The drone of air catching on lowered wing flaps shuddered through the private jet as its speed dipped in preparation for landing. From his cream leather seat in the cabin, Mohamed bin Hammam could see a gleaming citadel of glass, steel and concrete across the waters of the Persian Gulf. He was proud of his home and everything that his fledgling state had achieved. But ever since the Emir had made his wish known, Bin Hammam had been gripped by a gnawing anxiety that touching down in Doha in the summer months did little to dispel.
It was early June 2008, and Bin Hammam was returning after FIFA’s annual congress in Australia. He came home with far more reason to be worried than when he had left. Sepp Blatter had caught him off guard when he stood up in front of a packed auditorium at the Sydney Opera House and told more than a thousand delegates that Qatar was one of the countries interested in bidding to host the World Cup. Now the genie really was out of the bottle, and there was no way to put it back. By announcing this private ambition so publicly, the FIFA president had left Bin Hammam with no choice but to do everything in his power to make the Emir’s pipe-dream a reality. But how could he do it?
Ever since Blatter had set this hare running at that private dinner in Doha in February, Bin Hammam had tried his best to persuade the Emir that the country risked humiliating defeat if it attempted to achieve what the FIFA president had promised. Qatar was simply too hot; it had no international standing as a footballing country; there was only a small fan base; and, to top it all, it didn’t even have the stadiums to accommodate the world’s biggest sporting competition. If Qatar entered a formal bid, it was guaranteed only one vote on the executive committee which determined the host for the tournament – his own. What if none of his 23 Exco colleagues backed him with support? Wouldn’t that bring humiliation and shame upon Qatar? Would that not be an affront to the country he loved so dearly? But it was all to no avail: the Emir wanted the world’s best-loved sporting tournament on his doorstep, and nothing Bin Hammam said could change his mind.
As the cabin doors opened onto Doha International airstrip, Bin Hammam slipped on his signature aviator sunglasses and stepped out into the penetrating white light of the desert sun. Alongside him was the familiar figure of Mohammed Meshadi, his constant companion, gopher and confidant. Meshadi revelled in the high life that came from travelling the world with a multi-billionaire. While Bin Hammam kept his figure trim with discipline and a daily exercise routine, Meshadi was losing the chiselled good looks of his youth and, now several pounds heavier, was sweatily lumbering across the airport tarmac carrying the bags behind his master. Within Bin Hammam’s close entourage, Meshadi was known as a lovable bear of a man with a twinkle in his eye. The female assistants liked to gossip girlishly about his playful role as the office flirt, but they were also wary of his quick temper. He had a sharp tongue that he used to keep hotel staff and office juniors on their toes. For Bin Hammam, the short walk to his waiting black Mercedes through the searing midday heat did nothing to diminish his nagging doubt about the size of the task ahead of him.
The car purred through the wide avenues passing through streets which were mostly deserted. Doha is not a city where people go out for a casual stroll in the summer. The sun is too unremitting, too cruel. The temperatures average over 40°C and can often climb into the fifties. It is a city that beats to the pulse of a million air-conditioning systems – a hostile desert environment tamed and made habitable by the best refrigeration devices money can buy. People move seamlessly from expensively cooled homes and offices to the comfort and safety of air-conditioned cars and shopping malls, avoiding the harsh rays as much as possible. Stepping out into the open air is a little like opening an oven door. You are hit by a wave of heavy heat – so thick and tangible you could almost grasp it. In such temperatures, pale skin burns within ten minutes.
They sped along the Corniche snaking around the West Bay with the Persian Gulf shimmering in the glaring daylight, then hit the long wide stretch of Al Rayyan Road heading out to the gated compound on the outskirts of the city where Bin Hammam lived with his two wives, 11 children and numerous grandchildren. The billionaire had plenty of time to reflect on the problem he had been wrestling with on the way. The Qatar summer is a brutal climate. He had only to look at the forehead of his stout travelling companion: beads of sweat had already formed after a short exposure to the sun. Yet modern football is a lung-busting high-velocity game. Players can cover more than six or seven miles in the course of a 90-minute match – much of it in bursts at sprinting pace. If it was too hot even to venture outside, surely it was too hot to play the world’s biggest football tournament?
Bin Hammam was proud of the rise of the game in his nation since he had watched the oil workers play along the West Bay waterfront as a boy, but he knew it could never really compete with countries hundreds of times bigger where football was almost a religion. The game had come a long way since his days scuffing around with a ball in the Doha scrublands, and as a pioneer of organised football and the former president of the Qatar Football Association, he could take some credit. But it still had a long way to go.
The top dozen clubs in the Qatar Stars League averaged crowds of 4,000, and that was no more than a club like Yeovil Town in the third tier of English football pulled in. For the price of their tickets to the Khalifa International Stadium, the fans came to see the odd fading professional from Europe or South America paid handsomely to bolster the home-grown teams and slog out the dregs of their career under the desert sun. Qatar’s tiny population had not produced one single great player of note. Even the native footballers didn’t dare play in the summer cauldron: the Stars League season runs from September, when the worst of the heat has died down. Having grown up listening to raucous choruses of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ in the Scouse theatre of Anfield, Bin Hammam was realistic enough to understand that football in Qatar would struggle to match the passion so famously encapsulated by Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly when he quipped: ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’
The truth was that Qatar had never even come close to qualifying for a World Cup finals and it was unlikely to do so in the near future. Unless, of course, he succeeded in his mission. The team from the country which hosts the World Cup qualifies automatically. Bin Hammam had been successful in bagging the 2011 Asian Confederation Cup to be hosted in Qatar, a big tournament contested by national teams from the region, but that would be played in January when the mercury dips to a more bearable 20°C. It was a sensible solution, but not one that Qatar could propose when bidding for the World Cup. His nation would have been a laughing stock. Every World Cup finals since the competition began in 1930 had been played in the months of May to July.2 It was tradition, and an unfortunate one from Qatar’s point of view because June, July and August are its hottest months.
But it wasn’t just about history. The world’s packed sporting calendar had evolved in such a way that those eight or nine weeks every four years in early summer were the only window to hold the tournament. The powerful professional football leagues, especially in Europe which controlled many of the world’s top players, were always bitterly resistant to any change to their seasons, which mostly ran from August to May. Weeks lost at the heart of a season equalled millions of pounds lost in gate receipts and broadcasting money. In addition, the major television companies, which were the lifeblood of a World Cup’s income, would fight against any attempt to move the competition to a time of year which clashed with events such as the Winter Olympics or American football’s Superbowl. It had to be June or July. But it simply could not be: not in Qatar. It wasn’t safe for the players or fans. Bin Hammam rubbed his silvered chin and stared pensively out of the car window. His task seemed impossible.
But the Emir wanted the World Cup to come to Qatar and Bin Hammam was the only man in the whole Middle East who stood any chance of making his ruler’s dream a reality. He had risen out of the desert and through the ranks of world football to become a member of FIFA’s ruling Exco, earning the admiration, loyalty and gratitude of many along the way. That was why the improbable task of persuading his colleagues to let him carry off their crown jewels to the desert fell to him. To outsiders it might have looked like a poisoned chalice. But, on the other hand, might this be his big chance to put himself and his family at the very top of Qatari society?
Sheikh Hamad had explained to him that hosting the World Cup was a crucial pillar of his plan to turn Doha into the foremost sport and tourism hub of the 21st century. It was all part of the 30-year strategy devised to shore up Qatar’s position for a future without the oil and gas that had brought such riches. Four years previously, Qatar had unveiled a $15 billion scheme to transform the country into a centre for sports, tourism, business and culture, and earlier in 2008 the Emir had pumped another $17 billion into the project.
The plan had just suffered a humiliating setback when Qatar’s bid to host the 2016 Olympics was quashed, failing even to make it through to the candidate city shortlist. The bid had proposed to hold the Olympics in October to avoid the summer heat, but this was outside permitted dates for the games. The president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, had also privately told his aides that he did not trust his 102 members to withstand the temptation to succumb to the advances of the super-rich emirate, and Qatar’s bid had been nipped in the bud. But no matter, Sheikh Hamad had reasoned. The World Cup was an even bigger, more glittering prize. So now Mohamed bin Hammam had a chance to play a pivotal role in securing his country’s future. If he failed, he would bring further humiliation upon his homeland. If he won, his family would bask in the victory forever.
By now Bin Hammam was back home again and the sun had begun to dissolve into a dusty horizon. A shamal was gaining potency and soon a desert sandstorm would be whipping up from the winds gusting in from the north-west coast. It was time to close the shutters and attend to his guests who were beginning to assemble in his majlis. His evening ritual was a reminder of the immense wealth and status which was founded on the hard-won patronage of the royal family. Sometimes men would come seeking money or loans, and Bin Hammam would always listen carefully. In Qatar generosity is a mark of honour and if someone asks you for something you are bound to give it to them. If you admired Bin Hammam’s watch, he would take it off his wrist and press it into your palm. The Emir wanted the World Cup and it was in his gift to help deliver it. How could he say no?
The World Cup is a colossus dwarfing even the Olympic Games for television viewing figures. For four weeks in a given summer, the competition stirs up a heady mix of joy, triumph and despair among the billions of people who are sucked in to watch the improbable drama of 22 athletic young men in shorts patriotically chasing a small polyurethane sphere around a neatly mown rectangle of grass. A missed penalty can be a national disaster and a hopeful hoof goalwards can be such stuff as dreams are made of. The names of the heroes are writ as large in popular history as the pioneers who first stepped on the moon. Think of the slender 17-year-old Pelé juggling the ball over the head of a bemused defender in Sweden 1958, the much-imitated Johan Cruyff drag-back in Germany 1974, or the barrel-chested Diego Maradona skipping past half the leaden-footed England team to score one of football’s greatest ever goals in Mexico 1986.
It is an event of such outrageous glamour that countries will fight tooth and nail to be the hosts in the knowledge that nothing else – except war or natural disaster – would attract such a swarm of the world’s television cameras to their doorstep. For a ruler or politician, hosting the competition is a way of bathing in the stardust and advertising the capability, organisation, hospitality and, above all, prestige of their nation. It is the ultimate showy dinner party in your lovely home, with the whole world as your guests. So it is perhaps surprising that the decision on where to hold this great showcase, the tournament to end all tournaments, should rest with just 24 people.
Thankfully, Bin Hammam was well acquainted with all of them. After 12 years at the FIFA boardroom table, he had come to call his colleagues on the ruling Exco his ‘brothers in football’. This was one advantage Qatar could count on. The Emir’s grand plan was in its early stages, but there were only a few months to get the scheme into shape before it would have to be revealed in detail to the world. FIFA was about to open the bidding process for the hosting of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, and countries who wanted to enter the race would have to register their formal bids by 16 March 2009. Speculation had been mounting for months as to which nations would throw their hats into the ring. Would England put together a credible bid? Would the United States enter the fray? Unsurprisingly no one had even considered that Qatar might be a contender, until Blatter had let the cat out of the bag in Sydney.
Once the candidates were formally declared in March, Bin Hammam would have just over 20 months to persuade his executive committee colleagues to back his country’s unlikely bid. The secret ballot to host the next two tournaments would be held at FIFA headquarters on 2 December 2010. Bin Hammam had an intimate understanding of the murky world of football politics learnt at the heel of his mentor, Blatter. He understood what made his colleagues tick and more crucially how to strike deals with them. It took only junior school maths to calculate what was required for victory. Persuade 13 of his brothers – a simple majority – and the glittering prize would be his. The ballot could take several rounds depending on how many countries had entered the race. After each round, the bid with the fewest votes would be eliminated until one of the contenders notched up the 13 or more ballot papers needed to win. In the event of a tie between two final bids, the FIFA president would have the casting vote.
Despite all the difficulties he faced, Bin Hammam had to admit that Blatter had given him a leg-up. The FIFA president had announced in Sydney that for the first time ever he would propose the rights to host two World Cups should be awarded at the same time, meaning the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments would be run side by side. In the same congress speech when he outed Qatar as a potential bidder, Blatter had also revealed that England, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, Japan, Australia and the United States were potential contenders. These were some fearsome rivals, but all the big guns from Europe would surely rush for the closest prize – the 2018 World Cup – splitting the field and leaving the contest for the 2022 tournament relatively open.
The Exco had also sanctioned a new rotation policy which would prevent a country from bidding to host the tournament if the World Cup had been held in their continent in the previous eight years. Since Brazil had already been selected for 2014, the new rules meant that the whole of South America – one of the world’s most football-obsessed regions – would be excluded from both ballots. If all went to plan, Europe and South America, the two continents which had produced all the World Cup-winning teams since the competition began in 1930, would not be in the running for 2022. Also, Qatar had only a handful of small stadiums and the 12-year gap between the vote and the 2022 tournament would give the country time to build the requisite eight or nine world-class venues from scratch. Even more crucially, the dual bidding process paved the way for the novel possibility that bidding nations for the respective tournaments could broker deals to rig the ballot by trading blocs of votes. No one was more adept at that sort of politicking than Bin Hammam. There was a glimmer of hope.
Best of all, the ballot was secret, providing the perfect cover for any backroom deals the bidders cared to strike. Secrecy was part of FIFA’s culture. While the world of business had moved into a new era of transparency and accountability since FIFA was formed as a gentlemen’s club of seven nations in 1904, it suited the men who ran football to cling onto its status as a mere nonprofit association in secrecy-obsessed Switzerland. That country’s regulators have the tenderest of touches with such bodies, demanding no taxes and placing only the lightest requirements upon them to file annual accounts. The laws are intended to shelter national yodelling clubs or homeless charities from cumbersome bureaucracy, but FIFA is one of several multi-billion-dollar enterprises which have benefited from the peaceful impunity they afford.
The Swiss association is structured in such a way that it allows Blatter, as president, a free hand to run the administration of world football more or less as he likes. There are two checks on his power: one is the congress of all the member associations, which meets only once a year, and the other is the FIFA Exco. A supine committee suited Blatter very well, and in turn the president appeared more than willing to turn a blind eye to anything which did not directly threaten his own position.
A handful of times each year, FIFA’s ruling committee waft into Switzerland on first-class flights and are put up in the elegant splendour of the Baur au Lac Hotel, with its lawns rolling down to Lake Zurich. They are treated like royalty. Since 2006 the meetings have been held in a cavernous chamber in the bowels of FIFA’s new headquarters where the participants are shielded from prying eyes by huge black-out blinds. Blatter sits at the head of the table and dictates the agenda while the other 23 men eye each other across a big oblong table in a scene eerily similar to the war room in the Cold War satire Dr Strangelove.
Many of the men stay silent and simply nod through Blatter’s proposals before heading off for dinner in one of Zurich’s numerous Michelin-starred restaurants. These were the people that Bin Hammam would have to win over if he was going to fulfil the Emir’s wish and deliver the World Cup on a plate to Doha. He would need to call in favours, cut some deals and grease the palms of those who had influence with the voters. There had been a commercially successful World Cup in Germany two years earlier where the final had been watched by more than 700 million people worldwide. The next tournament in 2010 was going to be held in Africa for the first time, fulfilling a long-standing promise from Blatter, whose grip on FIFA depended on his support from the continent’s power-brokers. Then Brazil would take its turn in 2014. After that, everything was up for grabs.
A reader of pure heart might be forgiven for thinking that the decision on where FIFA’s prize money-spinning tournament should be held might be judged on the quality of the country’s stadiums, transport infrastructure and accommodation for the fans. Surely the bidders ought to be assessed on how capable they are of holding a first-class World Cup? Bin Hammam knew it was far more complicated than that.
Previous ballots have been littered with tales of intrigue and skulduggery. A FIFA Exco member was likely to vote for his own country if it happened to be in the running, although even this was by no means certain. Other members would be swayed by regional loyalties, football politics and alliances offering some kind of advantage. Anyone who spent enough time in FIFA’s corridors of power would have heard the stories about large cash sums being offered and accepted in the witching hour before the ballot. A sizeable bung, however, was not always a guarantee of support. Since the ballot was secret, an Exco member could take the cash, then sneak off to vote for someone else. Nobody would be any the wiser. Broken promises and double-dealing were the dark heart of a World Cup ballot.
Bin Hammam was a little distracted that evening as he sipped his coffee in the majlis while his guests lounged on his sofas, glued to the football on the television. Perhaps the task set by the Emir wasn’t completely impossible after all, he thought. But he needed to devise a way to win over his fellow Exco colleagues, and fast.
For any World Cup bid to be successful, it had to have the support of FIFA Exco member number one: the president, Sepp Blatter. Given his proposal over dinner with the Emir back in February, and considering all that Qatar had done to help him get elected in 1998 and 2002, Bin Hammam could surely count on Blatter’s vote. Or could he? While Blatter had blithely uttered the words ‘We are going to bring the World Cup to Qatar,’ as though the tournament was entirely within his gift and there might as well be no ballot at all, his duplicity over the 2007 presidential election showed he was a man who could not be trusted.
The FIFA president had the charm of a kindly grandfather and could often seem slightly bumbling in public, with his platitudinous utterances about his ‘FIFA family’ and the ‘beautiful game’. But behind the scenes, Blatter’s FIFA lair was a world apart from the football pitch that he so frequently eulogised: that open arena where fair play was prized and cheats were punished with a referee’s whistle. This was the ugly game. It was not sufficient to be merely an accomplished football administrator, although Blatter was certainly that. You had to be a prince in the style of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. If this meant surrounding yourself with sycophants, purging your opponents and being all things to all people while quietly taking a course which secured your position, then Blatter was eminently capable of it all. He had told the Emir he wanted to see the World Cup come to Qatar. Did he really mean it?
By 2008 the 72-year-old Blatter had been the president of FIFA for ten years, and the decade at the helm of world football’s governing body had taken its toll on his private life. There had been three failed marriages, producing one daughter, and plenty of salacious rumours about his private tastes and habits into the bargain. Blatter had once been president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders – a campaign group pushing for women to abandon wearing tights and go back to saucier stockings – and he kept a succession of glamorous women dangling on his arm, so far as he had time.
But Blatter didn’t have friends as such, and he couldn’t make these girlfriends stick for long. It wasn’t so much that he devoted his life to his work: his work was his life. At weekends he could often be found alone busying himself in his grand office at FIFA’s headquarters. So much of his time was spent on all-expenses-paid business for football’s governing body that he barely needed to draw his salary – rumoured to be several million – although this, like much of FIFA’s opaque accountancy, remains a closely guarded secret, kept from even the Exco. His attention to detail was as legendary as his political charm. Members of the Exco were used to receiving his gushing emails celebrating their birthdays or congratulating them on some recent success, such as re-elections which retained their positions at football’s top table.
Keeping his grip on power was what mattered most to Blatter, as Bin Hammam knew to his cost. To hold down the job as world football’s top administrator you had to keep the support of the Exco and tame the unruly bunch of federations who each had one vote at the organisation’s annual congress. It was not sufficient to send out a few fawning emails. Blatter had learnt from his mentor, João Havelange, that the key to success was to use FIFA’s ever-expanding wealth to achieve your own political ends.
In the four years leading up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany, FIFA had raked in more than £2 billion which could be distributed to win favours. Three-quarters of the federations had become financially dependent on FIFA, which paid them $250,000 annually, plus a bonus in World Cup years. Without those payments many of the federations would be bankrupt, so they needed a president who kept the cash flowing. Under Blatter, the handouts were expanded to help exactly the type of smaller nations that shored up his presidency with their votes. FIFA’s targeted development schemes such as the Goal Project (chaired by none other than Bin Hammam) and the Financial Assistance Programme doled out sums of up to $400,000 a time, which enabled top football officials in impoverished nations to cement their standing at home by building artificial pitches and sparkling new administrative headquarters. Though these were ostensibly laudable objectives, the payments were also a neat way to win friends and influence people.
At the same time, Blatter used his patronage to reward supporters and keep opponents in plain sight by appointing them to FIFA’s myriad committees which met a few times a year to discuss everything from sports medicine to beach soccer. A committee member could easily earn $100,000 and more each year from FIFA by claiming generous day rates and expenses. The Exco was by far the most important committee. Blatter had not only doubled their numbers to two dozen, but he had also secretly introduced the six-figure ‘salary’ for each member, which was a welcome addition to the wages they earned from their day jobs back home. As accommodating as ever, FIFA made the payments available in cash which could be picked up from the finance office in tax-free Switzerland. It was, of course, pocket money to Bin Hammam. When in Zurich he would often send his chauffeur or Meshadi to pick up envelopes from the finance office containing $10,000 or $20,000 in crisp new bank notes. It was money that could be dispersed to friends and underlings.
The only thing Bin Hammam knew for sure about Blatter was: the old fox would do whatever he needed to cling to power. Nothing more, and nothing less. So if Blatter continued to believe it was in his political interests to lend his backing to Qatar’s World Cup dream, that’s just what he would do. If for some reason the wind changed, Blatter’s promises of support would diffuse like the dust in a desert shamal.
Bin Hammam mixed easily with his other ‘brothers’ on the FIFA executive committee. At events in Zurich and around the world, he glided effortlessly from handshake to handshake, his serene countenance revealing little of the steely determination that lay beneath. The Exco saw themselves as swashbuckling globe-trotters with wheelie suitcases: toasting each other’s honour in some of the world’s finest restaurants; propping up the bar in the early hours at five-star hotels; joshing in the hospitality boxes at the best matches; and snoring loudly in their first-class reclining seats on the flight home. For these grey-haired men, FIFA wasn’t just a gravy train, it was a truffle and saffron-infused express with gilded carriages. At least a dozen of them were already millionaires and rest were treated by FIFA as if they were. Bin Hammam knew well which members of the Exco old guard had taken bribes and got away with it. He was also close to the double act who were quietly fleecing FIFA for millions.
When sitting down to plot his strategy, it was useful for Bin Hammam to think of his Exco colleagues in regional blocs, because that was how they often voted. It increased their bargaining power. The Exco were drawn from the four corners of the globe: seven from UEFA, the body which controls European football; three from South America’s Conmebol confederation; four from the Confederation of African Football (CAF); three from CONCACAF in central and northern America; one from Oceania which covers the Pacific islands and New Zealand; and four from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC), of which Bin Hammam was president; as well as one from the British home nations and Blatter himself. The cornerstone of his campaign would be to win over the Africans and shore up his support in Asia. That would give Qatar almost two thirds of the votes it needed.
Asia should have been straightforward. Bin Hammam had plenty of leverage over the three other Exco members from the continent as the president of its confederation. There were, however, complications. Three other countries from the AFC were planning to enter the bidding race, and as their leader Bin Hammam owed them at least a semblance of impartiality. Australia, South Korea and Japan all wanted to throw their hats in the ring, so Bin Hammam couldn’t be seen to be backing Qatar’s bid at all costs at the expense of his other members. He was going to have to tread carefully. South Korea and Japan were represented by members of the Exco, and the very rules that Blatter had proposed to effectively disbar Europe and South America from the 2022 contest had stirred up their hopes. The two countries had jointly hosted a modestly successful World Cup in 2002 and their chances of being allowed to snatch the tournament back so soon were slim, but with the big guns out of the running they thought it was worth chancing their arm for 2022.
The South Korean bid was a political ploy by Chung Mongjoon, who vied with Bin Hammam for the position of richest man on the FIFA Exco. He had been adopted into the family that owned the Hyundai Heavy Industries group, and now aged 57 he was the controlling shareholder of one of the biggest conglomerates in the world. Like Bin Hammam, Chung loved sport as much as business. He had been a champion equestrian in his youth and further distinguished himself as cross-country skier. He had become the head of his national football federation partly out of a passion for the game, but also because he saw it as a stepping stone for greater things: his country’s presidency. And the World Cup was to be the spring-board for his political ambitions. In the regional politics of the AFC, Chung was not a supporter of Bin Hammam. The two men were wary of each other and Bin Hammam had his work cut out if he was going persuade Chung to vote for Qatar as a second choice once South Korea dropped out of the contest in the initial rounds, as he intended to make sure it would.
The softly spoken Junji Ogura of Japan was a little easier to deal with. His country had half-heartedly thrown in their hat for the 2022 competition alongside South Korea. Few understood why and, like South Korea, nobody expected them to win. Ogura, aged 70, was a quiet, respectful grandfatherly man with floppy white hair who adored football but was more comfortable sizzling up tempura in his Tokyo home. He was one of the Exco who went to Zurich to nod through Blatter’s proposals. Ogura, surely, would do the decent thing once Japan was out of the race and vote for its Asian comrades in Qatar? So Bin Hammam’s strategy was to deftly tie his AFC ‘brothers’ into a pact. He needed to persuade Chung and Ogura that their three countries would vote for the last man standing – out of a regional patriotism. If Bin Hammam could find the votes, that would be Qatar.
There was one Asian member left, Worawi Makudi from Thailand. Bin Hammam was all too familiar with the 57-year-old Makudi, whose reign in Bangkok had survived the ever-changing whims of his country’s many political regimes. He was primarily a football administrator but he used his position to create a number of lucrative business schemes in his homeland with the help of his sidekick and chief advisor at the Thai FA, Joe Sim, a gambling baron known to his friends as ‘The Casino King’. Makudi kept questionable company, and he was known in world football as ‘Mr Ten Percent’ – a reference to his personal entitlement for the television rights from some of the friendly matches played by Thailand’s national team. He was a close friend of Bin Hammam’s, certainly, but he always made sure he got his slice from any deal.
In order to ensure Asia’s voters backed Qatar when their own countries were out of the running, Bin Hammam would also have to drum up a groundswell of support for his country’s bid across all the continent’s member associations who mandated their representatives on the Exco. That wasn’t a problem: Asia was his power-base, and he knew how to curry favour here. Many of the continent’s national football officials were already on his payroll. Sewing up Asia would still get Bin Hammam only four votes, however, including his own. He needed 13 to win. Where were the rest going to come from?
Thousands of miles across the ocean were three of the FIFA Exco’s most entrenched members. The trio from South America came as a group and between them they had notched up more than 40 years on the executive committee. In any normal organisation with robust ethics, they would have been kicked out of their jobs several years ago, but this was FIFA and Blatter had come to rely upon them.
For 19 years Ricardo Teixeira had been in charge of the football federation that had produced some of the greatest teams, Brazil. A combative, sturdy man with a shock of white hair now aged 61, he had married into the FIFA family years before when he took the hand of Lúcia Havelange, the daughter of Blatter’s predecessor. Under the tutelage of his father-in-law, Teixeira had become a multi-millionaire in a country where vast sections of the population live in shanty huts and child malnutrition is rife. Teixeira had been the subject of several investigations by the Brazilian authorities for creaming off a percentage of sponsorship contracts to his federation, but he had managed to survive. Even the country’s most adored footballer, Pelé, had accused him of corruption in a dispute over television rights. But there was one scandal that even he could not escape from: one of the darkest moments in FIFA’s history. It also implicated his fellow Exco member Nicolás Leoz, the president of Conmebol, the South American confederation.
At the age of 80, Leoz, a former sports journalist, lawyer and history teacher, made even Blatter look like a sprightly young thing as he tottered into FIFA headquarters for Exco meetings. He had been making the same trip since 1998 and by now had the air of an aloof dictator with bulbous face and raised eyebrows that had fixed over the years into an expression of almost permanent disdain. He was comfortably wealthy from his years controlling football in South America, but he still craved recognition in his dotage. In his home country Paraguay, a football stadium and a beach boulevard had been named after him and his lackeys kept a book of his long list of titles. He collected honours like other people collected stamps. Like his close ally Teixeira, he had taken bribes and got away scot-free. In fact, even as the investigation into the kickbacks began, Leoz was awarded the FIFA Order of Merit for his leadership in football. Blatter knew how to keep the old man happy.
The scandal that engulfed Leoz and Teixeira had followed the collapse of International Sport and Leisure (ISL), a sports marketing company that had been awarded contracts by FIFA in the 1990s to sell broadcast rights to the 2002 and 2006 World Cups. ISL had paid several hundred million dollars but had struggled to turn its contracts into profits and collapsed in 2001. A resulting investigation by Swiss prosecutors found that it had won the contracts by paying out more than $100 million in bribes and commission payments – many to FIFA officials – through front companies in Liechtenstein and elsewhere. Leoz had been paid a $130,000 kickback by ISL, but this was dwarfed by the cash paid out to Teixeira, who pocketed a staggering $13 million.
The payments were sweeteners for the contracts which had been voted through by the FIFA Exco. However, thanks to Switzerland’s tenderness towards its associations, the acceptance of bribes like these was not considered an offence under the laws of the land and the two men were never prosecuted. It was not even a breach of FIFA’s own rules, because world football’s governing body didn’t have a code of ethics until three years after the fall of ISL.
In any normal organisation Teixeira and Leoz would have been shown the door, but these men were key power-brokers and personal friends of the president. Blatter had knowledge of ISL’s dirty payments as early as 1997 when a $1 million payment slip had ended up in his Zurich office by mistake. The named payee had been none other than his own mentor, the then FIFA president Havelange. At the time, Blatter was just the secretary general and he simply passed the payment on to its intended recipient because, as he later tried to explain, he couldn’t understand why the money had been routed through FIFA. He didn’t think to ask why Havelange was receiving such a substantial sum from ISL. That was his story and he was sticking to it.
The final member of the Latin triumvirate was Julio Grondona, from Argentina, who was virtually untouchable. He commanded FIFA’s finance committee and was therefore one of the handful of men in the world who knew how much Blatter earned. Grondona was the most senior of the vice-presidents on the Exco and was, in effect, Blatter’s number two. He founded Arsenal Fútbol Club, an Argentinian league side, in the 1950s, and rose through football administration before taking a seat at the executive committee in 1988. Now aged 76, he had a weak heart but that did little to subdue his sharp tongue. Grondona was a politically astute operator who played to the gallery in Buenos Aires by using every opportunity to display his hatred of the English over the ‘occupation’ of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands). They certainly wouldn’t be getting his vote and neither would the United States bid for 2022, because they were England’s stooges as far as Grondona was concerned. In any other organisation he would have been sacked for racist comments he had made years earlier. In 2003 he told a journalist: ‘I do not believe a Jew can ever be a referee at this level. It’s hard work and, you know, Jews don’t like hard work.’ He repeated his anti-Semitism later, saying: ‘Jews don’t like it when it gets rough.’ FIFA’s public stance had always been that it did not tolerate any form of racism, and yet Grondona’s jaw-dropping remarks passed unpunished in Zurich.
For Bin Hammam, the South Americans were a challenge which would require all his skills of diplomacy and deal-making. These men were no push-over. What he did know, however, was that both Teixeira and Grondona had problems at home. Brazil was struggling to find the funds to update its stadiums for the 2014 World Cup and the Argentine football league was in a financially parlous state. Might this provide a way in?
You would have to fly 5,000 miles from Buenos Aires to the pearl fishing island paradise of Tahiti in the middle of the South Pacific to find the next Exco member on Bin Hammam’s list. The lonely Oceania confederation had claim to just one seat on the Exco, and the current incumbent was the former French league football player Reynald Temarii. At meetings in the Zurich war room, the suave, bronzed Tahitian stood out from the rest of the Exco not least because there wasn’t a single grey hair on his head. At 41, he was the youngest member by nearly a decade, having joined the world of high football politics just four years earlier. He may have worn a Hawaiian shirt on occasion, but Temarii was no buffoon. He had returned to Tahiti after finishing his playing career with FC Nantes and became first an advisor to the president, then a minister for youth sport and development. At FIFA he was one of the executive committee’s eight vice presidents and frequently rubbed shoulders with Bin Hammam as they both held senior positions on the body that doled out Goal Project cash. What Temarii needed more than anything was development money to improve the Pacific islands’ threadbare playing facilities.
The Europeans were an entirely different proposition for Bin Hammam to ponder. Their federations were mostly rich and they didn’t vote as a pack as some of their colleagues around the world were apt to do. They would have to be dealt with one by one. There was a new rising star at the head of European football, and his name was Michel Platini. The Frenchman had enjoyed a stellar career as a footballer, with many rating him as one of the top ten players of the 20th century. He was the type of footballer every fan loved to watch: effortlessly agile with the ball at his feet and capable of conjuring a pass or a shot which was simply sublime. He was a lover of art, a bon viveur and perhaps surprisingly, for a man of such rich athletic talents, a smoker. He had played in Italy for one of the great Juventus teams and once wryly observed: ‘A Frenchman would drive two hundred kilometres for a good vineyard; an Italian would drive two hundred kilometres for a good game of football.’ Platini was undeniably in the French camp. After hanging up his boots in 1987, he managed the national team for four years before moving into football administration as an organiser for the 1998 World Cup in France and joined the Exco in 2002.
It was a charmed life which just kept on getting better. By 2008 he had served as the president of UEFA for a year, after pulling off an improbable and narrow victory against the 16-year incumbent Lennart Johansson – largely due to the efforts of his new patron, Sepp Blatter. He did it with typical aplomb, announcing to an assembled crowd of voters: ‘My hair is gone; I’ve got a big belly; it’s time to be president.’ Platini seemed unstoppable and a clear candidate for the ultimate job, the FIFA presidency. So where would that leave the Qatar bid? Platini was not the sort of man who would want see his cherished game played in 40-degree heat. But he was known to be close to the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who had made it clear he was open to forging alliances with oil-rich Qatar. Bin Hammam might have found his pressure-point.
The other big name from Europe was an equally tough nut to crack, Franz Beckenbauer. The former German footballer would also feature on most people’s top ten list of the great players of the last century. While Platini never made it to a World Cup final, Beckenbauer had won the competition as both a player and a manager. His achievements were without parallel. In his playing days he controlled games by sweeping behind the defence, organising those around him and reading the play intuitively. Upright and elegant, he would choose his moment to stride up the pitch in a manner that suggested he knew he was in charge. The Germans called him ‘Der Kaiser’ and he had retained his unshakeable self-confidence when he entered management with his national team, and later Bayern Munich.
Beckenbauer was better placed than most to understand the nature of an Exco World Cup vote because he had seen it at first hand when he led his nation’s bid for the 2006 competition. It was a highly controversial ballot swung by a typical piece of Blatter chicanery. The president had promised the Africans that the World Cup would come to their continent when he was first campaigning to lead FIFA in 1998. It was one of his tactics to win the continent’s support, and he therefore publicly supported the South African bid against Beckenbauer’s Germany. However, when it came to the secret ballot for the 2006 World Cup hosts at Zurich in July 2000, Blatter was said to have reneged on his promise. Michel Zen-Ruffinen – the FIFA secretary general who turned on Blatter in 2002 – had collected the votes from each member and later revealed that the president had actually put his tick against the name of Germany, not South Africa. Zen-Ruffinen reasoned that this was because FIFA was already wedded to a financially uncertain World Cup in Japan and South Korea in 2002 and Blatter did not want this to be followed by another high-risk tournament in Africa – despite his pledges during his election campaign.
The vote on the 2006 tournament was closer than anyone could have imagined. Going into the final round, South Africa and Germany were tied at 11 votes each, and England was about to drop out as its support had been cut to two. Then a curious thing happened. Charlie Dempsey, the Exco member from New Zealand, went awol. He had been mandated by his federation to vote for South Africa and did so in the opening two rounds. Then in the final round he had a sudden change of heart and abstained. Germany won 12 votes to 11, and best of all they had done so in a manner which meant that Blatter would not have to reveal his hand by using his casting presidential vote. Quite what caused Dempsey’s 11th-hour capitulation has never been discovered, but he was forced to resign by his Oceania committee two days later. The sorry saga did, however, present Bin Hammam with an opportunity. Qatar had given its backing to the German World Cup bid over South Africa and Bin Hammam, ever the dealmaker, had played a crucial role in rounding up the Asian votes Beckenbauer needed to win the ballot. The Germans owed Qatar a debt of gratitude and it was time to call in the favour.
Four of the other European members of the Exco were representing countries which were in the running for the 2018 competition. Although it was against the rules, Bin Hammam could offer his vote to them if they agreed to back Qatar for 2022. England were pushing hard for 2018 after losing out on the 2006 World Cup and they were well equipped in stadiums and infrastructure to host the tournament. But they were not popular among the Exco. They clung to the arrogant belief that England was superior as the home of football and they were loathed by grandees such as Grondona.
They also had a fundamental weakness: their own Exco member (who joined the committee as one of the British home nations, rather than as a member of UEFA), Geoff Thompson, was only half-heartedly promoting their bid. Thompson, aged 63, was as straight as they come: he had been a referee and now worked part-time as a magistrate. He shunned the limelight, preferring the peace and quiet of his Chesterfield home. Behind his back, the England bid called him ‘the blazer’ and were never quite sure if even they could count on his vote because he seemed so diffident. He had gone from slicing the half-time oranges for his village team to running the Sheffield and Hallamshire FA in the 1960s. Following a spell as general manager at Doncaster Rovers, he climbed his way up the English FA to become its chairman in 1999. Thompson, however, stood down from this role in early 2008 to make way for a favourite of the Labour government, the former minister Lord Triesman. It left him freer to concentrate on his roles at UEFA and of course the Exco, which he had joined two years previously. Thompson presented Bin Hammam with a problem: he was a stickler for the rules, and wouldn’t England be more inclined to vote for their big ally, the USA?
Perhaps he had to look to Spain, where a football revolution was taking place thanks to the foresight of the urbane Exco member Ángel María Villar Llona. As head of the country’s association, Villar Llona had put in place a youth training system decades earlier which was now bearing fruit. Only that summer Bin Hammam had been present at the Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna to watch Villar Llona spring to his feet as Fernando Torres scored the winning goal for Spain against Germany in the final of the 2008 European Football Championship. It was a rebirth for a country of perennial footballing underachievers who could now pass their way through all before them thanks to the array of young talent which had matured together into an outstanding team.
Villar Llona, aged 58, had been an accomplished midfielder himself, representing his country on 22 occasions. He studied law after leaving football and was celebrating his 20th anniversary as the head of the Spanish FA. The handsome Spaniard was now fronting his country’s World Cup hopes and was negotiating with Portugal to agree a joint Iberian bid which would be culturally and linguistically attractive to the three South American voters. If Villar Llona could pull that off, he would have four votes at his disposal. Of all the European contenders, he had to be the prime target for any vote-swapping deal.
The chubby Belgian doctor Michel D’Hooghe offered an alternative if he could be persuaded that the temperatures in Qatar were not too threatening to players’ health. D’Hooghe’s home country had made a partnership with Holland and was styling itself as the green bid for the 2018 World Cup – which was slightly misplaced as hardly anyone on the FIFA Exco gave a hoot about environmental issues. Bid teams on bicycles were not going to cut much ice with men more used to chauffeur-driven limousines. The Low Countries bid was unloved and needed votes. Even D’Hooghe would stay at a distance from his nation’s well-meaning campaign. While Villar Llona led the Spanish bid from the front, D’Hooghe made it clear he supported his country, but did not get involved.
The jovial 62-year-old loved nothing better than to don his short-brimmed Belgian hat and entertain friends with his accordion. He had become smitten with football as a child when he first walked on to the grass of the Klokke Stadion in his home city of Bruges dressed as a smiling bear mascot in blue and black football kit. After medical school, he was appointed the club’s first doctor – a job that launched him on an illustrious career in sports medicine as, among other things, an expert in groin strain. At the same time he took charge of the Belgian FA, and for the last 20 years he had been a fixture on the Exco. As the FIFA medical expert, he understood better than anyone else how extreme heat sapped the performance of elite athletes. Bin Hammam scrawled a question mark against his name.
Russia was a dark horse. Sport had been an instrument for bringing prestige to the state since the days of communism, but prime minister Vladimir Putin was not a football fan. The country’s football chiefs were planning to bid for the 2018 World Cup, but would its leader throw his weight behind their efforts and give them the backing of a state apparatus which had tentacles all over the world?
In 2008, Russia’s FIFA Exco member was Vyacheslav Koloskov, a long-standing sports functionary who cut deals on the Exco based on national interest, but the leadership of the bid had been handed to Vitaly Mutko, one of Putin’s cronies from his days as mayor of Saint Petersburg. It was rumoured that Mutko would take Koloskov’s seat on the Exco and that might be a signal of Putin’s intent. Qatar and Russia could not have been more different in size and yet they had certain things in common. Both were autocracies with strong rulers whose positions were cemented by an accident of geology which made them the world’s biggest exporters of liquefied natural gas. To secure the vote of the Russian Exco member, whoever it might be, Bin Hammam would have to persuade Putin to back Qatar, and perhaps his country’s shared gas interests might be a way of getting his foot inside the door of the Kremlin.
The other UEFA Exco members were Marios Lefkaritis from Cyprus and Şenes Erzik from Turkey. The Cypriot entrepreneur Lefkaritis was an unknown quantity when it came to the World Cup vote. He had been a reliable stalwart on UEFA committees for many years, but at the age of 62 was only just getting accustomed to the machinations of the FIFA Exco following his election the year before. He had been born in the port of Limassol, Cyprus’s second biggest city, and had made a fortune through the oil industry. His family’s company, Petrolina, owned dozens of petrol stations all over Cyprus and supplied fuel to the shipping and aviation industries, with subsidiary firms owning land and property developments across the island. Bin Hammam could not predict how amenable Lefkaritis would be to a back-room deal before the World Cup ballot, but one thing was for sure: when it came to oil and property, he knew how to do business.
Erzik, aged 66, was a multilingual economics graduate who had worked in the pharmaceutical industry and the United Nations before being hired by the Turkish FA. From his office among the minarets of Istanbul, he used his marketing expertise to transform Turkish football and was awarded posts with UEFA in 1994 and then the FIFA Exco two years later. At the time Turkey was the only Muslim country with a representative on the Exco besides Qatar. It was something Bin Hammam could build on.
And then there was the little and large partnership that had been quietly skimming the cream off the FIFA coffers for years: Jack Warner, the president of CONCACAF, and his gargantuan secretary general, Chuck Blazer. CONCACAF had three seats on the Exco, and in any normal ballot you would have expected the trio to pledge their support to the USA, their confederation’s only candidate for the 2022 World Cup. But the small group of men was led by Warner, and that meant anything was possible.
The former history teacher from Trinidad and Tobago was already one of the most notorious figures in Blatter’s ‘FIFA family’. He wielded disproportionate power as president of CONCACAF, presiding over an organisation that had a fifth of all votes at the FIFA congress. Warner’s fiefdom included three countries from North America and seven from Central America, but his strength lay in the 31 Caribbean islands which each had a football federation no matter how small they happened to be. The great footballing nations, such as Brazil (population 200 million) and Germany (80 million), each had one vote at FIFA congress. So did tiny Montserrat with a population of just 5,000 people which formed part of Warner’s empire. The joke was that every time a tiny atoll pierced the warm blue-green waters of the Caribbean, Warner would give it a football federation.
Warner was a natty figure in a shiny suit with short lapels. He was quick to grin and crack a joke and played the part of the lovable rogue to perfection. But beneath all the zap and charisma, this was a rapacious opportunist who would bully and browbeat friends and enemies alike in order to get what he wanted. Warner had several money-making schemes, but the most lucrative was the cash he was looting from FIFA using his pet project, the Dr João Havelange Centre of Excellence.
The centre, on the outskirts of Warner’s home city of Port of Spain, had lofty ambitions. It was, according to its website, a ‘hub of football education, expertise and skills training, catering to the needs of players, both club and national teams, sports officials, referees and other stakeholders, with a mission to achieve a sustained level of excellence in every aspect of the game’. It was also open for weddings, birthdays, rock concerts and Miss Universe contests, in fact, anything that generated cash.
Over the years Warner repeatedly bombarded FIFA with requests for money to develop the centre. FIFA duly obliged, pumping millions into Warner’s scheme almost every time he asked. His secret, which he never let on, was that he owned the land the centre was built on, and the CONCACAF bank accounts FIFA were regularly filling were also under his complete control. FIFA never enquired about what happened to the money. The votes Warner controlled at congress were too important. Instead, Blatter tried to keep his Caribbean friend happy, offering patronage in the form of membership of various FIFA committees to 72 officials from Warner’s confederation.
Warner’s co-conspirator was one of the most conspicuous people on the FIFA Exco. His American comrade, Blazer, was as wide as he was tall. With his perfect rotundity and curly white beard, CONCACAF’s secretary general had all the appearance of a cash-crazed Father Christmas. He ran the confederation’s operations from a grace-and-favour penthouse in Trump Tower: one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in New York, with prized views over Central Park. Blazer was highly intelligent, but also eccentric. Joggers would turn their heads to watch this man-mountain taking his daily ‘exercise’ around Central Park on a Segway with a parrot on his shoulder. Even stranger was the fact that the parrot had been trained by Blazer’s ex-wife to hurl abuse at him in her own voice. Mrs Blazer had taken temporary custody of the bird after the pair had separated, and spent a year training it to spit out choice insults which she felt summed up her ex-husband’s many defects before sending it back to give him a piece of her mind. Blazer was still fond of his parrot which he kept in a giant gold aviary in his penthouse office, but he wished it would stop squawking ‘You’re a dope’ at him during business meetings.
Warner and Blazer came together as a partnership in 1990 when the Trinidadian made an audacious challenge for the presidency of CONCACAF. Warner won against the odds thanks to the support of Blazer, who was an official in the United States soccer federation at the time. Shortly afterwards, Warner made Blazer CONCACAF’s secretary general and the pair set about making money. In the ten years before 2008, Blazer misappropriated many millions of dollars from CONCACAF in unauthorised commissions, fees and rent expenses for his apartments in Trump Towers and Miami. Even his giant Hummer was fully paid for by the football organisation.3
In the contest for the 2006 World Cup, Warner and Blazer, along with the third CONCACAF member of the Exco, had initially backed England. They soon proved inconsistent. After voting for England in the first round, they switched their support to South Africa, effectively ending the English bid’s chances. Since then, a new third member had joined the Exco. Rafael Salguero Sandoval, a 62-year-old former football player turned solicitor from Guatemala, was a vice chairman of CONCACAF and had been on its executive committee for 22 years. Salguero had been unaware of the huge amounts of money being siphoned off by Warner and Blazer. Bin Hammam was not sure how this new third member would vote, but the way into CONCACAF was undoubtedly through Warner.
The man from the Caribbean was key, and thankfully he described Bin Hammam as ‘my only brother in football’. The Qatari was already working hard on locking down Warner’s support. A couple of weeks earlier in May 2008, he had emailed his staff at the AFC to ask for Warner’s bank account details so he could wire over $250,000 – a sum 25 times the average wage in Trinidad and Tobago at that time. Days earlier, just ahead of the Sydney congress, Warner had been taken to China on Bin Hammam’s private jet in his role as the Qatari’s ‘consultant’ on a project to raise the standards of football across Asia. The men were touring Beijing when a massive earthquake hit the Sichuan region, hundreds of miles away. Warner would later claim that the cash from Bin Hammam was to recompense him for ‘losses’ he had suffered during the natural disaster. He never explained quite what he was carrying in his luggage that could possibly have been worth such a huge round-figure sum – unless, of course, it was a suitcase full of cash.
Last but a very long way from least, there was Africa, Bin Hammam’s political heartland. The continent he had learned to navigate extremely well on the campaign trail for Sepp Blatter. Here, he would have to build bridges with Issa Hayatou, the man he had helped trounce in the FIFA presidential elections six years earlier. For 20 years the French-speaking Hayatou had been the dominant force in African football as the president of CAF, and had served on the Exco for longer than Bin Hammam. He cut an imposing figure in his flowing white boubou – an impression accentuated by his oke headdress which made him look even taller than his 6ft 5in frame. His vote would come with conditions. He would want to know what Qatar could do for Africa and his home country Cameroon. But Hayatou was not unassailable. Bin Hammam, alongside Blatter, had ruthlessly cut his support in half in 2002 and could do so again. If he wanted to stay at the helm of African football, it might be easier for Hayatou to go with the flow this time, especially if his country and his continent stood to benefit.
In contrast to Hayatou, two of the three other members of the Exco from Africa had been voted onto the committee only the previous year. Jacques Anouma, 56, was a quick-witted former accountant for a French airline who had prospered in the Ivory Coast under the ruthless dictator Laurent Gbagbo. In fact, he and Gbagbo were so close that Anouma had been the country’s financial director for years while at the same time running his nation’s football federation.
The other newcomer to the Exco was the squat Amos Adamu, the president of the Western African football union, who clearly had the Midas touch. He had grown rich as a football administrator in Nigeria, owning at least three homes, including one in London. His critics had blamed him for the millions of dollars that were lost following the 1999 World Youth Championships and the 2003 All Africa Games, but the accusations went no further. Bin Hammam resolved to invite all three men to Doha to show them what his gleaming city had to offer. The fourth African Exco incumbent, Slim Chiboub of Tunisia, was widely expected to be replaced at the next election in 2009, with the former Egyptian footballer Hany Abu Rida looking like a strong contender for the seat. Bin Hammam wasn’t going to waste much time on Chiboub until he knew who was going to be in position in December 2010, when the World Cup vote would be decided.
Winning the support of the four Africans was crucial because they were expected to vote as a bloc. That would get Bin Hammam a third of the 12 votes on top of his own which he needed to win for Qatar. CAF was a tight-knit federation under Hayatou, and its member associations knew how to make their voices heard. Bin Hammam knew that if he was to sew up the African voting bloc, he was going to have to drum up a groundswell of support among officials from across the continent who would lean on their Exco members to back Qatar’s bid. His campaign in Africa would be two-fold: he would deal directly with the voters and he would buy up an overwhelming coalition of support from across their confederation to make it impossible for them not to support Qatar. He had done it before in Africa, and he would do it again. This was to be the first phase of his campaign and he was going to start right away.