FIFA’s hilltop headquarters was suffused with milky morning light as the cavalcade of limousines glided down the landscaped drive on the morning of 16 March 2009. The young son of Qatar’s Emir gazed out of the window, taking in the futuristic glass and granite edifice of the home of world football rising up ahead. Resting in his lap was the sheaf of documents required to register his country’s official bid to host the 2022 World Cup, which he had been sent to hand over to the FIFA president, Sepp Blatter.
This was a big moment for Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. Aged just 20, he had been put at the head of the team officially charged with bringing the world’s biggest sporting tournament to his home country. Sheikh Mohammed was still an undergraduate, studying international relations at the Georgetown University campus which opened in Doha as part of his father’s diplomatic entente with the USA. The Emir had big plans for him once he graduated. When he finished his studies in two months’ time, he would be made the assistant director of the Prime Minister’s office for International Affairs, and he would spearhead Qatar’s World Cup campaign on the global stage as the chairman of its official bid committee. His father was counting on him. All of Qatar was counting on him. It was a heavy responsibility to carry on such young shoulders.
Sheikh Mohammed was the Emir’s fifth child with his second wife, the dusky beauty Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, and he was his mother’s son. All the young royal had inherited from his hulking father in the looks department was the little gap between his front teeth in an otherwise Daz-white filmstar smile. Like Sheikha Mozah, he was tall with finely carved features, and a glossy black sweep of perfectly coiffed hair. Sheikh Mohammed looked every bit the dashing young royal when out on duties in Doha with his silk robes shining as spotlessly white as the Diwan Palace. But he was more at ease when abroad, as he was today, wearing the suits he had hand-woven from rare and exquisite fibres by the finest tailors in the world.
Sheikh Mohammed wasn’t just a pretty face: he had sporting pedigree, too. As the captain of Qatar’s equestrian team, he had captured hearts across Asia three years before when he emerged on horseback from underground at the opening ceremony of the 15th Asian Games in Doha and galloped to the top of the stadium to light the ceremonial flame. He played for the Georgetown University football side and he supported the Al Sadd team in the Qatar Stars League. There was no doubt that he was a glamorous figurehead for Qatar’s international sporting ambitions. But how much did this young sheikh really know about football politics?
The cavalcade passed through the security gates and descended into the bowels of the building where FIFA’s well-paid executives parked their Porsches and Ferraris. The chauffeurs leapt out to open the doors and Sheikh Mohammed emerged. Climbing out behind him was the wiry figure of his new companion. Hassan Al-Thawadi was the freshly anointed chief executive of Qatar’s 2022 bid committee. Al-Thawadi was rake-thin and a touch bug-eyed with a jaw that jutted so sharply it sometimes gave him a mean look when he forgot to arrange his face. But he was as smart as a whip, and he wasn’t there for appearance’s sake. It was Sheikh Mohammed’s job to lend the grace of his royal presence to Qatar’s World Cup dream; Al-Thawadi would bring the brains.
The bid’s new chief executive was only 30, but he was already the legal director at the Qatar Investment Authority, the country’s vast sovereign wealth fund which was pushing its financial might around the world through its ballooning property and business portfolio. Al-Thawadi was the son of a former Qatari ambassador to Spain and he had spent much of his youth in Europe. It wasn’t all glamour: he took his A levels in the struggling British steel town of Scunthorpe, and went on to study law at Sheffield University. Al-Thawadi came home the proud possessor of a law degree with the gloss of a Western education, but his sojourn in the industrial north of England had thrown a touch of grit into the mix. For all that he was charismatic and articulate, there was something a little scratchy about this fiery young lawyer.
Al-Thawadi’s early business career had taken him to live in Houston, Texas, which accounted for his mid-Atlantic accent and his appealing command of slangy American English. But his father had been a friend of the Emir’s, and it did not take long for the ambitious young lawyer to be airlifted into positions of power in Qatar. He had worked as a senior lawyer at Qatar Petroleum, the state oil company, and he had taken the job of general counsel to its sovereign wealth fund just a year before. Now he had the chance to be part of making history.
Al-Thawadi had returned from Britain with a case of football fever that he couldn’t shake. He still regularly checked the scores of Scunthorpe and Sheffield United, but the teams he loved best of all were Liverpool and Real Madrid. The European leagues held an impossible glamour for him. He had played with distinction as an attacking left-back in Qatar Club’s youth team, modelling himself on the great Italian defender Paolo Maldini, and now he was the legal director of Al Sadd club – Sheikh Mohammed’s favourite side. But it was all such small beer compared with the gladiatorial clashes between international superstars he had grown up watching in the European leagues. The chance to bring the greatest sporting show on earth to his home country flushed him with tingling excitement. Al-Thawadi would use all his fiery passion and intellect to make the dream come true.
The young chairman and chief executive of the bid were accompanied by an older man with baggy eyes and straggling grey hair long enough to brush his shoulders. He was Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, the president of the Qatar Football Association and himself a member of the royal family. This elder statesman of Qatari football with his bristling steel-wool beard was there to lend some gravitas to the youthful delegation. But none of the three Qataris who were now striding through the granite corridors towards Blatter’s office to submit their country’s World Cup bid had an iota of the international football experience of the one man who was missing from the party.
Mohamed bin Hammam was conspicuous by his absence. The country’s most senior football official was a natural choice to join the delegation: he had been there at the inception of the Emir’s World Cup dream as Blatter well knew. But his role in pushing Qatar’s bid needed to remain under wraps. In submitting their registration documents that day, Qatar signed up to rules of conduct which banned its official bid committee or any of its associates from providing any football official with ‘monetary gifts [or] any kind of personal advantage that could give even the impression of exerting influence, or conflict of interest, either directly or indirectly, in connection with the bidding process’. That was exactly what Bin Hammam was doing behind the scenes in Africa on a mass scale – whether or not the new leaders of Qatar’s bid knew it. But so long as he was not publicly associated with the official committee, he acted with impunity.
Bin Hammam may not have been present when the bid was formally registered that day, but he was not far away. He was, in fact, also in Zurich, ready to attend a meeting of the executive committee the next day. Najeeb Chirakal, his closest aide, arranged for his chauffeur to pop down to FIFA headquarters shortly after the delegation departed to pick up $25,000 in cash from Bin Hammam’s FIFA account. It was just a bit of spending money while the Qatari billionaire was in town, on top of the $16,342 in expenses and daily allowances that he claimed for his three-day visit.
Blatter was typically gracious as he accepted the sheaf of documents which formalised Qatar’s World Cup bid that March morning, and wished the young leaders well in their campaign. Beside him was his secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, a handsome, bulky Frenchman in his late forties with a crop of curly chestnut hair and cool blue eyes. Valcke was as much of a power-broker as Blatter had been when he was secretary general under João Havelange. He and the president were as closely conspiratorial as two men who so jealously guarded their own self-interest could ever be. Valcke was no ingénu. He knew that for all the formal presentations and glossy bid books and the scrutiny of FIFA’s technical assessment team, the real deciding factor in this bidding contest would be the same thing that had transformed world football’s governing body into the global powerhouse it was today. It would all come down to cold, hard cash. And as he eyed the Qatari dignitaries smiling graciously and glad-handing Blatter that morning, he was in no doubt that these were serious contenders.
That same day, ten other contenders entered the running for the 2018 and 2022 tournaments by submitting their bid registration documents to FIFA. The European nations were England, Russia and two joint bids which saw Spain teaming up with Portugal, and the Netherlands with Belgium. It was an open secret that the 2018 tournament would go to a bidder from their continent, but the Europeans initially hedged their bets by declaring their intention to compete for 2022 as well, though FIFA would eventually persuade them all to drop out of the running for the latter.
Indonesia and Mexico also entered the race at first, but soon fell out. The real contenders lined up against Qatar for the 2022 tournament were South Korea and Japan, who represented little threat because they had held the tournament together only six years earlier, and two more formidable opponents. First there was Australia, a sports-mad country which had demonstrated its flare for hosting a major tournament with the widely praised Sydney Olympics. Second, there was the United States which had hosted a World Cup once before in 1994. The US was viewed with suspicion by some in the FIFA Exco because it was not primarily a soccer-loving country, but its bid could not be underestimated. An American World Cup would have pizzazz. Its potential to bring in bumper television revenues, marketing opportunities and a sponsorship bonanza would light up the dollar signs in the eyes of the FIFA Exco.
Qatar’s official bid committee had to get serious if was going to beat off that kind of competition, and the young bid leaders knew it. After formally submitting his country’s registration documents at FIFA headquarters, Sheikh Mohammed released a statement. ‘We believe it is time to bring the World Cup to the Middle East for the very first time,’ he said. ‘Our bid truly epitomises FIFA’s slogan “For the Game, For the World” . . . It would allow the rest of the world to gain a true picture of Arab culture and hospitality.’ And the young royal acknowledged that he had a mountain to climb. ‘We know that we have a lot of work to do before the FIFA Executive Board makes its decision in December 2010,’ his statement concluded.
Sheikh Mohammed was right. While Bin Hammam manoeuvred behind the scenes, the new leaders of Qatar’s official bid team had their work cut out for them. It was their job to create a compelling case that Qatar was a viable place to host the World Cup, despite all the obvious impediments. They would have to come up with a plan to beat the sweltering heat with the most aggressive air-conditioning systems science could deliver, and devise a way of cramming the giant sporting jamboree into the cramped space available in one of the world’s tiniest countries.
They had to persuade FIFA’s team of technical evaluators that they were capable of building nine world-class stadiums and all the players’ and fans’ facilities from scratch in a country with only the scantest football infrastructure. There was no room in Doha: it would be necessary to build a whole new city out in the desert to fit it all in. Not only did they have to convince FIFA’s evaluation team, they had to find a plausible way to explain to fans around the globe why Qatar deserved to host their beloved tournament when it had no real football tradition to speak of, no serious professional league and not a single world-class player. The country languished near the bottom of FIFA’s world rankings – it would drop to 113th by the time of the vote – and had never come anywhere close to qualifying for the World Cup finals it wanted to host. Bin Hammam had made it his mission to sell the idea of a Qatar World Cup to the relatively small number of influential football officials required to sway the vote, and their loyalty often came with an affordable price tag. The bid committee had to dream up a way of selling it to the world. It was hard to say who had a more daunting task.
Paradise Island in the Bahamas is blessed with brilliant white sand beaches and pale turquoise water warmed by the tropical currents of the Gulf Stream. It is home to the dizzyingly glitzy Atlantis mega-resort, famed for its giant water park rides, buzzing casino scene, lively bars and array of celebrity chef restaurants. The island is linked by two bridges to the capital city of Nassau, with its gracious pink colonial buildings, fish shacks piled high with red snapper, and rum distilleries selling Bahama Mamas for $10 a pop. These streets were once stalked by pirates, looters, Spanish invaders and Prohibition rum-runners. So where better for FIFA’s motley crew to gather for their annual congress?
When FIFA’s hundreds of officials came together at the Atlantis resort in June 2009, the bidding race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was well underway. The billionaire retail property tycoon and Australian FA chairman Frank Lowy had sailed his 74-metre superyacht to the Bahamas and moored it off Paradise Island, ready to host a succession of FIFA Exco members in the lap of luxury as he lobbied them to support his country’s 2022 bid. The leaders of England’s 2018 committee – its chairman, Lord Triesman, and the London Olympics chief Lord Coe who sat on its board – had also jetted in to Nassau to make their case.
Bin Hammam flew into Nassau on his private jet accompanied by Mohammed Meshadi, ready to step up his campaign to cement the loyalty of his African brothers. He met a string of delegates in private on Paradise Island to discuss their financial needs. Seedy Kinteh from Gambia was naturally first in line. After the congress, he emailed Bin Hammam to remind him about what they had discussed. ‘I really need your brotherly help again as per discussed in Bahamas and i hereby provide you with the full bank details that you can use for any transfer,’ he wrote. ‘While i hope to here from you, please Sir do accept my very sportive regards and fraternal esteem always and my continuos prayers for your well being. Everyours Seedy M.B.Kinteh, PResident, Gambia Football Association.’
The service was quick. Just ten days later, another email dropped into Bin Hammam’s inbox from Kinteh. ‘Many thanks indeed for your recent mail disclosing to me the transfer of $10,000 Dollars. I must first of all express my profound gratitude to you for this very wounderful brotherly gesture that you have once again demonstrated.’ Kinteh said he was sure the money would go a long way to developing the skills of Gambia’s players – despite the fact the payment had gone into his own bank account. He signed off: ‘On behalf of the entire Football family of the Gambia and indeed on my own humble behalf i wish you a continuos well being and good health as you continue to steer the affairs of your continent football. I have every reason to be grateful and indeed my President and Brother I AM!!!!’
Manuel Dende, the president of the Sao Tome federation, also emailed Bin Hammam after meeting him in Nassau. Dende had visited Bin Hammam in Kuala Lumpur on one of those famous junkets the previous October, and he had been aboard the cruise ship in Putrajaya when the bagman Amadou Diallo had moved between the guests finding out how to make them happy. He knew how beneficent his new Qatari friend could be. So after a second meeting in Nassau, he asked for $232,000 to be paid into his personal bank account, apparently to build artificial football pitches in his country. Bin Hammam was nothing if not a generous man, but he considered such a large request from an official who was not even a member of the CAF executive committee a touch audacious. He decided to scale it back, faxing a copy of the email to Chirakal with the instruction: ‘Najeeb: I want to transfer $60,000 to this Federation.’ The money was not immediately forthcoming, and when Chirakal eventually emailed Dende in December with news his federation had been paid the lesser sum of $50,000, his response was curt. ‘Ok, tks,’ he replied.
Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’ Izetta Wesley was more easily gratified. She received $10,000 into her personal bank account after meeting Bin Hammam4 in Nassau in July and responded: ‘I’ve received the transfer. Please convey my thanks and appreciations to Mohammed. May the Almighty Allah replenish his resources a hundred fold. I am so happy that I have a brother and friend that I can always depend on.’ She had written to Bin Hammam before the congress in the Bahamas to report ‘a serious problem’. Her letter explained: ‘My league have started and I do not have any sponsors. Things are very difficult. Therefore, I have decided to send you a portion of my league budget for assistance.’ Her generous Qatari brother had smiled on her request, and she was eternally grateful.
The Ivory Coast FA, home to the Exco voter Jacques Anouma, received $22,000 from one of Bin Hammam’s private slush funds at the start of July, earmarked as football aid,5 while the president of the Moroccan FA, Said Belkhayat, received a payment straight into his personal bank account.
Bin Hammam was not the only Qatari on manoeuvres in Nassau. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa bin Ahmed Al Thani, the country’s FA president who had met Blatter in March when its formal bid was presented at FIFA headquarters, had arranged a private audience with the FIFA president. The Emir was determined to have a World Cup on his patch, but some of the naysaying about the improbability of cramming the entire tournament into his tiny country had evidently sunk in. He had decreed that overtures should be made to other Gulf states to mount a joint bid to host the tournament, and the FA president had been deputised to run the idea up the flagpole with Blatter. He had written to the FIFA president in May, and Blatter had responded warmly.
‘It is with great interest that I took note of your proposal to include neighbouring Gulf cities into your World Cup bid in order to share the vision of “Bringing the World Together” with several countries. I would be happy to discuss this matter further at the upcoming FIFA Congress in Nassau,’ he wrote.
The plan to mount a joint Gulf bid did not go ahead because Qatar could not persuade its neighbours to sign up to take on the unlikely challenge. The other heads of state had told the Emir he was crazy even to consider a bid because they were bound to lose. But the meeting between Blatter and Sheikh Hamad was another opportunity to cement the ties between the FIFA president and the Qatar bid he had first encouraged over dinner with the Emir the previous year.
Now that Bin Hammam had the enthusiastic support of the influential leaders of African football, it was time to kick off phase two of his campaign. He needed to begin making his approaches to the men who really mattered: the 24 voters on FIFA’s executive committee who would ultimately decide on the two hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in a secret ballot in December 2010.
In August, his aides began making arrangements for a visit from the only man at the helm of FIFA who really knew how it felt to win a World Cup. Franz Beckenbauer, the former German football superstar, was a highly influential figure on the executive committee and an international icon. He ranked among the greatest footballers of all time: one of only two men, along with Brazil’s Mário Zagallo, to have won the World Cup both as a player, in 1974, and as a manager, in 1990. Beckenbauer was football royalty. He cut such a starry figure that he was known at home as Der Kaiser – ‘The Emperor’. Selling the idea of a World Cup in the desert to a man of this stature was not, on the face of it, going to be an easy task. But Bin Hammam knew that Beckenbauer had a soft spot for Qatar that he could exploit.
The Emperor of German football had added to his roll call of triumphs when he led his country’s successful bid to host the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Qatar had been a supporter of his campaign and, crucially, Bin Hammam had helped to round up the bloc of four Asian votes which propelled the German bid to victory. Now, he wanted a return on his investment.
Bin Hammam had invited Beckenbauer to Doha to visit the Emir at the Diwan Palace, to remind him of his debt to Qatar. The German football legend would be accompanied by his close associate, Fedor Radmann, a roving sports consultant who had played a key role in the German World Cup campaign. Radmann was a schmoozer, a smooth-talker in four languages, a man who lurked in the fancy hotels where collars were loosened and gossip flowed freely. He was a lobbyist in the politics of world football, and there was always a hefty fee for his ‘priceless’ knowledge and intelligence. Anyone who knew anything about the politics of the international game knew that if you wanted to get to Der Kaiser, then you went through Radmann. It was vital to get him on board.
But there was a complication. Radmann’s exorbitant consultancy fees had already been paid by one of Qatar’s biggest rivals: the Australian bid. Its chairman, Frank Lowy, had hired the lobbyist and his business partner Andreas Abold to produce its official World Cup bid book at a princely cost of A$11.2 million. The arrangement had been negotiated by none other than Peter Hargitay, the Sepp Blatter confidant who had written to Bin Hammam the previous year scoffing at Qatar’s chances. England had sacked him early in its campaign but you couldn’t keep a man like Hargitay down and he was now being paid about $850,000 by the Australians for his wise counsel.
Bin Hammam had a few things to straighten out in his own relationship with Australia before he got down to business. Until recently, the country’s football association had been part of the Oceania Confederation which loosely covered the far-flung islands in their corner of the Pacific. But under Lowy, who owns the Westfield shopping empire, they had developed major ambitions. They didn’t want their national side to be playing only New Zealand or whatever teams the South Pacific islands could muster in Oceania. They wanted proper competition, which is why they applied to become part of Bin Hammam’s Asian confederation.
Bin Hammam had been delighted to help because Australia expanded his power base, and he did everything he could to make them welcome when they joined the Asian football family in 2006. In the process, he had become close to Lowy, and the two men had spent much time schmoozing in the garden hotels of Kuala Lumpur. They had a lot in common. Lowy, a Slovakian refugee then in his late seventies, was a truly self-made man, and Bin Hammam respected that. So when he declared he wanted to bring the World Cup to Australia, his new Qatari friend was initially supportive.
Lowy announced his ambition before Bin Hammam knew that his own country was going to enter the running, and he had advised Lowy to hire the best team of lobbyists money could buy: Hargitay and his friends Abold and Radmann. Abold had been instrumental in securing the German World Cup alongside Beckenbauer and Radmann as the bid’s strategic consultant and he was a trusted member of Der Kaiser’s inner circle. If he and Radmann were on board, Beckenbauer’s vote would be in the bag, or so the reasoning went, and with such an influential backer on the Exco other votes would be sure to follow. Bin Hammam’s advice had not stopped there: he had also advised his Australian friends that the best way to win support for their World Cup bid was to target football officials across Africa and Asia to lay down a bedrock of support across two continents – just as he would later do for his own country.
The whole business had become acutely embarrassing when Bin Hammam had realised his Emir wanted the World Cup too. There was no question as to where his loyalty must lie. Lowy had always told Bin Hammam that his country felt secure in bidding for the World Cup because they could rely on the AFC president’s support, but that was no longer the case. When the secret got out and Qatar’s intention to bid was becoming known, Bin Hammam had to come clean with Lowy and tell him that he would have to support his home country. The billionaire had been furious to lose Bin Hammam’s support, but he was still counting on Radmann and Abold to deliver Beckenbauer’s vote.
Now, Bin Hammam wanted to interfere with that too. He might not be able to persuade Beckenbauer to vote for Qatar in the first round if Radmann and Abold were in the pay of Australia. But if Australia was knocked out in the early rounds, how would Beckenbauer vote then? If Bin Hammam and the Emir could remind Der Kaiser of the debt he owed them for their help in delivering the German World Cup, perhaps his vote could be won in the crucial later rounds which would ultimately decide the victor.
So it was that Beckenbauer and Radmann touched down in Doha on a hot afternoon in late October 2009, and climbed into the air-conditioned limousine which took them to their suites in the five-star Sheraton Hotel on the Corniche. They were treated to all the finest hospitality Bin Hammam could offer and, first thing the next morning, they were driven with the Qatari football grandee a few hundred metres along the West Bay to the Diwan Palace to meet the Emir.
The German football legend and his lobbyist would remember the visit for years to come, dining out on their surreal meeting with the ruler of the world’s richest country. Bin Hammam walked tall as he graciously ushered the two men through the grand marble corridors of the palace and into an anteroom outside the Emir’s private chamber. But when they were invited to enter, he dropped back. Sheikh Hamad was all charm in his gold-trimmed dishdasha when he greeted Beckenbauer and Radmann. But Bin Hammam seemed to cower in the corner, stooping with his neck bowed and his two hands clasped over the back of his head in reverence. The European visitors were nonplussed. This man was not just a leader of world football; he was a multi-billionaire, a captain of industry, and a royal counsellor. Why was he crouching in the corner like the lowliest serf? Beckenbauer and Radmann would tell their friends when they flew home that they had realised then more than ever before just how absolute was Sheikh Hamad’s power. Bin Hammam was entirely in his thrall. It was no wonder the other royal courtiers called him The Slave.
The Emir duly reminded Beckenbauer of the support his country had given to the German 2006 World Cup campaign, and how Bin Hammam had helped secure the Exco votes he had needed to win. The conversation was awkward. Beckenbauer was a World Cup winner, and he knew what it took to play football at that level. He and Radmann tried to reason with the Emir. The heat was too severe, they told him. It just wasn’t possible to play football in those conditions. They respectfully urged him to think again. Why not have another go at the Olympics? But leave the World Cup alone. The Emir was implacable. He wanted the World Cup in Doha. Nothing else would do. And he expected Beckenbauer and Radmann to help him get it.
So now Beckenbauer was in a quandary, and when he went back to Germany he talked anxiously to friends about his dilemma. Australia was expecting his vote and it would be bad form to back out of the assurances his associates had given to Lowy. But he was an honourable man, and the weight of the gratitude he owed to Qatar bore down heavily on his shoulders. Bringing the World Cup to Germany in 2006 had been one of the crowning glories of his career, and Bin Hammam had helped him by rounding up those crucial Asian votes. Could he turn his back on his friends in Doha after all they had done?
Bin Hammam continued to invite a procession of key FIFA voters to enjoy his legendary hospitality in Doha as 2009 drew to a close, at the same time as getting to know the young men whom the Emir had put in charge of Qatar’s official bid committee. He invited the Spanish voter Ángel María Villar Llona to meet ‘Qatari higher ranking peoples’ in November, and the Brazilian voter Ricardo Teixeira was flown in on the Qatari’s private jet with his wife and daughter the same month. Teixeira dined privately with Bin Hammam on the evening of 13 November, and the whole family were taken to watch a friendly match played between Brazil and England in Doha’s 30°C November heat at the Khalifa International Stadium the following day. Bin Hammam’s aides emailed Teixeira’s full itinerary to Hassan Al-Thawadi, the new chief executive of the Qatar 2022 committee. It was important to let him know when a big fish was on the hook.
While Bin Hammam attended discreetly to his friends inside FIFA, Al-Thawadi was assembling his team to mount Qatar’s official campaign. His new second in command was his surly older sibling, Ali Al-Thawadi, who was about as unlike his brother as it was possible to be. Where Hassan was tall, smart and slim, Ali was short, sluggish and round. Hassan was extensively travelled and most comfortable in a well-cut lounge suit, but his brother liked his home comforts in Doha and he favoured the traditional dishdasha over all that tight Western tailoring. He was gruff and charmless, lacking his younger brother’s polish, but he was loyal and Hassan looked after him. So Ali Al-Thawadi was brought in to be deputy chief executive of Qatar’s official bid committee. He was kept in the background, without appearing at the press conferences or in the official photographs of the bid team. Instead, he ambled along doing his younger brother’s bidding behind the scenes, and sometimes getting on with things the squeaky-clean public faces of the bid team didn’t want to think too much about.
Ali Al-Thawadi had met Bin Hammam when he visited Kuala Lumpur as a ‘special guest’ of the AFC in September, accompanied by Khalid Al Kubaisi, the bid committee’s new director of finance, and Nasser Al-Khater, its slick new communications director. The relationship between the older Al-Thawadi brother and Bin Hammam was key, and it was important that the two men became well acquainted. Ali was to be the principal point of contact between the bid committee and Bin Hammam in the coming months, as Qatar’s man inside FIFA brought his African campaign to fruition. A plan had been hatched to host a third junket for Africa’s top football officials, in Doha rather than Kuala Lumpur, and this time the official Qatar bid committee would be picking up the bill. Perhaps that was one of the things Hassan would rather not know too much about, but Ali was there to take care of it.
Ali was back at Bin Hammam’s side on 7 November and this time Hassan was there too when the brothers joined the AFC president at the Asian Champions League final in Tokyo. With them was Mohammed Awada, another conduit between the bid team and Bin Hammam. Awada had been the AFC president’s PR man until he went to work for the official Qatar bid committee as a back-room spin doctor. The two men remained close, so it was nice to be reunited in Tokyo, and catch up on the latest developments in promoting the country’s bid.
Despite all the excitement of a tense match, in which South Korea’s Pohang Steelers beat the Saudi team Al-Ittihad 2-1, Ali and Bin Hammam had other things to discuss. They were busy planning their Doha junket for the African officials. The day after the final, the bid’s deputy chief executive emailed Najeeb Chirakal in the Qatari billionaire’s private office asking him to provide daily updates on which CAF officials had accepted the invitation.
Bin Hammam needed to maintain a decent distance from the bid team, mindful as he was of the need to keep his covert activities separate from their public-facing campaign. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t give them the benefit of his wisdom behind the scenes. He had four decades of experience under his belt in football administration, and these young pretenders had no idea how the game really worked. Sheikh Mohammed, Hassan Al-Thawadi and their staff were on a steep learning curve, and they looked up to Bin Hammam. He spent many hours advising them on how to sell the country’s official bid to the world.
One way of getting noticed was to sponsor big events where the bid could plaster its branding over every surface, make speeches promoting the Qatar 2022 campaign and send its ambassadors out to work the room and whisper in ears. Where better to start than with the AFC’s own annual awards dinner? The bid pledged $100,000 to bankroll the flashy AFC event in Kuala Lumpur on 24 November, and the entire committee attended the gala led by their royal figurehead Sheikh Mohammed.
Hassan Al-Thawadi took the opportunity to hold a press conference before the dinner announcing that the Saudi player Sami Al Jaber had signed up as an official ambassador for the bid, and the Middle Eastern football star adorned Qatar’s table that evening. The room was packed with influential Asian football officials, many of whom were growing accustomed to enjoying Qatari hospitality and patronage by now.
There was Rahif Alameh, the president of the Lebanese FA, who received an unexplained payment of $100,000 into his personal bank account wired by staff at Kemco earlier that summer. Also present was Mari Martinez, the president of the Philippines FA, who had money transferred into his wife’s bank account from one of the Kemco slush funds in July. And then there was Ganbold Buyannemekh, president of the Mongolia FA, whose daughter’s university education was being funded by Bin Hammam. It was all part of the service. The only thing he asked in return was loyalty. That evening, the guests were treated to a sparkling display of traditional dance and acrobatics as they tucked into the banquet, this time courtesy of Qatar’s official World Cup bid committee rather than their usual benefactor, Bin Hammam.
Afterwards, when the invoice for the Qatar bid’s sponsorship was paid to accounts staff at the AFC, the director of finance Amelia Gan fired off a wry email to a colleague. ‘I’m pleased to inform that we received USD99,9953 from Qatar today,’ she wrote. ‘I will collect the shortage of USD47 from President. hahahah.’
By the end of the year, the draw for the South Africa World Cup was fast approaching, and Bin Hammam’s focus on Africa had rubbed off on the young leaders of Qatar’s official bid committee. Hassan Al-Thawadi had decided to make his own fledgling attempt to win hearts and minds across the continent with the power of his chequebook. The bid’s chief executive favoured a subtler approach than the cash handouts, junkets and slush-fund bungs that had worked so well for his experienced mentor.
Rather than going to the continent’s football officials directly, he had decided to make overtures to a single man whom he thought had the power to unite all of Africa behind him. So it was that Al-Thawadi contacted Desmond Tutu, the first black archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel peace prize winner, beloved and revered for his social-rights campaigning and vigorous opposition to apartheid. Tutu had lent his weight to South Africa’s successful bid to host the 2010 World Cup, and Al-Thawadi hoped he could be persuaded to do the same for Qatar. The dynamic young bid chief got in touch offering a donation of $100,000 in exchange for Tutu’s support. By the autumn he thought they had a deal. Al-Thawadi wrote to Tutu in October saying: ‘How grateful we are for your kind support and your acceptance to be an Ambassador for the Qatar 2022 Bid.’ His letter concluded: ‘In deep gratitude for your kind support, it will be the Qatar 2022 Bid’s great pleasure to make a donation of $100,000 to be divided, as you suggested, between your two chosen humanitarian charities.’
The money was to go to the Tygerberg Children’s Hospital in Cape Town and the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation. But while the hospital received its $50,000 donation a month after Al-Thawadi’s letter, the money that had been promised to Tutu’s own HIV foundation was not immediately forthcoming. A fortnight after the Tygerberg hospital had cashed its cheque from Qatar, Al-Thawadi received a nasty shock. The Australia 2022 bid wheeled out their new ambassador on the eve of the World Cup draw in Cape Town, and it was none other than Archbishop Tutu wearing the yellow shirt of the country’s national team, the Socceroos. The Nobel laureate met Australia’s bid chief Lowy at the Tygerberg Hospital and promised the billionaire his unstinting support. Qatar had been outbid. Its Australia rivals had donated a million South African Rand ($130,000) to Tygerberg in exchange for Tutu’s backing.
It was a humiliating moment for Qatar’s official bid committee, and Bin Hammam might have been forgiven for wondering what the youngsters were playing at as he watched from the wings. Donations to charity and overtures to archbishops were all well and good, but that wasn’t how a World Cup vote was won. Yes, Tutu was well respected across Africa, but did Al-Thawadi really think the continent’s football officials were going to vote with their hearts? Football administration was a hard-headed game. The young tyros had a lot to learn about the way the sport really worked at the top if they thought charity would get them anywhere.
While Al-Thawadi was dilly-dallying with Tutu on the eve of the Cape Town draw, Bin Hammam had been busy doing deals with a real member of African football royalty. He had met Kalusha Bwalya – the former Zambian footballing superstar known as ‘King Kalu’ to his countrymen – at the end of October to find out what he could do to win the influential official’s loyalty. The strapping Zambian was one of the continent’s all-time greatest players, having been named African Footballer of the Year in 1988 and shortlisted for FIFA World Player in 1996. Now he was running his country’s football association.
Bwalya had built up his powerbase as a member of FIFA’s football committee, chaired by the UEFA president Michel Platini, and he sat alongside Africa’s four voters as a member of CAF’s powerful executive committee. This was a man with real influence, and Bin Hammam wanted to have him on side. After the meeting in October, Bwalya wrote to the AFC boss thanking him for his time and reminding him of his obligations. ‘As per our conversation, please Mr President if you could assist me with about 50 thousand Dollars for my Football Association and personal expenditures,’ his email said. The Zambian FA chief said he hoped to repay the money one day, and provided his bank details.6 On 2 December, the day after Tutu’s humiliating defection to Australia, Najeeb Chirakal emailed Bwayla a bank transfer slip showing that $50,000 had been paid into his personal bank account from one of the slush funds operated by Kemco. That was how you did business in world football.
As the Kemco cash was winging its way into Bwalya’s account, Bin Hammam was sipping mint tea at 30,000 feet on his private jet en route to Cape Town. His bagmen Amadou Diallo and Mohammed Meshadi as well as his AFC office director Jenny Be all flew in as part of his entourage, and Najeeb Chirakal arranged for them to pick up $10,000 from his FIFA account as spending money for the trip. The group stayed at the five-star Westin Grand Hotel, with panoramic views of Table Mountain and the emerald waters of the adjoining bay.
The leaders of Qatar’s bid committee were also in South Africa. They knew this was a big moment, and they had opened their coffers accordingly. The bid had bought up a major presence at the SoccerEx conference in Johannesburg where the great and the good of world football congregated days before the draw ceremony. They had shelled out for display stands boasting flashy interactive videos and handed out Arabic coffee, promotional paperweights and Qatar 2022 t-shirts. Sepp Blatter toured the vast halls of the Sandton Conference Centre flanked by his CIA-style security detail in their suits and shades, with the press pack swarming after him whichever way he turned.
All the bidding countries were in the scrum at SoccerEx, trying to collar the FIFA president and key members of his Exco for one-to-one meetings and photo opportunities, but Qatar and Russia had spent by far the most money on showcasing their bids on the conference floor. Sheikh Mohammed was in town, with a whirlwind media programme to get through. The bid’s communications team had put together a list of friendly journalists for him to speak to. The briefing document he was handed explained that they had: ‘Identified accredited media that, by virtue of their geographical reach and status, may be read/viewed/listened to by certain FIFA ExCo members – for example list includes key Brazilian, Nigerian, and German media that could help reach Teixeira, Adamu and Beckenbauer.’
When the SoccerEx conference stands came down, football’s global boss class jetted across to Cape Town for the spectacular show that had been laid on to mark the official World Cup draw. The streets outside the Cape Town International Convention Centre were a riot of colour with live music and parades as thousands gathered to watch the ceremony on giant screens. The event was beamed around the planet to an audience of 150 million people in 200 countries as the South African President Jacob Zuma joined Blatter on stage to welcome the world at the start of the 90-minute live broadcast. Nelson Mandela, the country’s former president and hero of the struggle against apartheid, delivered a pre-recorded message about football’s power ‘to inspire and unite’. He said: ‘The people of Africa learned the lessons of patience and endurance in their long struggles for freedom. May the rewards brought by the FIFA World Cup prove that the long wait for its arrival on African soil has been worth it.’
Inside the auditorium, a privileged elite of 3,000 dignitaries and journalists sat to watch the ceremony at first hand. The audience was dotted with some of the world’s most dazzling football celebrities; from David Beckham and Franz Beckenbauer to Michel Platini and Roger Milla. The apartheid-beating Nobel laureates F.W. de Klerk and, of course, Archbishop Tutu, looked on. Charlize Theron, the Oscar-winning South African actress, partnered with FIFA’s secretary general Jérôme Valcke to announce the 32 teams who would take part in the 2010 finals. It was the perfect showcase of football’s global star-power, six months before the World Cup kick off.
Qatar’s own World Cup hopes suffered a couple of setbacks during the festivities surrounding the draw in Cape Town. First, Reynald Temarii, the FIFA Exco member from Oceania, announced that he would be voting for the Australian 2022 bid. This was natural enough, since the country had been part of Oceania until only three years before, but coupled with Tutu’s defection days earlier and the signing of the A-list Australian actress Nicole Kidman as an ambassador, Qatar’s rival bid seemed to be gathering unwanted momentum.
Then Franz Beckenbauer made matters worse by saying publicly that Australia’s bid was ‘perfect’ and had a great chance of victory. Bin Hammam knew that Beckenbauer had to stay outwardly loyal to the bid that had hired Radmann and Abold, but such a high-profile show of support for a rival from one of the greatest footballers of all time was a blow to Qatar that he could do without. Still, he had to remain focused. His fixer Amadou Diallo was at his side throughout the draw, and the two men were already planning the next phase of their own campaign.
It was nearly time for Bin Hammam to bring his African brothers home to Doha for an all-expenses paid junket which he hoped would be a decisive moment in Qatar’s World Cup quest. Diallo had been drawing up the list of guests to target. This time it would not just be the presidents of national football associations who Bin Hammam invited to enjoy his famously lavish hospitality. The moment had come to target Africa’s voters directly.
Issa Hayatou, the president of CAF, was flown into Doha straight after the draw in Cape Town, with the Nigerian voter Amos Adamu and Jacques Anouma from the Ivory Coast following a fortnight later. Bin Hammam’s men Chirakal and Diallo worked together to arrange for the three voters and 35 African football association presidents to fly in first-class and stay at the pyramid-shaped Sheraton Hotel on the shores of the Persian Gulf at intervals throughout December.
It was a busy time for the official Qatar 2022 team as they prepared to submit their signed bidding agreement on 11 December. But Ali Al-Thawadi presided anxiously over the arrangements for the junket – repeatedly asking Chirakal to send him the latest list of delegates who were expected, wanting to know the details of the programme Bin Hammam had arranged for them and instructing him to forward the invoices for all the flights and hotel rooms to the bid for payment. ‘Please forward me the final list of CAF delegation arrival and departure. The full cost of their flight expenses and accommodation. The full program that has been arranged for them in their visit in Qatar,’ he wrote in one email on 16 December. He wrote again at the end of the month: ‘Please provide us with the invoices regarding the African FA’s visit last week from the accommodation and the travelling expenses in order to not delay those payments.’
The junket was a turning point, because Bin Hammam was going to lay his cards on the table and ask the officials outright to pledge their support to his country’s bid. From the humblest football association president of the most minor African country, through the members of the powerful CAF executive committee right up to the FIFA voters themselves, he wanted to be assured that Qatar had their backing. Bin Hammam wanted to ensure that every man who visited left Doha feeling a debt of gratitude that they would remember when the World Cup vote neared in a year’s time. And he knew how to make men grateful.
Both Hayatou and Adamu already had reason to be thankful to Bin Hammam, having seen payments of $400,000 channelled to their national federations at the start of that same month from the FIFA Goal Programme football development funds which he and his committee controlled. The money was earmarked to renovate their association headquarters into spanking new offices fit for FIFA royalty. Anouma was not left out of the Goal Programme spending spree: the Ivory Coast federation had already received $400,000 that summer, and was granted another $400,000 the following year.7
Founding the Goal Programme had been a stroke of genius by Blatter a year after Bin Hammam had helped him get elected in 1998. It was both a laudable use of FIFA’s cash and a sure-fire way of shoring up support among the world football electorate. As a reward for his loyalty, the president had given his Qatari friend the job of chairing the Goal Bureau which controlled its coffers. In the years that followed, the scheme had dished out major grants to fund more than 500 football development projects from artificial pitches to technical centres in 193 of FIFA’s member associations. Bin Hammam had pulled the purse strings for Blatter for more than a decade, and now he had an agenda of his own. If the Qatari intended to curry favour with the three African voters for his country’s World Cup bid by dishing out football development cash to their federations, no one was going to stop him. Those sorts of conflicts of interest were allowed to flourish unchecked inside FIFA.
Anouma was delighted with his visit to Doha, and enjoyed a generous welcome from Qatar’s Emir as well as from his host and fellow Exco member. Days after he returned from Doha, the secretary general of his FA wrote to say Bin Hammam’s ‘very good friend’ Anouma had asked him to prepare a proposal to ‘push very hard the bid of Qatar’.
Anouma followed up with his own email: ‘After my recent stay in Doha at your invitation, I would like to express all my thanks and gratitude for the fraternal welcome you reserved for my wife and I and members of our federation. I want to tell you how much I appreciate your availability and your attention vis-a-vis African federations hereof. It is no doubt that the Doha meeting will contribute to tighten the bonds of friendship and brotherhood between, first, the African federations and your confederation, and secondly, between yourself and leaders of African football.’ He went on: ‘I would like to assure you of my desire to ensure that the discussions we had together during this stay translate into concrete action. I would ask you to convey to His Highness the Emir of Qatar, my sincere thanks and expression of my deep respect.’ Quite what Anouma had to be grateful for was not made explicit, but it was clear that the Emir’s kindness had made quite an impression.
Bin Hammam had used the Doha junket that December to hold a series of private meetings with the delegates at which he lobbied them to throw their support behind Qatar’s bid. At the same time, some of the guests had been offered handsome payments from the Kemco slush funds.8 David Fani, the president of the Botswana FA, emailed Bin Hammam afterwards to say how impressed he had been by Qatar’s preparations for the 2022 bid. ‘I have no doubt that your country will be ready for the 2022 FIFA World Cup and, even without a vote, I pledge my support to you in this respect. If there is anything that I can do, no matter how small, to assist your course, I would be happy to oblige,’ he wrote. ‘I will write to you in the New Year concerning assistance to Botswana Football Association as per our discussion of 21st December 2009.’
John Muinjo, president of the Namibian FA, also emailed Bin Hammam to express his enthusiasm for the Qatar bid – at a price. ‘Kindly take note that Namibia Football Association will always be behind you in its unequivocal support at all times,’ he wrote. ‘Dear President, allow me to sign off by humbly requesting you for the 2022 Bid Committee to consider as we discussed the legacy of putting up an artificial turf in the densely populated area of the North of Namibia which will positively score you points in the final analysis as you embark upon the mammoth task of securing the bid for vibrant Qatar in 2022 . . . We would want to be assisted with a once off financial assistance to the tune of U$50-000 for the 2010 season to run our second division leagues that went crippled by the prevailing global economic melt down.’ Bin Hammam responded personally: ‘I really appreciate your kind support to Qatar Bid for 2022 World Cup . . . As far as the request made by Namibia Football Association, I will see that it will be delivered as soon as possible.’9
The junket had been a runaway success. Just as Bin Hammam had hoped, it marked a turning point. Days after the last of the delegates returned from Doha on 7 January 2010, CAF announced that it had struck a deal worth $1.8 million for the official Qatar 2022 bid to sponsor its congress in Angola at the end of the month. The money would be paid into the confederation’s bank accounts, which were ultimately controlled by its president, Hayatou.
His secretary general Mustapha Fahmy emailed all the other bids after the deal was done to tell them that they had been effectively gagged by Qatar. ‘Kindly note that CAF has signed an exclusive sponsorship agreement with Qatar 2022 for the CAF Congress 2010, which as a consequence means that no other bidding nations for the FIFA World Cup will be allowed to make any presentations at the Congress . . . However, your delegation and representatives will be allowed to attend as “observers”, but without the possibility to organise press conferences, distribute any promotional material or erect stands to that effect within the venue and its vicinity on that day.’ Bin Hammam’s African campaign had come to fruition. CAF belonged to Qatar.