Heat will be on fans and players alike

WITHIN the next few weeks Qatar will begin a campaign asking visitors and foreign residents to respect its decency laws.

A computer generated image hand out, released by the Organising Committee of Qatar 2022 shows the stadium to be built in Al-W...

WITHIN the next few weeks Qatar will begin a leafleting campaign asking visitors and foreign residents to respect its decency laws. It will remind everyone that clothing should be modest, covering shoulders and knees.

More sternly it will warn that people making obscene gestures, reciting songs or uttering “indecent phrases” will risk a six-month jail sentence.

Given that the average England football supporter swears copiously, habitually wears shorts and enjoys nothing better than an obscene chant or two, the Qatari authorities will have their work cut out (and their prisons full) when — or perhaps if — the World Cup is held there in 2022. To critics it is further evidence of the sheer madness of awarding the tournament to a tiny desert nation with a population of 1.6 million, an absolute monarch and a dim view of Western moral turpitude.

The main problem, however, is the heat. Temperatures in June and July, when the World Cup is usually held, regularly top 50C. Harold Mayne-Nicholls, who led the FIFA inspection of the nations bidding to host the 2022 World Cup, had warned before Qatar was chosen that the heat was a “potential health risk for players, officials, the FIFA family and spectators”.

He said in an interview last year that just walking down the street during the inspection “was not easy — you really suffered with the sun”.

Qatar is building eight stadiums in and around the capital, Doha, at a cost of $4.5 billion. Promises that they will have air-conditioning to reduce the temperatures have been widely ridiculed, as no such system has been tried before in a stadium. Even with a cooling system, playing would be “very risky”, in Mayne-Nicholls’s opinion. “I cannot imagine top athletes running 90 minutes even with the cooling system, because at certain times of day they will feel this climate.”

Another problem is Qatar’s size. All the new football developments are within a radius of about 32km. Most host nations hold World Cup matches throughout the country. The problem for Qatar is that there is not much country there. It is a 160km peninsula sticking out into the Gulf, no more than 90km wide. Its only land border is with Saudi Arabia.

The construction of new roads, a metro and an expanded airport has brought in tens of thousands of migrant workers but the heat and bad working conditions have taken a toll.

The government has admitted that 964 workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh died in 2012 and 2013. Of the victims in 2012, 246 had heart attacks, 35 died in falls and 28 committed suicide.

Having awarded the tournament to Qatar, FIFA is now scrambling to move it to the winter, probably November and December as September is still too hot. If it does so, this will cause huge disruption to domestic football in Europe. Qatar is currently ranked 95th in the world. In fact, of all the countries that FIFA could have chosen to host the tournament, it would have been hard pressed to find one with less of a footballing culture than Qatar.

Eric Cantona, the former France and Manchester United captain, has said: “In giving the World Cup to Qatar they (FIFA) show the world that they don’t really care about the sport.”