Qatar’s unifying World Cup vision erodes as nations cut ties

FILE- In this Saturday, April 7, 2012 file photo, the new high-rise buildings of downtown Doha, photographed in the background as Qatari women and a man walk by the sea in Doha, Qatar. Qatar, now facing a diplomatic crisis with other Arab nations, is a small country with a big history of turmoil and coups as it became one of the world’s top suppliers of natural gas and now plans to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili, File)

Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup was based on a powerful vision that soccer could unite the Middle East.

“Just think together of what we can achieve together,” Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the wife of the Qatar’s then-ruler, told FIFA voters in 2010. She ambitiously forecast a “culture of peace across our region through football,”

With five years until kickoff, that optimism is rapidly disintegrating after Arab neighbors severed ties on Monday with the tiny nation that turned to sports to buttress its global status.

Soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, is hoping the regional rifts are healed long before there’s any need to contemplate any change of host, a move that would deal a heavy blow to Qatar’s reputation and economy as it is investing more than $150 billion on infrastructure to handle the World Cup.

For now, FIFA is predictably sidestepping detailed questions about the impact of the decision by Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to cast Qatar adrift diplomatically. Qatar’s Gulf neighbors have accused Qatar of supporting terror groups, interfering in the sovereign affairs of Arab countries and backing groups that undermine political stability.

FIFA has reiterated that it maintains regular contact with Qatar.

“One thing is certain, the world’s football community should agree that large tournaments cannot be played in countries that actively support terror,” said Reinhard Grindel, president of the German football federation and a member of FIFA’s ruling council.

Qatar denies funding extremists, but that hasn’t stopped its neighbors from implementing punitive measures that impact people and businesses across the region, including soccer fans.

FIFA was dragged into the backlash against the 2022 World Cup host nation on Tuesday when Qatar’s state-funded broadcaster beIN Sports appeared to be blocked in the UAE. With beIN holding the broadcasting rights to FIFA events across the Middle East and North Africa, the ongoing Under-20 World Cup in South Korea will now be unavailable for viewers in the UAE.

FIFA said it was in contact with the broadcaster and was monitoring the situation.

FIFA is also in partnership with Qatar’s flagship carrier. Qatar Airways, which signed up as a World Cup sponsor last month , has been forced to reroute journeys over Iranian and Turkish airspace after Saudi Arabia and Egypt blocked Qatari flights from using their airspace. A soccer sponsorship has already been affected, with Saudi club Al-Ahli terminating its deal with the airline.

The escalation of the crisis in the Persian Gulf will have underscored to FIFA just how precarious the region is, and the geographical weakness of oil-and-gas rich Qatar.

The desert nation is heavily reliant on food imports , predominantly through its border with Saudi Arabia, where hundreds of trucks transporting food and construction materials have now been stopped from entering.

A sustained blockade could hit the construction boom required to transform the sparse nation. An entire city is being built to stage the final. Not a single stadium was ready at the time of bidding, and only one venue has so far been completed as Qatar prepares to welcome the 32 teams.

Qatar has long been heavily reliant on a massive workforce of migrant laborers from Asia to expand its infrastructure. The Philippines has temporarily suspended the deployment of Filipino workers to Doha, but said there is no plan yet to repatriate the more than 200,000 existing members of the labor force.

Being handed the World Cup made working, living conditions and employment rights in Qatar a global concern. Practices such as the “kafala” sponsorship system that binds workers to their employer are in place across the region, but activists have largely only shone the spotlight on Qatar and the human cost of hosting the World Cup.

Qatar has responded to the pressure by compelling companies to adopt labor reforms . It’s one of the consequences of hosting a major sporting event that Qatar did not seem to anticipate amid the joy of beating the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea in the 2010 vote.

Qatar has the global attention, but it’s largely been unwelcome.

From the moment then-FIFA President Sepp Blatter pulled Qatar’s name out of the envelope in Zurich, the whiff of corruption has hung over Qatar’s bid, coupled with concerns about heat that forced the tournament to be shifted into the heart of the European season in November-December 2022.

Despite being exonerated by FIFA’s ethics investigators, speculation about Qatar being stripped of the hosting rights or being boycotted by some countries has persisted, without the call coming from any authoritative soccer body or government.

Significantly, the federation of World Cup holder Germany is not endorsing such an extreme move.

“There are still five years before the World Cup kicks off,” Grindel said. “Political solutions must take precedence over threats of boycott in this time.”

Not all the countries currently embroiled in the dispute with Qatar are World Cup regulars, so there is slim chance of the entire bloc qualifying for the 2022 tournament. But Qatar will be hosting athletes from across the region when it stages the world track and field championships in 2019.

“We are talking to our teams in the region to properly understand the implications for both the short term and long term,” the IAAF said.