In July 2011, seven months after Qatar’s shocking, winning bid to host the Fifa World Cup in 2022, the official bid committee invited me to interview its chief executive, Hassan Al Thawadi, for the Guardian, at the operation’s headquarters in Doha. The country to which Fifa’s barons had casually sent the World Cup in the summer was suffocatingly hot, and like in Abu Dhabi, the only people out of air-conditioning and in the dusty tracts between the streets were the immigrant workers doing the tough and dirty construction work.
The campaign groups Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Trades Union Congress would mount fierce attacks on the country’s kefala system of employing immigrant workers under the control of one company, the oppressive working conditions in Qatar and inadequate accommodation in ‘labour camps’. Al Thawadi and his team would respond with a series of reforms and promise better conditions on their sites, and argue that hosting the World Cup was a catalyst for change because it subjected Qatar to fierce global scrutiny. Amnesty would welcome some reforms but persistently argue they did not go far or wide enough. The ITUC argued that Fifa sending the huge construction project to Qatar meant there would be more workers dying on building sites, although the bid committee, renamed the ‘supreme committee’ for organising the World Cup, disputed the ITUC’s figures.
For Al Thawadi, the young, driven, English and American university-educated lawyer entrusted by his Emir to market the country’s merits to Fifa and lead the bid, Sepp Blatter pulling the name Qatar out of that envelope–while seeming almost to hold his nose–was the most ecstatic moment of his life. Al Thawadi would tell me he had been highly emotional the day before, when they made their slick final presentation to the twenty-two voting executive committee members, to send the World Cup to the tiny Gulf state in the summer.
‘Afterwards I broke down and cried,’ he recalled, in his surprisingly spartan office on the twenty-sixth floor of a bog-standard office block in Doha. ‘We had been all over the world, we took a bid nobody thought had much chance of winning on to a new level. I told my team on 1 December: win or lose, you should be very proud.’
Al Thawadi still could not dare to believe they would win, despite the huge money poured into his marketing budget, the involvement of the Qatari, bin Hammam, still in the heart of the executive committee, and his country’s vast, coveted wealth in a credit-crunched world economy. A World Cup in Qatar would be played at a planned twelve stadiums, building nine and remodelling three, essentially in a single city, Doha, capital of a previously fairly obscure emirate with a native population around 278,000, in desert summer conditions of oppressive humidity and temperatures. Then, they did win the vote, and Qatar’s delegation leapt and hugged each other delightedly in that stunned and sheepish hall.
On my trip, the bid’s head of communications, Nasser al-Khater, who also went to university in the US, had explained the nation-building, ‘Brand Qatar’ elements which the World Cup and the country’s other sporting, cultural and investment efforts were intended to promote:
‘Warmth, hospitality, economic development beyond oil and gas, openness to the world and being a positive interface between the Arab world and the rest of the world.’
But the ecstasy of the victory for these young Qatari, Western-educated professionals was immediately devoured by a reputational firefight. The allegations that Qatar must have corruptly ‘bought’ the World Cup through bribery were instant, and this was before Blazer, Warner, Teixeira, Grondona, bin Hammam and Leoz, all of whom voted, were charged or proven to have been corrupt, and other voting members were sanctioned by the ethics committee for breaches of Fifa’s own code of conduct.
Being there, in their Doha offices, I saw and heard how agitated and resentful they were. Work was going on towards the monumental construction project they had taken on, to be incorporated with a new metro system and other huge infrastructure which by 2022 was to transform Doha, still then a strung-out city with dusty, empty spaces between the skyscrapers. They did show me the engineers working on the air-cooling technology which they had promised could make a summer tournament possible–the bid had built a prototype stadium with just 500 seats for $27m–but they seemed partly paralysed, stuck on stemming the storm of allegations.
They had invited me over and the BBC’s then sports editor, David Bond, for Al Thawadi to give a press and broadcast interview, in which he planned to be defiant, rebut all the claims, maintain their bid was clean. When we finally sat down for the interview, though, he went further than just that: he complained that in the relentlessly suspicious focus on Qatar, there was an element of racism, the assumption that Arabs with so much money must have been greasing palms.
‘I do believe that there is a stereotype, and prejudice against the fact that we are a rich, Arab nation,’ he said. ‘Ignorance fed into prejudice and made it a more fertile ground for these rumours to take seed and grow. Maybe we are an easy target. Had England or Australia or the USA won the bid, would any of this outrage have occurred?’
There were strong rumours even then, since considerably strengthened, about the probity of Germany’s campaign to land the 2006 World Cup and South Africa’s to host the 2010 tournament, yet there had been no outcry on anything like this scale. Al Thawadi mentioned England’s bid for 2018, particularly that they had been organising the friendly with Thailand, which the FA then cancelled after Worawi Makudi did not vote for them. There were also questions about Australia’s bid by then, and the employment of the consultants, particularly Radmann, who was known to be so close to Beckenbauer. Al Thawadi asked furiously why all the attention was on Qatar. Responding to the calls for an investigation, he said he believed it would clear them and they had nothing to hide but, fiery, he retorted:
‘Why do I have to take ten steps to prove my innocence when there is no shred of evidence available? Why should we have an investigation if no other country has one, even Russia, which won it on the same day?’
Every time the accusations came, including from John Whittingdale’s parliamentary committee after they published the Sunday Times ‘whistleblower’ claims, Al Thawadi responded strongly and in detail, usually with lawyers’ letters. When eventually there was the Fifa ethics committee investigation, by Garcia, the official Qatar bid gave him access to all their correspondence, computers, emails, and made themselves personally available for discussions and questions. Russia, which as Al Thawadi said, won a majority of votes from the same executive committee, including its corrupt members, the same day, had its explanation of leased, destroyed computers accepted without comment by Eckert in his summary of Garcia’s report in November 2014. Yet Russia’s bid, personally propounded by Vladimir Putin with all necessary state backing, has always escaped the relentless suspicions lasered on Qatar.
While David Bond and I were there, trying to understand this place where Fifa was sending its World Cup, the bid sprung on us that the ‘whistleblower’ had agreed to retract her claims. She was Phaedra Almajid, the woman who had worked on international media relations for the bid, left in March 2010 unhappy at some of her treatment, and gone to live in the US. She had told the story alleging that at the CAF congress in Angola, the African executive committee members had been offered $1.5m each for the vote, which they and Al Thawadi denied. Now, we were told, she wanted to withdraw it. She had even signed an affidavit, taking back that and other information she had given against the Qatar bid, saying the Angola story was ‘fabricated and untrue’.
It was a fundamentally awkward and unsatisfactory position for us to be landed in. We were presented with this by the Qatar bid itself, which raised the clear suspicion that Almajid had been either threatened, or paid. The bid denied that, and so did Almajid, to us. Practically, as she was insisting she was retracting of her own free will, there was no way to further satisfy ourselves. Also, we were in Doha, and she was in the US.
The question of whether to tell this story at all, given the obvious questions about it, necessitated long calls on the phone to her, and to my editor in London. At home, by habit, I often walk around while on the mobile, and I found myself doing it in Doha, too, leaving the bid’s office or my hotel and wandering around outside. It was ridiculously hot, and exceptionally humid. I remember talking through the knotty ins and outs of it with my editor for half an hour late morning one day, and bursting out sweating immediately, literally dripping, my shirt soaked within minutes. Of sending a World Cup to these conditions, I could just about accept that the hugely expensive air-cooling systems might work for the stadiums, to keep the players at ideal temperature, and even people in the stands. But the thought of fanzones, and tens of thousands of people wanting to mill about to enjoy a World Cup, in those temperatures, seemed ludicrous. As in Abu Dhabi, nobody really went outside in the daytime, unless they were going to and from their cars, except the immigrant workers in their boots, overalls and helmets.
Almajid repeatedly maintained that the bid had not put pressure on her or induced her to retract her stories; in fact she swore to that in her affidavit. In it, she said she had been bitter about the circumstances in which she left, felt the bid unfairly questioned her ability to ‘control’ the international media, and she had been told she would be replaced. She said she made up the Angola story ‘to hurt the bid like they had hurt me’. But then, she stated, it had gone too far after the stories were printed and made such a huge impact, and when Blatter had said the whistleblower would be coming to Zurich and there could be a re-vote on the basis of her story. She said she then contacted a member of the bid team and voluntarily offered to retract.
‘I want to make clear that Qatar 2022 bid committee never engaged in the behaviour I accused them of,’ her affidavit concluded.
Ultimately, we decided to report this, with the circumstances of how it came about. Al-Khater, who had worked most closely with Almajid and been friends with her, had gone to the US to conclude her signing of the affidavit, just before they invited David Bond and me to Doha. We reported this retraction as she and the bid were presenting it, and made clear that the bid itself had delivered it to us.
Al-Khater and Al Thawadi were satisfied that Almajid’s retraction removed the only solid allegations in the swirl of suspicion against Qatar since the vote. Al Thawadi made the point that his country was seeking the World Cup to promote a wholesome, friendly image to the world, and that would be endangered if they had sought votes corruptly:
‘Even if we had wanted to do anything improper, which we did not, we could not risk it because if it ever came out, the reputation of our whole country would be in tatters, the absolute opposite of what we are trying to achieve,’ he said.
I was surprised, then, when Judge Eckert’s summary of Garcia’s report was published three years later, in November 2014, that it cited a ‘whistleblower’ who had repeated stories to Garcia about the Qatar bid. Eckert said that Garcia had had ‘serious concerns about the individual’s credibility’ because ‘it’–an attempt to maintain the whistleblower’s anonymity by not disclosing her gender–had previously retracted the allegations in a sworn statement. Eckert said Garcia had not relied on any information from her because her journals could not corroborate her story, and that the findings ‘demonstrate the difficulty to establish reliable evidence, independent of the public opinion [sic]’.
The coy non-use of her name and gender worked for precisely nobody, and in the media everybody knew this whistleblower was Almajid, as she confirmed herself. She was furious with Eckert for referring to her, and for Garcia for allowing that to happen, when, she said, her confidentiality had been guaranteed. Eckert did the same with Bonita Mersiades in relation to her information about the Australia bid on which she worked, referred to ‘a whistleblower’, then questioned her credibility. It remains inexplicable why he went out of his way to do that; as Almajid said herself in a seething complaint to Fifa, Garcia was said to have talked to more than seventy witnesses anonymously, yet only she and Mersiades were singled out and dismissed. Fifa’s ethics committee said it would not hold an investigation into that, and there has been no explanation as to why these two women, who helped Garcia, were publicly outed and undermined in this way.
Yet it was surprising to me that Almajid, having insisted in 2011 that her original story had been false and she was put under no pressure to retract, had gone to Garcia and, presumably, repeated the original allegations. So I talked to her again, to find out what had happened. Almajid now says that in 2011, after Blatter said that she would be coming to Zurich to tell her story to Fifa, the bid did threaten her with legal action, that it would invoke a confidentiality clause in her contract, which carried a $1m potential penalty for a breach. She told me she had never intended to be a public whistleblower in the first place, that she talked to the Sunday Times off the record and did not know they would then write to Whittingdale’s committee, or that it would publish the claims. She says she did not even know parliamentary privilege existed until she saw the committee able to freely publish that story of hers.
Almajid told me she became scared of the situation she had found herself in, and felt vulnerable, so agreed to sign a retraction and go public with it. She also maintains that, contrary to what she said at the time, the Qatar 2022 bid had promised her something in return: to give her a commitment that they would not take a lawsuit out against her in the future.
‘I felt terrified,’ she told me. ‘I have two kids, one is disabled; I was facing legal action and the loss of my income too. I agreed to sign that affidavit, and they promised to release me from legal action. But they never kept their side of the bargain.’
Al-Khater told me in response that the Qatar bid, now the supreme committee, did not threaten to sue her. He said that they have checked their records, and there are no confidentiality clauses in their employment contracts which carry a $1m penalty for a breach. Al-Khater has always said that Almajid contacted the bid committee herself, feeling that she was in over her head. He also denied having promised her that if she retracted they would provide a firm commitment releasing her from legal action. However, he did acknowledge that she asked for it, and that it was discussed, but then they never provided it.
‘Although we initially discussed the possibility of providing her with assurances that we would not take legal action against her, we never agreed to do so,’ Al-Khater said.
Almajid insists it had been promised, and says she felt betrayed immediately after swearing the affidavit, when she then did not receive a written commitment in return. Throughout this process, she says that while the Qataris had high-profile and expensive London lawyers, she had nobody advising her. Almajid began to demand the written commitment from them and to complain vehemently when they did not provide it. Finally, on 21 October 2011, she was sent a legal letter–but it threatened to take action against her if she continued to contact them.
The lawyers’ letter said that the bid committee had never ‘formally agreed’ to give her an assurance of no future legal action against her, and accused her of being ‘threatening and disturbing’ in her communications with Al Thawadi and Al-Khater, when she had been repeatedly asking for the commitment. The lawyers said there was no ‘wish’ to bring a claim against her over the ‘completely false’ accusations she had made, but that if she made any further allegations to the media or other third party, or tried to communicate directly with any bid members, that would be different.
‘In either such eventuality, legal action in respect of your past conduct as well as in respect of any further conduct you may have undertaken of concern to the Bid Committee and the Supreme Committee [organising the World Cup] would be very likely,’ it said.
When Garcia began his investigation, Almajid still had no commitment from the bid to release her from legal action; in fact she faced this threat. Weeks after receiving it, in December 2011, she decided to talk to Garcia, in confidence, to tell him that in fact the story had been true and she stood by it.
‘It was fifty-fifty if he would believe me or not; I accept that, it is my word against other people’s,’ she says. ‘But I was promised complete anonymity, and I didn’t get that.’
However, despite being a reluctant whistleblower, she maintains the story is true, except that what happened in Angola was more subtle than a story of straightforward bribery, which was the impression that came out in parliament. Almajid says the perception that cash bribes were offered to the three CAF voters is not correct. In fact, she says, there was a discussion about football development in the voting members’ countries, an assurance that Qatar would like to make a contribution, and no explicit connection was made between such contributions and a request by Qatar for their vote.
They were all in Angola for the January 2010 CAF congress, which the Qatar 2022 bid had sponsored for $1.8m, in return for exclusive access to CAF, its executive committee representatives, and fifty-four federations, for the duration of the event. The bid team deny completely that any such meetings with the executive committee representatives took place at all, and that they made any offers for votes, whether linked to development or otherwise. They say they used the time to make their professionally produced pitch for a World Cup in Qatar, particularly emphasising it was an opportunity to have the tournament in the Middle East, in an Arab country for the first time. Almajid herself acknowledges that people in Angola were very supportive of that idea:
‘Very many of the African journalists I was talking to were saying they agreed, that they had the World Cup in Africa in 2010, and it was time to have it in the Middle East,’ she recalls.
One of her roles there, she said, was to provide reassurance that Qatar was not behaving detrimentally to African football via its ‘Aspire’ academy programme, which had been accused of trawling for talented African players and taking them back to Qatar.
There has been a culture at Fifa–for years, decades–of FAs in Africa and other poorer parts of the world asking for development funds, often legitimately, as they have always lacked anything like the resources of the wealthier nations. Yet the Qatar 2022 bid’s position is that they paid $1.8m to secure days of exclusive access, when they wanted the votes of CAF’s executive committee representatives, and they never discussed what their World Cup could do for development.
In the summer of 2014, just before the World Cup in Brazil was about to kick off, the Sunday Times made a huge splash with more stories, which it claimed showed ‘how Qatar bought the World Cup’. It was almost entirely based on emails from Mohamed bin Hammam while he was the Asian Football Confederation president before, during and through the bid; the newspaper had been given leaked access to the whole AFC database. The emails and other internal AFC information had in fact substantially been made public already; they were what PWC had been given access to and reported on in 2012. The Sunday Times published more details of bin Hammam’s regime of largesse–principally paying and entertaining in Doha the presidents and senior officials mostly of small African FAs, who had usually requested help with football facilities or resources. None of those people whom he paid had a vote on the executive committee for the World Cup host, and, despite the huge impact the Sunday Times coverage made, there was a general scepticism in football whether this did reveal a campaign to buy World Cup votes. Rather, it was felt to expose a culture of beneficence, and influence-buying, by which bin Hammam buttressed his personal stature in football and laid the foundations for his bid to become president.
Bin Hammam was, though, found to have paid two executive committee members who did have votes. One was Warner, but this was in July 2011, seven months after the vote, appearing to relate to bin Hammam’s halted presidential bid and the pair’s efforts to salvage their careers and reputations after the Trinidad scandals. The other direct payment was $262,500 to cover Reynald Temarii’s legal costs, so that he could appeal his suspension from the executive committee after the Sunday Times 2010 undercover sting. That did directly help Qatar with the vote for the 2022 World Cup host; Temarii being able to appeal meant that he was not replaced by his deputy, David Chung, who was mandated to vote for Australia.
Al Thawadi and the Qatar bid always argued in the face of this next onslaught that it was naïve to believe that all bin Hammam’s activities related to the World Cup bid, from which they said he had actually been semi-detached for a long time. He clearly had major ambitions of his own and was steadily building up his prospects for a presidential campaign. When Qatar first decided to bid for the World Cup, bin Hammam is said, not only by Al Thawadi, to have been sceptical, even worried that it could damage his own efforts and lobbying within the entitled world of Fifa. Al Thawadi said they had to work hard to convince bin Hammam, and that he only came round to properly supporting Qatar’s bid in 2010, when he saw it gaining momentum.
‘He had responsibilities with the AFC; there were three other bids from his confederation [Australia, Japan and South Korea] and his presidential campaign still out there,’ Al Thawadi said. ‘Don’t assume that because we had the AFC president we didn’t face difficulties. Mohamed bin Hammam went through significant efforts to show there was no favouritism to Qatar.’
The persistent rumours of a voting pact between the Spanish and Latin American executive committee members to vote for Qatar, and the Asian representatives to vote in return for Spain’s bid, had been rejected by a Fifa investigation, but were reignited by Ricardo Teixeira in June 2015. He told the Brazilian website Terra:
‘Spain needed votes [for 2018]. They had the three from South America, their own and maybe one more from Europe, but it wasn’t enough. So we had a meeting. Me, Villar [the president of the Spain FA, Ángel María Villar Llona] and [Julio] Grondona [of the Argentina FA] got some votes from Asia thanks to Qatar. And what was the deal? Qatar would vote for us for 2018 and would, in exchange, receive our support for 2022.’
Although this alleged pact did not appear to figure in any of the emails in the whole AFC database to which the Sunday Times had access, it seems inconceivable if it did happen, that bin Hammam was not involved with it. It appears to be against the Fifa rules forbidding collusion between bids, but outrage about any alleged collusion should perhaps be tempered by the realisation that others did it. England’s FA, which under the later chairmanship of Greg Dyke was relentlessly critical of Qatar’s bid, nevertheless admitted that its own executive committee member, Geoff Thompson, believed he had a pact with Chung Mong-joon of Korea. England’s 2018 bid were actually quite vocal about being upset when they discovered Chung had not kept to it.
The summary of Garcia’s report published by Eckert in November 2014 crushed those hoping for Qatar to be ‘stripped’ of the World Cup, and for a re-vote, after the allegations. Eckert, publicly dismissing Almajid’s credibility, did not uphold her story of development funds being offered in Angola. While he said the Qatari sponsorship of the 2010 CAF congress ‘created a negative impression’ because the total cost was unclear, such exclusive deals were, remarkably, not against the rules. He said Garcia’s report found that the Qatar bid had ‘pulled [the Aspire Academy] into the orbit of the bid in significant ways’, but did not judge it to affect the ‘integrity’ of the bidding process. He also said that Garcia’s report had highlighted the conduct of two people acting as advisers to the Qatar bid for ‘questionable conduct’, and that the relationship between them and the bid was ‘characterised by a significant lack of transparency’. However, as they did not hold official positions, Eckert said it was difficult to bind them to the rules and sanction them, and, without elaborating, he dismissed this as an issue.
Eckert also addressed a friendly match played between Brazil and Argentina in Doha on 17 November 2010, two weeks before the Zurich vote, which some speculated to have been a sweetener for Grondona and Teixeira. Eckert found, however, that the money paid to each country’s FA to bring the teams over to play the match was not excessive, but ‘comparable to fees paid for other matches featuring similarly elite teams’. There were concerns over the money, but they were not focusing on the Qatar bid itself, rather on what happened to the $2m legitimately paid to Argentina, and whether it all went to the Argentina FA. The Swiss attorney general, following Fifa’s reference to him of the issues raised by Garcia, did conduct an investigation, focusing not on Qatar, but on two unnamed companies in Buenos Aires.
On bin Hammam, Eckert found that the payment to Warner was not related to the World Cup vote, but to the Trinidad scandal. It was, he stated, ‘in connection with Mr Warner’s decision to resign from Fifa and refuse to cooperate in the proceedings against Mr bin Hammam’.
Eckert agreed with the view that the payments to small African FAs and presidents did not, as the Sunday Times had alleged, show a plot to buy the World Cup for Qatar, because those recipients did not have a vote on the World Cup hosts. Eckert did note that the payments were ‘improper’, saying it was more likely they were buying votes for the presidency, and had been dealt with during the previous investigation into bin Hammam, after which the Qatari was banned from football for life.
‘The evidence before [Garcia’s arm of the ethics committee] strongly suggests that Mr bin Hammam paid CAF officials to influence their votes in the June 2011 election for Fifa president where he was a candidate,’ Eckert concluded.
Eckert did find that the payment of Temarii’s legal costs did influence the vote, but decided that, as it was only one, it did not make a ‘significant’ difference to the bidding process.
The German judge accepted without criticism Russia’s explanation about its destroyed computers, with no surviving emails or documents, and he concluded that, on ‘the evidence available’, there was nothing ‘sufficient to support any findings of misconduct by the Russia 2018 bid team’.
It is still not known if Garcia’s remarkable, outspoken objections to Eckert’s summary of his report were related to the findings on Qatar, or if Garcia expressed his concerns about any bid more strongly. Dyke complained the Eckert report was a whitewash about Qatar, produced for political reasons, and exaggerated the issues with the English bid. However, that outraged response meant that the FA never engaged publicly with the genuine criticisms made. Again, as with Qatar, the Garcia and Eckert reports were produced following full cooperation by England’s 2018 bid, whose officials felt they had done nothing wrong. It did highlight various concerns, principally that England’s bid had linked offers of development to votes, and that they had sought to ‘curry favour’ with Jack Warner.
Garcia, Eckert reported, had concluded that Warner ‘had considerable influence’, that he ‘sought to exploit the perception of his power to control “blocks of votes” within the Fifa executive committee,’ and that he:
‘Repeatedly used that power to exact personal benefits… Mr Warner’s conduct demonstrated an expectation that bidding teams would react favourably and seek to curry favour with a voting member of the Fifa executive committee. According to the [Garcia] report, England 2018’s response showed a willingness, time and again, to meet such expectation, thereby damaging the image of Fifa and the bidding process.’
England, the Eckert summary reported, had sponsored the CFU gala dinner at its congress in Trinidad in 2010, ‘once again in an effort to curry favour with Jack Warner’, paying the $55,000, which Warner had suggested. The England 2018 bid had also given ‘substantial assistance’ to a training camp for the U20 Trinidad and Tobago team in England in 2009, and ‘appeared willing’ to cater to Warner’s demands for ‘favours and benefits’ for the club he owned, the ‘Joe Public Football Club’. The England bid had also helped ‘a person of interest to Warner’, understood to be the son of a friend of his, to find work in football in England; the FA apparently helped him to gain an internship at a senior professional Football League club.
Eckert said Garcia had found that the England 2018 bid had also linked an agreement with Temarii for the FA to do development work in Oceania, to his potential vote for England to host the World Cup. Eckert’s report said that the English FA’s proposed deal:
‘Raised the appearance of Mr Temarii using his position in Fifa and the upcoming 2 December 2010 vote in order to achieve a most favourable result for the OFC, and of England 2018 granting Mr Temarii (or the OFC, respectively [sic]) considerably preferential treatment in terms of allocating football development funds.’
The judge also referred to the Dingemans report, which Jérôme Valcke had told us in 2011 showed all the executive committee to have been ‘completely clean’. In fact, Eckert said Garcia had found that three of the four executive committee members mentioned had ‘made improper requests’ to the England bid–and ‘with regard to at least two of these committee members, England 2018 accommodated, or at least attempted to satisfy, the improper requests’.
The England bid appears to have stopped short of bribery, which remains unproven in relation to any of the 2018 or 2022 bids. However, they look to have found themselves with a £21m budget and high expectations, including from the British government, of bringing the World Cup to England, where there is a sense of entitlement in football. The voting system of the executive committee was far from an objective assessment based on Mayne-Nicholls’ reports or openly stated considerations. Instead, it required bidding countries to win the votes of twenty-four, then twenty-two men, of unpredictable opinions and wants, several of them now known to have been corrupt. The England 2018 bid did want Warner’s vote, and Temarii’s, and did what they could to get them. Sources in the England bid say they always tried to do so within the rules, which were grey, particularly when it came to development projects, and that they checked ideas in advance with Jérôme Valcke. Overall, Eckert said of England’s bid, there were ‘certain indications of potentially problematic conduct of specific individuals’. At the time of writing, no ethics committee or other proceedings have been brought against any of them.
The Spain and Portugal bid for 2018, accused of colluding with Qatar in a pact of votes, appeared not to have cooperated at all with Garcia. Their bid was not included in Eckert’s summary and the Spain FA president, Ángel María Villar Llona, was later given a warning and fined 25,000 CHF, apparently for not cooperating. The ethics committee stated that he had not behaved ‘in accordance with the general rules of conduct applicable to football officials in the context of the investigations’.
The Korea bid had been led by the Fifa executive committee member Chung Mong-joon, a seriously wealthy member of the family which owned the Hyundai car and industrial manufacturing company, and a politician in his home country. Eckert said the Garcia investigation had found that Chung had written to Fifa executive committee members in late 2010 about a proposal to establish a $777m football development fund for confederations and FAs, to run from 2011 to the World Cup in 2022. The report said this proposed ‘global football fund’ was directly linked to the Korea 2022 World Cup bid, and therefore that it ‘created at least the appearance of a conflict or an offer of benefits to Fifa executive committee members in an effort to influence their votes’.
Following an ethics committee investigation into the issues raised by the Garcia report, Chung Mong-joon was banned from football for six years after, the announcement said, being found guilty of infringing several rules in the code of conduct. On appeal, that was reduced to five years. Chung raged against it, calling it a political process, because he, like Mayne-Nicholls, had been considering standing for election as the president. But at the time of writing the ban still stands. I did contact Chung to ask for an interview in the preparation for this book, but after initially making contact, his team did not respond.
Then there was Australia’s bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the rival to Qatar’s, with its Fifa insider consultants close to Franz Beckenbauer. Bonita Mersiades, the former head of communications who did turn into a whistleblower, raising her concerns publicly, was also outspokenly critical of the Australia bid’s payment of development money to regions with voting executive committee members. The FFA bid contributed to the Oceania Football Confederation when Temarii was the president, stated in the bid’s final report to have been Aus$500,000; to the AFC’s ‘Vision Asia’ development programme when bin Hammam was the president, Aus$1.25m, and paid Aus$500,000 to Jack Warner at Concacaf. That latter donation was intended to be for the upgrade of the stadium at Warner’s Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence in Trinidad. Warner had asked the FFA for $4m, and they agreed to pay $500,000 initially to fund a feasibility study. The bid also donated LapDesk computers to FAs throughout Africa, at a cost of Aus$90,000. These payments were part of much bigger contributions made in Oceania and to Vision Asia, including with Australian overseas aid money.
The April 2013 report into Warner’s activities by the Concacaf integrity committee found that the FFA paid the $500,000 (US$462,500) by cheque made out to Concacaf, which was deposited at Republic National Bank in Trinidad, in which Warner also had personal money. The $462,500 appeared nowhere in Concacaf’s accounting records and the committee could not identify any trace of the money. It concluded that Warner defrauded the FFA and kept the stadium donation for himself.
Mersiades, who has become a campaigner for wider reform of Fifa following her experiences working on the Australia bid, a founder member of the group #NewFifaNow, argues that the FFA bid was wrong to contribute to those confederations whose presidents wielded votes in the executive committee.
‘The culture of Fifa was that there were expectations of favours sought and gained,’ she told me. ‘And while the guidelines warned bidders against seeking an “advantage”, there was also an implicit understanding that potential host countries should be active in “development”. Of course, “development” was targeted at the voters and their interests.’
Eckert’s summary of the Garcia report is at its most forthright, of all the bids, not about Qatar, but when dealing with these payments by the Australia 2022 bid to the confederations. Eckert said Garcia had noted ‘potentially problematic connections between financial and other support for “football development and the bidding process”’. Noting Temarii’s requests for financial support, Eckert said: ‘Australia’s acquiescence helped create the appearance that benefits were conferred in exchange for a vote, thus undermining the integrity of the bidding process.’
Eckert noted the payment to Warner, too, and also said there were ‘indications’ that the FFA bid had ‘attempted to direct funds the Australian government had set aside for existing development projects in Africa towards initiatives in countries with ties to Fifa executive committee members, with the intention to advance its bid’.
Eckert said the Garcia report found the FFA ‘well aware of the ramifications such a pattern of conduct might imply’. But they went ahead anyway, to provide financial support ‘under the title “(football) development projects” preferably in areas home to Fifa executive committee members’.
Eckert did say that according to the Garcia report on Australia: ‘There are certain indications of potentially problematic conduct of specific individuals in the light of relevant Fifa ethics rules’ and ‘potentially problematic facts and circumstances’. He went close to calling for an ethics committee investigation into these issues, saying that he:
‘Trusts that the Investigatory Chamber will take appropriate steps if it deems such measures appropriate and feasible… and underlines that the Investigatory Chamber has full independence and discretion with regard to the initiation of proceedings against specific individuals.’
At the time of writing there has not been an ethics committee investigation announced into the Australia bid, however, or any action in relation to it.
Frank Lowy argued that the money for development was legitimate, demonstrated a commitment to international football and was the same approach used to win the Australia bid for the 2000 Olympics and for Australia to win a seat on the UN Security Council. It was, he said, ‘consistent with what every other bidding nation was doing’. Of the Concacaf money, Lowy said Warner had ‘stolen’ it and the FFA had asked for it back, and had been advised by Fifa to wait until all inquiries were complete. Without expanding, Lowy claimed that Australia ran a clean bid, but it had not been ‘a level playing field and therefore we didn’t win it’.
Hence, following this clearance three years after I met him in Doha, Hassan Al Thawadi would feel vindicated, and he has since argued again that there was anti-Arab prejudice in the persistent accusations that Qatar could not have won the vote cleanly, with no similar focus on any other country.
Blatter himself, after his own suspension for the 2m CHF payment to Michel Platini, began to reveal his feelings about the votes for Russia and Qatar. In October 2015, he said that the executive committee had already agreed, before the vote, to share the next two World Cups with the world’s ‘two biggest political powers’, Russia, then the USA. He bitterly regretted that the Qataris gazumped the USA, sending the World Cup to the Gulf in the summer and causing a fundamental credibility crisis for Fifa. But Blatter did not put the blame on still thin and unproven allegations of vote-buying. Instead, pointing to Platini switching his vote from the USA to Qatar after the lunch with Sarkozy, Blatter said World Cup votes were not ‘bought’, the real influence was geo-politics, that World Cups went ‘where the higher political influences are’. He said that four European votes were lost from the USA to Qatar after Platini changed his mind. Otherwise, regardless of all the stories about how Qatar won other votes, in Africa, South America or elsewhere, the USA would have had a majority. Talking of his plan to have Russia host the tournament in 2018, then the USA in 2022, Blatter said:
‘Everything was good until the moment when Sarkozy came in a meeting with the crown prince of Qatar, who is now the ruler of Qatar. And at a lunch afterwards with Mr Platini he said it would be good to go to Qatar. And this has changed all [the] pattern.
‘If you put the four votes, it would have been twelve to ten [for the USA].’ Arguing again that this had prompted the US authorities’ investigation of Fifa, he said: ‘If the USA was given the World Cup, we would only speak about the wonderful World Cup 2018 in Russia, and we would not speak about any problems at Fifa.’
One of the European executive committee members thought to have voted for Qatar, Marios Lefkaritis of Cyprus, chairman of the Uefa finance committee and a key ally of Platini, was reported afterwards to have sold some land to the Qatar Investment Authority for €32m. He has strongly denied any suggestion that it had anything to do with the World Cup vote. I did seek an interview with him for this book via the Cyprus FA, as recommended by Fifa, but I did not hear back.
For a full assessment of how Qatar claimed the World Cup, the eyes do need to be lifted from the Eckert summary of Garcia’s efforts at unravelling the claustrophobic rumour mill within the corridors of Fifa. The global economic and political realities have to be considered, as well as their effect on football. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, by 2007 Qatar had the world’s highest income per head of population. In 2015, this figure was put at $132,100, when in total the tiny country, luxuriating in natural gas and some oil reserves, had $320bn GDP. Qatar was estimated to have $49bn directly invested overseas by the end of December 2015. The strategy for developing the country by 2030 includes, like Abu Dhabi’s, being associated with cultural and sporting prestige events, tourism and education. After the new Emir took over from his father in 1995, and particularly into the 2000s, Qatar began seriously investing in sport, including the hosting of events. Speaking at the Institute of Foreign Affairs in London in May 2016, when he again suggested there was some racism in the constant accusations of corruption, Al Thawadi accepted there was ‘an element of soft power’ in his country’s determined bid to host the World Cup.
While the Emir was putting his energy into wanting the World Cup for Qatar, for the prestige, exposure and power, and perhaps for the fun it could be, too, his country was reported to have concluded gas and pipeline deals with Argentina, Paraguay and Thailand. In England, while Greg Dyke repeatedly cast suspicion on the Qatar World Cup bid, the Gulf statelet was buying up some of the most coveted properties in London, including the Shard and Harrods. The government and trade missions were constantly seeking to interest the Qataris in buying more British assets and products, in a country which now relies economically on investment from overseas.
In football, there was in Europe a startling disconnect between the constant allegations of corruption about how Qatar won the World Cup bid, and the acceptance, hunger even, for Qatari and Gulf money in club football. Barcelona, whose legendary former player and coach Pep Guardiola had been a paid ambassador for the Qatari bid, ceded more than 100 years without commercial sponsorship on their shirts to sell it in 2013 to Qatar Airways, reported to be paying the club €96m over three years. PSG were one of the biggest club spenders in the world, and always in the Champions League group stage. BeIN were buying TV rights from dozens of countries besides France, including from the English FA, to broadcast England matches and the FA Cup in the Middle East and North Africa. The UAE, a rival to Qatar politically and religiously, also has huge amounts of its money in European club football: Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Mansour owns Manchester City, where he has spent around £1.2bn, and Dubai’s state airline, Emirates, sponsors Real Madrid, Arsenal, AC Milan and PSG.
Europe, in recession and on its economic knees, was seeking cash in all areas, and Qatar had it. While Al Thawadi was still engaged in the diplomatic efforts to assuage the accusations about his country’s ethics, Western construction companies were queueing for some of the $4bn to $5bn budget reported to be for building the stadiums alone, and $150bn for Qatar’s general infrastructure projects. US masterplanners AECOM, Danish engineers Ramboll and British architects Pattern were announced in April 2015 as the contractors to build the 40,000-seat Al Rayyan Stadium. The main Al Wakrah Stadium has been designed by Zaha Hadid architects, of London. Other firms working on World Cup infrastructure projects include British architects Foster + Partners; Populous, largely US-based stadium designers; Besix, a major Belgian construction company; and the Italian contractors Salini Impregilo. When it comes to wanting to earn from the work of building a World Cup, there appears to be little British or European sniffiness about Qatar.
At the time of writing, the Swiss attorney general says he is still investigating the 2018 and 2022 bidding process. That followed the criminal complaint made by Fifa itself after Eckert’s summary of Garcia’s report, so does not appear to have Qatar in its sights. The US authorities have said they are also investigating, but have not so far made any accusations of wrongdoing by any bid.
Since the astonishing majority decision on 2 December 2010, seven members of that twenty-two-man Fifa executive committee have been charged or accused by the US authorities of criminal wrongdoing; another, Franz Beckenbauer, is under criminal investigation in Switzerland and Germany over the allegations relating to Germany’s 2006 World Cup bid. Six more members, including Blatter and Platini, have been sanctioned by Fifa’s own ethics committee. So fourteen out of those twenty-two, the most senior administrators in world football, have since had a criminal or ethics procedure against them. Yet the decisions a majority of them took, after their mostly lazy and dismal approach to a flawed and wastefully expensive bidding process, to send the 2018 World Cup to Putin’s Russia, and the 2022 tournament to the Emir’s Qatar, still stand. No vote-buying allegations have been proven sufficient for a re-vote, the contracts with Fifa are signed, the Western companies are swarming in for the work, the immigrant labourers are being recruited, and a multi-billion dollar chain of football stadiums is taking shape in Qatar.