As negotiations over the 2022 Qatar World Cup continue, Jacob Mignano offers his own vitriolic assessment of the farcical process…

It’s hard to believe I’ve never written anything about the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar that hasn’t been neatly summed up in 140 characters. Such is my outrage, I feel Twitter is not an adequate medium through which to sufficiently summarise my feelings. That changes now.

Ever since the competition was awarded to Qatar I have tried my best to bite my tongue and just get on with it. Honestly, I was so incredulous at FIFA’s decision to overlook England as the host of the 2018 World Cup in favour of Russia, that when it was announced a short while later that Qatar had pipped the U.S.A and Australia to the post, I assumed it was just a very elaborate joke. As time passed though, I began to understand. Why hold the World Cup in the home of football, a country with one of the world’s most competitive leagues and some of the world’s finest stadiums already in place, when you can hold it across seven time-zones, on plastic pitches linked together by 24-hour bus journeys? I suppose for the same reason you’d choose to hold a World Cup in the sweltering heat of a country almost half the size of Wales.

(Oh, what’s that you say? They both have oil? Well, why didn’t you say so before?) Continue reading →