Bribery, Slave Labor, 106-Degree Heat: Why Qatar Wants the World Cup in the First Place

Here are some questions the global media has obsessed over since Qatar won the right to host the 2022 World Cup: Did Qatar buy the vote? Is FIFA entirely corrupt? Is it too hot to safely stage a World Cup in Qatar? Is Qatar a modern slave state?

Here's a question you don't often read: Why in God's name does Qatar even want to host a World Cup? This question is at the heart of a recent paper, published in the International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics, by Danyel Reiche, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon (currently a visiting professor at Harvard). For Reiche, the question goes beyond soccer: why is Qatar, a country of two million people, about 11 percent of whom are actual Qatari citizens, spending billions of dollars not just on soccer but on sports in general?

The answer to the first set of questions might very well be yes. There is mounting evidence that FIFA is indeed corrupt to the bone and that the vote awarding Qatar the tournament was deeply flawed. The extreme heat in Qatar is well documented, as are the horrible conditions of the migrant workers there. Hundreds of those workers have died laboring to build World Cup sites in the Qatari desert. The answer to the second question, however, is more complicated and, perhaps unsurprisingly, far less picked-through.

The question of why is especially interesting when you consider what life is like in Qatar for Qataris. The country is one of the world's wealthiest, per capita. There is virtually no immigration. Guest workers do all the labor, before eventually leaving. Among Qataris, there is little political, religious or cultural diversity.

"If Qatari people have a homogenous background, are happy with their life and there is no policy of integrating foreigners into society, there are no reasons to invest in sporting success as a tool to unite, integrate people and make those people proud," writes Reiche.

Rather, Qatar's desire to host the World Cup is part of a broader effort to leverage what social scientists call "soft power."

Take a minute and bring up Qatar on Google Maps. See that country to the north, across the Persian Gulf? That's Iran. See the country just to the west? That's Saudi Arabia. Neither country is an imminent, existential threat to Qatar but both are way bigger than Qatar in just about every metric, including military size. There's not much Qatar can do about that except worry. It wasn't too long ago, after all, that another big Gulf nation, Iraq, invaded a tiny Gulf petro-state, Kuwait. Qataris know that no amount of spending could really level the neighborhood's military playing field.

Instead, Qatar is looking for security by making itself indispensable. Qatar will never be the biggest guy in the room, but if it's the loudest or the most liked or the smartest? People love sports, and sports are where Qatar has looked to set itself apart. And becoming a sporting paradise is a strategy the country has pursued for a lot longer than people realize: By Reiche's count, since the 1988 Asian Football Cup, Qatar has hosted some 85 major sporting events.

These events will bring Qatar some domestic benefits too. The country has invested heavily in infrastructure, for example, as it has built stadiums. The stadiums might be more or less single-use, but that infrastructure isn't. And health is also an issue: "The World Health Organization (WHO) lists Qatar as the country with the 17th largest prevalence of obesity in the world," writes Reiche. So if watching, say, Cristiano Ronaldo, inspires some people to get off the couch, that can't hurt either.

But the real motive behind Qatar's investment is increasing its profile and leveraging that soft power in any way it can. And, as Reiche points out, the strategy goes way beyond sports. Al Jazeera and Qatar Airways and the large number of conferences and conventions Qatar hosts all increase the tiny country's voice.

Obviously the bad press—the human rights problems, the FIFA scandal—have undermined this strategy to a large degree. But Qatar's growing relevance is hard to argue with, and that's the point.