eyewitness
give the Asians a great taste of what to
expect in 2022 against the top teams,
but games against Serbia and the
Republic of Ireland will be more
interesting and the kind of tests that
Qatar will need to pass, at least on
home soil, if they are to get to the
knockout stage in 2022. Azerbaijan
and Luxembourg should provide
opportunities for a change of approach.
The playing side then is going as well
as could be expected, with COVID-19
the biggest threat to the national team
getting the necessary action. More
attention has been on off-the-field
preparations however.
Criticism of Qatar’s treatment
of migrant workers and thekafala
sponsorship system – where foreign
labourers are tied to one employer –
has been constant ever since FIFA
made the decision
in 2010. While
concerns over the
safety of workers,
especially in regard
to the country’s
stadium building
programme remain, in 2020 a new law
that allowed workers in the country to
change jobs without their employers’
permission came after the abolition of
the exit permit that was needed to leave
Qatar. This led the UN’s International
Labour Organisation to declare that the
kafalasystem had been “effectively
dismantled”. Human rights groups
welcomed the new laws, while cautioning
that it would all depend on how rigorously
the laws were enforced. Scrutiny will be
intense and on-going but it seems that
progress is being made.
Then there is the official end of the
so-called Qatar Blockade. InJune 2017,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and
Bahrain severed all diplomatic relations
and closed their borders with the World
Cup hosts. As damaging as this was
economically and politically, it led to
bad blood in football too, spilling over
into the 2019 Asian Cup where Qatar’s
victory in the UAE-hosted tournament
was not well received locally. It also
caused problems in the AFC Champions
League, where teams from the
countries regularly meet. And with a
World Cup billed as one for the whole
region, it would not have been a good
look had Qatar been physically cut off
from its three closest neighbours. It
means the restoration of relations,
symbolised by a public hug between
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and Qatar’s
Emir at the Gulf Cooperation summit in
earlyJanuary led to a sigh of relief all
round.If you told organisers of Qatar 2022
back in 2017 that there would be all
kinds of competitive and exciting tests
for the national team, the blockade
would be over and the criticism of
worker’s rights reduced then they would
have been delighted. But there is, of
course, the problem of COVID-19.
There is enough time before the
World Cup kicks off to be reasonably
confident that all will be okay in terms
of games taking place, though nobody
can say for sure. With new variants of
the virus springing up, travel may still be
an issue. Tens of thousands of fans who
had been thinking about some early
winter sunshine and lots of footballmay think again and wonder whether it
is worth the effort and the expense. It
remains to be seen what state the travel
industry is in and with the possibility of
games in Europe being postponed over
the coming months, 2022’s calendar
could be extremely hectic even before
the World Cup kicks off.
As you would expect, organisers have
been sounding a confident note. “We
are going to bring people towards
celebrating, what I believe, will be the
first global event at the tail end of the
pandemic,” Hassan Al Thawadi, secretary
general and chairman of the 2022
World Cup organising committee said,
adding that the Olympics and others
will provide some lessons. “We are
observing and learning from these
events and have the luxury of twoTens of thousands of fans who had been thinking
about some early winter sunshine and lots of
football may think againAFC Champions League...Qatar successfully hosted the tournament at the end of 2020