Football corruption and the remarkable road to Qatar’s World Cup

With the surrounding noise on human rights, worker deaths, image laundering and the rest, it is easy to forget what Qatar 2022 is really all about, the founding message at the very heart of this global festival of football. Which is, of course, corruption.

Committee members living high on someone else’s hog. Development money that never developed. The fat, wet handshake wrapped up in a TV rights deal. It is time, six weeks away from Fifa’s winter World Cup, to consider the base note of this thing.

An important disclaimer is required at this point. There is no chain of evidence linking Qatar itself to any kind of corruption in securing its World Cup bid success. Qatar’s supreme delivery committee has always strongly denied any such involvement. And rightly so. A two-year inquiry by Fifa’s ethics committee found no significant concerns.

In fact both Qatar and Russia could reasonably claim to have been unfortunate, assailed on all sides by other people’s corruption, and forced to operate within this nexus of bad optics and sour grapes. Even if, by happy coincidence, the decisions made within that environment have also happened to align with both their interests.

Either way Qatar 2022 remains an event tainted at its outset by a great gushing spume of individual corruption among Fifa’s executive committee and decisive actors outside the voting room; almost all of whom were physically present at the moment of delivery on 2 December 2010 in the Messe hall at Fifa House, Zurich, arguably the single most significant day in the history of modern football, and an occasion future historians will surely mine for colour detail while fleshing out their study of the carbon wars of the early 21st century.

There is still a sense of