The 2022 World Cup will start in November, if FIFA accepts the recommendation from its own task force.
It’s like one of those slow-motion car crash sequences in a 1970s movie. You see the tractor-trailer spinning out of control and you know what’s going to happen next.
Qatar’s decision to bid for the 2022 World Cup has led — indirectly in some cases — to an absurd sequence of events, each precipitated by the one before, each to some degree both predictable and unavoidable.
A Qatari bid, with all that it implied, magnified a process that was already murky and dubious — bidding to host a World Cup — and eventually led to FIFA ExCo members being banned for life amid allegations of corruption and huge transfers of cash. It might have happened without the Qataris, but their presence unquestionably raised the stakes and the scale of money involved. It also led to the Garcia report, the subsequent whitewashing and then the investigation into improprieties from which nobody — except for the Belgium-Holland bid — emerged with any credit.
After initially ignoring FIFA’s own viability reports, everyone realized that staging the tournament in summer, as contractually agreed, was folly. Even with the proposed cooling technologies, unless they got a weather machine or encased the country in a bio-dome, it was simply going to be dangerous: for players and for fans. So the FIFA machine had no choice but to switch from the traditional June-July World Cup to one played in a cooler time of the year.
That likely led to what we witnessed two weeks ago: the world’s most valuable rights (U.S. Spanish-language broadcast) and second most valuable (U.S. English-language broadcast) being “extended” and handed to a broadcaster for an unspecified sum, without an auction process. You can’t say for sure, but this sort of murkiness smacks of compensation to avoid litigation. And it likely means FIFA — and by extension its 209 member nations — left a lot of money on the table.
There were three options for the tournament’s new schedule and FIFA are leaning heavily toward November-December 2022 (though that needs to be ratified by the body’s Executive Committee next month). The others were January-February 2022, but that was vetoed because it clashes with the Winter Olympics (more of this in a bit) and May-June 2022 (the solution preferred by the big European leagues).
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Continuing with the car crash theme, November-December 2022 presents a severe disruption to the Premier League, Bundesliga and others. So much so that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, head of the European Clubs Association — the body that represents the interests of European clubs — has already talked about demanding compensation from FIFA. It’s not just the big six week hole in their TV scheduling and rejiggering of fixture lists; there’s also a knock-on effect for future seasons and a financial loss.
FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke, never one to mince words, fired back on Wednesday. “There will be no compensation,” he said. “There are seven years to reorganize. It’s not perfect, we know that … but why are we talking about compensation? It’s happening once, we’re not destroying football.”
This opens up yet another hugely thorny issue. Ever wonder why clubs have to release players to FIFA for internationals?
Well, it’s governed by something called a “memorandum of understanding” (European clubs signed one with UEFA in 2012 and it runs through 2018). It covers issues such as insurance, the FIFA calendar and revenue distribution. Theoretically — and not so theoretically — clubs could simply refuse to agree to a new one that covers 2022. Then what? Then there would be absolute chaos and we’d be far into uncharted waters, possibly with Mister Kurtz hanging in the background.
All of this is a further knock-on from the Qatari bid. With FIFA and the stakeholders stuck knee-deep in an ocean of horse dung and mutant worms, this is one more mess they’ll need to clean up.
But back to the dates. What’s hard to understand is this fixation on November-December, when both January-February and May-June seem more reasonable.
The counterarguments seem flimsy. ECA and the European Professional Football Leagues (EPFL) have suggested ending the season early and running the World Cup from May 5 to June 4. I’m no meteorologist, but the temperatures seem marginally cooler than June and, crucially, no hotter than in some of the venues of the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. (The original proposal, ending the season way early and playing from mid-April to mid-May would have made more sense meteorologically, but is unworkable due to Ramadan, which runs from April 3 to May 3.)
Such an arrangement would obviously work better for rights-holders, especially in the U.S. (no college football and no NFL to worry about). But the word from FIFA is that temperatures would still be too high. Which is a bit funny because Major League Soccer plays in August in places like Houston and Dallas where it’s hotter than Doha in May.
January-February 2022, the option championed by UEFA, was ruled out early. It was done FIFA-style, in a way that was neither transparent nor logical, but with five of the six confederations ruling it out. Ostensibly, it’s because playing in January-February 2022 would present a clash with the Winter Olympics, which are scheduled to run from February 4 to February 20, 2022 in either Almaty, Kazakhstan or Beijing, China.
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Now, the International Olympic Committee hasn’t even determined a host yet. There is no reason why they could not be shifted, say, three weeks, and run from February 25 to March 13, apart from not wanting to upset the IOC. The World Cup could then run from, say, January 21 to February 20. Those nations, like England, who insist on playing on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day could still release players on January 2, and you’d have at least 19 days to acclimate. That’s more time than you’d have under the November-December proposal. Everybody else would have even more time. Yes, I know, the blue-bloods who make up the International Olympic Committee (and I do mean blue-bloods: count the number of Princes, Princesses, Sheikhs and Barons on the list … I put it at around 10 percent) might be inconvenienced. But guess what? When it comes to global reach and interest, the Winter Olympics aren’t even in the same galaxy as the World Cup. How about a bit of give and take? FIFA, after all, happily release professionals to play in the Summer Olympics. What if they used it as a bargaining chip?
What’s more, among the 102 IOC members, you’ll find folks like Issa Hayatou, head of CAF and a FIFA ExCo member, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (who is only the Emir of Qatar and might have an interest in as little controversy as possible surrounding his World Cup), Lydia Nsekera (who also happens to sit on FIFA’s ExCo), Franco Carraro (former head of the Italian FA and former UEFA ExCo member), Prince Albert of Monaco (patron of AS Monaco) and, of course, one Sepp Blatter himself. You would expect that some of these people would go to bat for football and do their best to persuade the IOC to adjust their precious schedule. But, no. Apparently FIFA have a gentleman’s agreement with the IOC.
If you really, really, really don’t want to upset Baron Pierre-Olivier Beckers-Vieujant or Princes Norberta of Liechtenstein, Countess of Rieberg, Dowager Marquesa de Marino (no, I’m not making it up, these are some of the sort of people on the IOC), why not switch the whole shebang to 2023? Yeah, that’s right. Have the 2022 World Cup in 2023. You may be creating the answer to a trivia question, but, so what? Folks could handle it. That was UEFA’s second-choice, after January-February 2022.
Nope. The line from FIFA is that it can’t be done for “branding” and “legal reasons.” Legal reasons? LEGAL REASONS? What might those be? And to what law does FIFA answer? No point asking. They won’t answer either question. There’s still time for a semi-sensible solution. Without the Executive Committee’ approval next month, November-December isn’t cast in stone. Call me naive, but I’m still hoping saner heads will prevail. And that the next seven years won’t all be about lawsuits and bickering over compensation.
Gabriele Marcotti is a columnist for ESPN FC, The Times and Corriere dello Sport. Follow him on Twitter @Marcotti.