Welcome Hot Qatar

This week, FIFA announced that the World Cup in 2022 - already awarded to Qatar - would be in the winter.  Normally, the World Cup is in the summer, but that will be a problem in Qatar.  If you're not familiar with it, Qatar is a peninsula in the Persian Gulf, so it combines the oppressive heat of a desert with oppressive humidity too.

What's wrong with having the World Cup in December?  It's because most of the places where soccer is really popular are also places where winter is either mild or non-existent.  That means that the biggest soccer leagues, employers of the best players, are active over the winter. 

Of course, here in Canada, we're used to the National Hockey League shutting down mid-season for the Olympics, so we might not be sympathetic.  But the Olympic hockey tournament is less than two weeks, while the World cup is a whole month.  And international soccer is already full of extra tournaments, cups and international games. 

So you have to wonder what FIFA was thinking when they awarded the games to Qatar.  My suspicion is that they were thinking, "What am I going to spend all this bribe money on?" (I have no evidence for this, and am just being cynical, please don't sue me Mr. Blatter.)  The media has mostly been reporting this as just such a mystery: as though FIFA awarded the tournament without considering the obvious climate problems.

But those of us with memories will recall that at the time of the awarding, we were assured that Qatar had technology to cool their stadiums to reasonable temperatures, even open-air stadiums.   However, those promises have been quietly forgotten, and FIFA and Qatari organizers have been presenting the problem as an intractable situation that can only be solved by changing the tournament's timing.

So good on the BBC's website for actually remembering the proposed air conditioning, and bringing up the topic.  It seems it can be done, at least on a small scale, but building doing it on a huge stadium is going to be expensive and environmentally irresponsible.  That would violate some of FIFA's other commitments to sustainability.

So it looks like FIFA didn't think it all through completely.  Either that, or the cooling claims were just a smokescreen to get the tournament approved.  Or they're all distracted planning vacations with the bribe money, for which I still have no evidence.