FIFA: Re-run of 2022 World Cup vote a possibility

I've been to Sochi several times from 2007 to 2014 and was there for the entirety of the Olympic games. I know what Sochi was before the bid, what it is now and how the games were on the ground from the perspective of foreign visitors (including about a half doze Canadians I assisted who stayed the entire games in the Mountain cluster). Whenever I hear the same old repeated lines from the lead up to Sochi about the hotel with bad water (pipes were new, I drank tap water at the house I was staying in), about the broken door handle, I know that the impression of the place and the games is based entirely on a few stories that made headlines, but did not reflect the overall experience of a massive games with thousands of people and thousands of different experiences. This is why I find the conclusion that Sochi was some sort of disaster divorced from reality.

 

I am not a lawyer. However.

I'm pretty sure that one side can't unilaterally change a contract. And this ain't going from 12 to 11. It's going from 12 to 8. Isn't 10 the minimum for a bid????

If this turns out to be true, world football is in for a scary couple of years. Because if Qatar can get away with this, all bets are off. FIFA will become a larger, more grotesque version of CONCACAF, where the nations that supply the real money are exploited by a coalition of Lilliputians.

 

Minimum is 8 I'm pretty sure.

 

Similar to how many people come to the conclusion global warming isn't real because it's cold where they live.

I don't mean to character assassinate the whole place but to call the Olympics a resounding success that modernized a region, was just ludicrous given the stories to come out of the place.

I'm pretty sure it's a tourist destination, ironically mainly for the summer so many parts I'm sure are nice

 

Looks that way:

The biggest loser this time is Brazil itself, which for political reasons insisted in hosting the tournament in 12 cities instead of the eight that FIFA wanted and now is paying the price.​

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/sp...ure-delays-brazil-will-be-well-done-cup-says/

 

I would reverse the claim and say that those saying that the Olympics were a disaster are more like Global Warming deniers using small isolated incidents (like it snowing in June or something) to try and prove a preconceived notion that Russians are incompetent boobs where everything is bad. Obviously the Olympics had issues and nothing was perfect, every event has major logistic issues because putting on huge events is difficult. Brazil is having major problems right now with infrastructure leading up to the World Cup. London had major difficulties with certain parts of their project. But like all these events the games were put on, relatively flawlessly with the majority of people having a great time, which is really what the Olympics are all about. Well that and making loads of cash.

Sochi wasn't really all that different from other Olympics in logistic terms, despite the bad press, which is in my view a success. The games went on, there were a few hiccups (snow was terrible at many mountain events for example). You had all these security fears, logistic nightmare scenarios and for the most part none of the doomsday scenarios came to pass. Russians (by and large the biggest group of tourists for obvious reasons and the target audience of everything despite what some may think) came to Sochi, saw a magnificent new city built and a games staged where their athletes (rebounding from an embarrassing Vancouver) found the medal stand repeatedly and those citizens came away with pride in their country and it's ability (questioned at times by most Russians) to actually accomplish things.

You can love or hate the Putin regime all you want, and I personally despise it, but if you wanted to see the list of their goals for the Sochi Olympics they basically checked all of them. They won medals, they rebuilt the infrastructure of the region and they left the citizenry generally impressed with their competence. It's for this reason that I say the Olympics in Sochi were a resounding success, because it was never about impressing a few foreign journalists or even impressing visiting foreigners. That would be a nice side effect. As you can see from the past few months the Putin regime doesn't really give a shit about what the rest of the world thinks of it or Russia. This was for domestic consumption and it hit all the right buttons.

Which is to say, bringing it back to Qatar, that I don't see a lot of parallels to Qatar. I'm much less familiar with the country, but I can't imagine the regime there is trying to impress it's tiny domestic population, although I'm free to be told I'm wrong about it. Qatar isn't trying to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure or redevelop itself. It basically seems like a sort of billionaire vanity project. If you had all the money in the world, wouldn't you want your own personal World Cup?

 

For all the things wrong with Russia, there's orders of magnitude of difference between a Russian World Cup, and a Qatari one.

Russia will likely pull off a competent job. The Qatari one is just one big trollfest of broken promises, implausible lies and ridiculous truth stretching and after-the-fact rationalization wrapped in a cynical veneer of "blame colonialism" whenever criticized.

 

The entire bid was a complete fabrication

*12 stadiums
*all air conditioned with no worries of heat
*all stadiums to be donated to other poorer countries after WC


Even if there were no bribes, the people who voted did not have the proper information

 

While I think this is typically true, what we would likely have here is the party suffering the breach refusing to enforce the contract. What I mean is, FIFA doesn't seem to care. All the talk about a winter event already sort of seemed to breach the terms of the request for proposal. But the party with the authority doesn't seem interested in enforcing those terms so I cannot see why they would behave any differently in connection with a stadium # "breach." Most contracts do not permit non-parties to enforce them unless they are named beneficiaries. Though I am completely with you.

 

Yeah, FIFA hasn't cared about Qatar violating the half of their bid they've already changed around; why would they all of a sudden stop to care about this newest change to their bid?

 

I hate to say it, but 8 venues is probably enough to host a World Cup. France and South Africa both only used 10 venues. USA only had 9 venues in 1994 (when the field was only composed of 24 teams, as opposed to 32). But if you space the games out correctly, 8 venues should really be more than sufficient.

At the very least, this decision should spare countless worker lives that would have been otherwise lost in a frantic bid to complete 12 venues by 2018.

Otherwise, I am completely opposed to Qatar as a host in every other way possible.

 

Interestingly, Qatar has decided to keep the huge amount of training sites they are building the same, which appears to be the number needed to support Platini's (spit) hope for a 40 team WC by 2022.

A 40 team WC in a 8 stadium site could be a logistical mess especially from a grass stand point.

 

Don't forget, its 4 fewer stadia that can be magically dis-assembled and brought to the 3rd World countries that so desperately need FIFA 4 & 5 star stadia.

 

Well that's one way of reducing the death count.

 

Is anybody else find it ironic that a bunch of the stadiums for the Qatar WC are being designed by the firm "Albert Speer and Partners"? You know, the son of that Albert Speer? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Speer

I don't hold children liable for the errors of their parents, but I just find it surprising.

 

Hopefully the keep the ones that will be cooled by UFT*. I'm really looking forward to seeing those.










*Unicorn Fart Technology

 

Honestly it makes more sense for Qatar to only have eight stadiums.

It's not like it's a big country with many different regions and cities to spread around the tournament to like South Africa, Brazil or hell even Germany. I think all the states combined outside of Doha are less than 100,000 people.

 

Well, yeah, but conceding that point is kind of burying the lede, isn't it?

Quite frankly, they don't need 8 stadia either.

 

Maybe, just maybe they are setting up for this a la Denver and 1972 Winter Olympic Games...

The cities of Denver, Colorado, United States; Sion, Switzerland; Tampere, Finland; and Vancouver (with the Garibaldi mountains), Canada, made bids for the Games.

The games were originally awarded to Denver on May 12, 1970, but a 300% rise in costs and worries about environmental impact led to Colorado voters' rejection on November 7, 1972, by a 3 to 2 margin, of a $5 million bond issue to finance the games with public funds.

Denver officially withdrew on November 15, and the IOC then offered the games to Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, but they too declined owing to a change of government following elections.

Salt Lake City, Utah, a 1972 Winter Olympics final candidate who would eventually host in 2002 Winter Olympics, offered itself as a potential host after the withdrawal of Denver. The IOC, still reeling from the Denver rejection, declined and selected Innsbruck, which had hosted the 1964 Winter Olympics games twelve years earlier, on February 5, 1973.

 

No doubt, unless you think it's reasonable, to put it in context, for Connecticut to have eight stadiums. Connecticut compares closest to Qatar in size and population of the US states. It actually would be more reasonable for Connecticut to have eight stadiums, because it has 50% more people, 25% more land mass and isn't surrounded by the sea and an empty desert like Qatar is.

 

Plus CT is surrounded by the Boston and NYC MSA's.

 

No doubt. In fact, it probably would compare more to having Las Vegas host the World Cup by itself - well a Vegas where fun is illegal and requires a visa to get there from anywhere else.

But the gaudiness, shady money, hot as hell in the summer and it being in the BFE does compare.

 

Yeah...Vegas is probably the closest comp, and I could probably make a plausible argument that Nevada's a better spot for a World Cup than Qatar.

 

I'll do one better--Quite frankly, I don't think Qatar can even build 8 stadia worthy for a World Cup in time for 2022.

And where are teams going to train and basecamp at?

 

This is getting absolutely ridiculous. If 1200 slaves have died, if they have to move it to the winter and if they can't deliver the 12 stadiums they promised...why do they get to keep it? Its hit absolutely outrageous heights.