Stadiums fall silent after football binge, but has Qatar scored a political goal?

Now that the FIFA World Cup Football is done and dusted, Qatar will have to reconcile to its vast empty spaces, made even emptier by the gargantuan infrastructure that will now lie silent and wait for the next big spectacle.

For the last 12 years, since the premier tournament was awarded to Qatar in 2010,  the tiny Gulf kingdom has been pushed, pummelled, turned inside out and almost disembowelled by the al-Thani government to makeover even heritage “souqs”, or markets,  into glitzy “neo-heritage” sites – the overall expenditure running over $200 billion.

According to reports,  other countries like South Africa and Russia have been trying hard to utilise stadiums built for the football World Cups they hosted. Though they have managed to put them to use, they come nowhere close to recovering the original investment in them. These nations would be happy to just generate funds to maintain the structures.

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Ranked 50^th in world football, why would Qatar undergo a veritable surgery on such a vast scale for a sport that the country is not particularly known for? Other than patriotic Qataris, none else deigned even to raise their eyebrows when the local team exited without fuss at the beginning of the World Cup. This was because they were never in with a chance.

The rationale, if one were to credit logic to the Qatari government’s decision, was probably more political than any great attempt to make the game of football their own. Over the last three decades, since 1996,  the country has strategically broken away from the shackles of the past, mainly from its subservience to the neighbouring Arab giant Saudi Arabia and attempted to make itself count among the world’s top nations.

Most recently,  prior to the football World Cup, Qatar emerged winner in a political “blink-first” game with Saudi Arabia,  Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. In a case of sheer one-upmanship, the four countries in 2017, led by the Saudis, cut diplomatic ties with Doha and imposed a land blockade on Qatar, besides banning Qatari planes and ships from utilising their airspace and sea routes.

The reason was the Doha government trying to assert itself politically by following an independent political line rather than the one dictated by neighbouring Riyadh. Iran and Turkey threw the lifeline and helped Qatar stay afloat.  The tug-of-war went on for nearly four years until January 2021, when the Saudis gave in, blinking first.

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The World Cup has proved to be a clear assertion of Qatar’s intention to stand its ground as an independent entity. Qatar is the first country in the Middle East to host the tournament – not Saudi Arabia,  not Egypt or any of the other big guns in the Arab Muslim world.

Qatar’s aggressive ruler Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani has played a pivotal role in promoting the country as a big player globally, especially in sports.  He reportedly plans to make Qatar a hub of international sports,  with the latest World Cup heralding his intentions.

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Tamim follows his father, Hamad bin Khalif al Thani’s strategy of modernising the tiny peninsula. Hamad’s first major project,  a free and independent media channel,  Al-Jazeera  set up in 1996, proved to be the path-breaker in the otherwise tightly-controlled media scene within the region. Fashioned on the lines of the other well-known channels, BBC and CNN,  Al-Jazeera, over 25 years, is now counted among the top in the world and a worthy competitor to its two Western counterparts.

Effectively,  this has meant running with the hare and hunting with the hound. For,  on the one hand, you have a media channel which, more often than not, comes up with blistering criticism of the West while the country simultaneously houses a huge United States military base that makes it an invaluable ally of Washington in the region.

This contradiction has bewildered analysts trying to understand the psyche of Qatar’s ruling family. But, irrespective of what the world thinks, Qatar continues to play all cards, even if contradictory, with elan. Take the World Cup, for example. Winning the bid to host, what is arguably the tournament with the largest following in the world,  was no mean task.  But it came with a price.

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Qatar was accused of liberally greasing the palms (allegedly worth $880 million) of all and sundry associated with FIFA, which itself is no stranger to charges of corruption, and reportedly left nothing to chance to get an opportunity to host the game.  Despite all the attention on the arrangements to get Qatar World Cup-ready, the organisers (in effect, the government) were soon embroiled in allegations of labour exploitation – with human rights organisations like Amnesty International documenting them meticulously.

But the tournament went ahead with no hitches. This, despite unexpected last-minute restrictions on drinking alcohol within the stadiums and a dress code that forbade the audience to wear anything against “local culture” – all contrary to FIFA tournaments known for their liberal ethos. In a sense,  the clampdown reflects the larger dilemma of Qatar, which until the mid-1990s, was a deeply conservative Muslim country, probably second only to Saudi Arabia.

Over time, with increasing global involvement and the concomitant liberalisation,  it has straddled both religion and secular practices in a unique tightrope walk, so as not to unsettle the local Muslim Qatari population, which by and large remains conservative.

If one were to track the trajectory of Qatar’s rise from a sleepy kingdom into a vibrant Arabic global showpiece, it would look similar to its other high-profile Gulf neighbour,  Dubai  (part of the UAE).

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During the time this writer was based in the Qatari capital Doha in early 2000 as an editor with Al-Jazeera,  the talk was on how the ruling dispensation was keen on propelling Doha as an international go-to destination on the lines of Dubai.

Dubai, too, went on a mad spree of construction activity,  even reclaiming land from the sea to construct a slew of exclusive housing and commercial properties. When the Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum was once asked why his government was embarking on such a massive scale of construction, he was quoted as having said, “We will construct.  People will come”.  However,  the 2008 global economic crash proved to be a party-pooper and since then the country has not been the same,  struggling to re-emerge as the region’s top dog.

But Qatar appears to have gone one up on Dubai.  It was not as profligate as its neighbour, and managed to weather the economic crash rather well.  One big difference between the two has been the presence of natural gas under Qatar, which has turned it into one of the world’s richest countries.  It holds 12 per cent of the world’s natural gas, to the extent of around 850 trillion cubic feet, easily worth a mind-boggling sum that has given it the heft to toy around with plans (like hosting the World Cup) that would have bigger nations think twice.

The Qatar government will get some breathing space.  The next round of the Asian football championship is scheduled for early 2024. That will be nowhere near the World Cup.  Still, it is some consolation.

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If one goes by Qatar’s track record,  no surprises if the al-Thani government comes up with some other long-term plans to utilise the vast state-of-the-art infrastructure now in place in Doha and its environs.  For instance,  sections of the seven technologically well-equipped stadiums built for the World Cup are expected to be dismantled and shipped to lesser-developed countries to help in their sporting activities.

But for now,  the stadiums and the various buildings will soon turn desolate and dusty. They will have to bide their time – until they get another opportunity to shine under the desert Sun.