—the corruption charges have been more seriously documented. Of special concern are the allegations that Mohamed bin Hammam, a Qatari member of the FIFA executive, made secret payments totaling $5 million to other committee members in advance of the 2010 FIFA vote in favor of Qatar’s bid. Hence the current pressure on Blatter to release the report, not least from its author, Michael J. Garcia, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose career highlights include the investigation of the disgraced governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.
Frustrated by the announcement of the head of FIFA’s ethics committee that a final judgment on Qatar’s hosting of the tournament was unlikely before the spring of 2015, Garcia urged FIFA to “authorize the appropriate publication of the Report on the Inquiry into the 2018/2022 Fifa World Cup Bidding Process.” Garcia’s call was joined by other key figures from international soccer, including Sunil Gulati, the head of the United States Soccer Federation, and, notably, Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, a FIFA vice-president, who opined on Twitter that the public has “a full right to know” the contents of Garcia’s report.
“FIFA doesn’t care about transparency,” said the leading soccer writer Simon Kuper, author of the highly-regarded Soccernomics, when I asked him why the world body would commission a report only to conceal its findings. “They might want the report for their own purposes. It’s useful to know who was corrupt, because you can punish them, or use that knowledge against them should they ever decide to run for election. FIFA also thought that by commissioning a report, it would look like they were acting against corruption.”
With Garcia’s report currently unlikely to surface in the public domain, speculation about how Qatar’s bid was successful will, for soccer wags, provide endless material to support the contention that FIFA is irredeemably corrupt. In the wider domain of Middle Eastern politics, the investigation takes on an additional layer; specifically, why Qatar, a leading sponsor of jihadi terrorist organizations like Hamas, and a serial abuser of human rights inside its own borders, has turned to soccer as the principal means of polishing and promoting its self-image as an enlightened state.
In Could Israel Get Booted Out of Soccer?, which was published in the June 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, written prior to Blatter’s reelection and subsequent resignation as FIFA president, assistant editor Aiden Pink described how closely identified Blatter was to Qatar’s World Cup bid.
Having led the organization that oversees the world’s most popular game since 1998—an organization that has long been accused of rampant corruption, retrograde sexism, and, in the case of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, enabling slavery—Blatter is a man who, like the sport he runs, brings out the passion in people. “He may well be the most successful non-homicidal dictator of the past century,” said Marina Hyde of The Guardian. “Sepp Blatter saying ‘I stand by my work’ is like a puppy standing by the work it did after being left alone in the house for the first time,” said John Oliver of HBO. But the people who actually participate in his elections have an entirely different, though no less passionate, view. To them, Blatter is akin to Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, and Winston Churchill—“Why is he different from these other men?” asked Osiris Guzman, the president of the Dominican Football Federation. Guzman once served a 30-day suspension from FIFA over allegations of vote-buying connected to an election that determined that the best possible location for a month-long soccer tournament was a desert nation where temperatures frequently hit 120 degrees and homosexuality is punishable by death—not to worry, though, said Blatter, because gay soccer fans should just “refrain from any sexual activities.”
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