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Qatar and Russia World Cups make sense

Exactly why and how FIFA’s old men — we’ll not add the adjective “wise” — concluded that Russia and Qatar will make fine World Cup hosts might always remain part of their litany of secrets.

But the more time passes, the more the choices they took last week behind closed doors make sense.

Had they been logical, which they proved not, FIFA executives would have sent the 2018 and 2022 tournaments to England and the United States. With ready-built stadiums and encyclopedic experience of managing and selling topflight sports, the hosts of 1966 and 1994 could have organized World Cups again, now, with minimum fuss and maximum revenue to then be plowed into football elsewhere.

Had FIFA wanted to reward nations’ achievements in sports, it could have anointed World Cup champion Spain, arguably this decade’s biggest pound-for-pound sporting power, and Australia. This Ashes cricket series notwithstanding, athletes from Down Under have long punched above their weight. The smooth Sydney Olympics of 2000 were such fun — remember Kylie Minogue on a surfboard? — that a World Cup in Oz would surely have been a riot, too.

Had frugality not been a concept alien to them, FIFA VIPs would have recoiled at the folly of Russia and Qatar needing to splurge tens of billions of petrodollars to be ready for one short month of football. The idea that such sums could be better spent, say, on feeding the world’s poor or giving them footballs doesn’t seem to cross the minds of those who, when not meeting in Vatican-like conclaves, like living in five-star luxury.

Still, for reasons that go far beyond football, Russia and Qatar were still good — and the most interesting — options.

First, Russia. After the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Russian health. According to the World Bank, Russians born today will be lucky to live beyond the age of 66. Their life expectancy is 16 years shorter than in Japan, which was a losing bidder for the 2022 World Cup, and 14 years less than the average in the European Union, whose members have already hosted football’s biggest tournament multiple times.

In a country portrayed as a virtual mafia state by Wiki-leaked U.S. diplomatic cables, there is a risk that Russian World Cup funding will fill corrupt pockets. Russia’s sorry record on media freedom doesn’t fill one with optimism that dirt-digging Russian journalists will safely be able to report all malfeasance.

Still, if hosting the 2018 tournament leads to more young Russians playing and watching football, steering them away from vodka, that would be worthwhile. Alcohol abuse, especially among men, is a prominent explanation for Russia’s health crisis, says the World Bank. So it will be for the good if football helps produce fewer drunks and more healthy examples like Andrei Arshavin, Arsenal’s forward and Russia’s captain who credits the sport for salvaging his troubled youth.

In a Qatar World Cup, the Middle East gets a welcome good news story. That’s not to be sniffed at for a region that a) is synonymous with bad news for many outsiders and b) doesn’t like the fact that many outsiders think only of terror, war, religious extremism and female oppression in the context of the Middle East.

If the 2022 World Cup helps blow away dusty misconceptions on both sides and helps bridge the divides that have yawned so large since 9/11, that will have been a worthy reason to brave Qatar’s intense summer heat.

“This is one of the best things that has happened to the region in the past 10 years,” says Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics at the London School of Economics. “The debate is no longer about al-Qaida, about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s about soccer.”

Because of its bid, more of us now know, for example, that Qatar aims to start a football league for women by the end of this year. A team of Qatari women ventured for the first time to a tournament of eight Arab nations this October. They scored no goals and conceded 47 in three games against host Bahrain, Syria and a Palestinian team. Still, it was a start. Lolwa Hussain Al-Marri, general secretary of Qatar’s committee charged with developing sports for women, told me by phone of her hopes that the journey to 2022 will change other foreign notions about Qatar and its region, too.

“They think we are idiots, that we cannot think. But we have brains. They think that men control us. But that’s changing,” she said. “They think we are still riding camels and still live in the sand. So I’m happy that things will change and they will see how things really are.”

Bizarre things have been said and evil things done by Islamic extremists who think that pious Muslims shouldn’t waste time on football.

Islamic militia in Somalia killed two people in dispersing a crowd of teenagers watching a broadcast of Germany vs. Italy at the 2006 World Cup. A fatwa, or religious ruling, published in the Al-Watan daily of Saudi Arabia in 2005 also decreed that Muslims shouldn’t play football according to established rules, “since this is the way of the nonbelievers,” according to a translation provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based in Washington, D.C. It stipulated that Muslims mustn’t use terms like “goal,” “foul” and “corner kick” or play 11-a-side like “nonbelievers, the Jews, the Christians, and especially the vile America.”

When millions of Arabs gather around televisions in 2022 to cheer the World Cup played in their own backyard, it will be crystal clear to the rest of the world how marginalized those extremist killjoys are.

Were FIFA execs thinking so profoundly in making their choice? Unlikely. Instead, Qatar and Russia’s petro-wealth and the prospect for FIFA of taking its flagship, money-spinning tournament to uncharted markets appear to have motivated the voters and blinded them to the risks — which, for Qatar, is the heat and, for both, is the massive construction that will be required.

But however it got there, FIFA still picked the most intriguing pair in the bunch.