FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

Qatar's Frantic Effort to Build a World Cup-Ready City in a Decade

Talking to David Roth about walking the half-finished streets of Doha.

Photos courtesy of David Roth

Back in 2010, FIFA – in all its international sportocrat wisdom – decided that the host of the 2022 World Cup would be Qatar, the tiny but insanely wealthy Middle Eastern monarchy. There are some problems with this. The country doesn’t have the stadiums it needs to hold the international sporting event, it’s much too hot there in the summer to play football and the technology to air condition the stadiums doesn’t exist yet. Oh, and the people building the football infrastructure – along with the rest of the country’s gleaming construction projects – are pretty much slaves. Everyone who’s been paying attention assumes two things: the Qataris bribed the shit out of FIFA officials to win the bid, and the 2022 World Cup will be a disaster.

Annons

Most people assuming those things have never been to Qatar, however, and the perception of the country is largely based on a stereotype of a petroleum-funded metropolis ruled by cartoonishly corrupt emirs who work South Asian migrant workers to death so they can build gilded skyscrapers. To get beyond that stereotype, SB Nation sent staff writer David Roth (who used to be VICE’s sports columnist) to the capital city of Doha to look around and see what he could see.

The result was a terrific five-part series that compared the country to an airport, visited the art museums and immigrant neighbourhoods, explored the pedestrian-unfriendly streets, delved into the country’s successful campaign to get the World Cup and, at times, seemed to grudgingly admire the Qatari spirit. It’s a terrific series that you should read in full, and I recently emailed David to learn more about his trip.

VICE: It sounds like Doha is the least walkable city in the world, which would make it pretty unfriendly to Europeans and urban Americans who are used to functioning public transportation. How important does stuff like that seem to the ruling class who are responsible for building the city?
David Roth: Man, trying to figure out what is important to the people in charge is maybe the biggest challenge in Qatar. That or trying to cross some of the bigger avenues without being evaporated by a Range Rover going 75 miles an hour. The thing with a country that basically has no political process – there's a tonne of politics and layers of bureaucracy, but nothing like participatory democracy – is that this sort of guesswork basically stands in for any conversation about policy. The sense I got is that things happen, and only happen because the Emir wants them to happen, and then you sort of guess at why. But also I was lost a lot over there, and that sense of randomness and vague causality comes with being and feeling lost.

Annons

It's clear that the [ruling] Al-Thani family is aiming to make Doha a "world city" – which mostly means expensive condos and amenities, but also some other civic things – and so they're spending a bunch of money on building a metro system. (Also improving the roads, but they are banking on the metro alleviating the traffic issues.) I bet it'll work, because they seem to want it to work and because mass transit is one of those things that can actually be bought, especially in a city that's as far from finished as Doha.

Even the impossibility of walking there owes mostly to the fact that they are, like, 40 percent done building sidewalks. So it'll be fine for a while, and then there's just this pile of pavers or some gully with gravel in it that will clearly be a sidewalk sometime next week. The whole city is in flux like that, and walking there is this jarringly on-the-nose experience of that. It basically exists or doesn't block-by-block, and there are these huge swathes of it that they haven't gotten to yet that are still unmistakably desert. Part of the traffic issue is that they're still ripping out all the old roundabouts that used to exist on a lot of the big streets. I think it'll look and feel and be very different by 2022. Also, like, four months from now.

Is it possible for a non-millionaire to have anything approaching a decent time in Qatar? From your description the city sounds totally focused on creating something that can only be enjoyed by the global 1 percent.
I didn't buy much, and I did OK – I ate in the souk instead of in the fancy hotel restaurants, and snuck in some whiskey from the duty-free in Frankfurt instead of paying $20 for Dewar's at some hotel bar full of petroleum industry dudes. I had the same experience of Doha's malls that I had growing up in New Jersey – I ate some fried stuff and mostly wondered what the hell anyone was doing there, or what they would even buy; Cinnabon's existence is mysterious in every culture.

Annons

But in terms of living there, it's hard to say – the social life for expats seems to centre around hotel bars, which are the only kind of bars that exist there and which seem maybe not surprisingly a lot like hotel bars. Which is to say sort of an expensive, sad/horny male-heavy bummer, with TVs tuned to Premier League football. Overall, I found myself really struggling to imagine what it's like to live there; the foreigners seem mostly to work a lot, and the Qatari are… sparse, relative to everyone else (there are only 250,000 Qatari and 1.8 million foreigners in the country), and family-oriented, and almost certainly doing stuff I didn't know about. I have never felt more like a tourist than I did in Doha, never felt further from or less aware of what the authentic lived experience of the city might have been. The experience of walking towards the big buildings and finding that they were closed and surrounded by this sprawling, bustling/desolate construction site was almost too on the nose as a metaphor. But also that happened.

I don't know how much more fun it'd be to be rich in Doha, honestly. You're still eating at the sushi place in the Four Seasons and then presumably driving or being driven home to watch satellite television. This is an oversimplification, of course – everyone there, down to the most wildly exploited foreign labourers, is there because, to varying degrees, they believe they can have a better life in Qatar than someplace else. And it's a place with people in it, so I guess all sorts of things are possible in terms of fun. But also I'm getting pretty sad typing this.

Annons

Your series was probably the highest-profile example of a sportswriter going to Qatar to write about the World Cup since ESPN sent Phil Ball there on an all-expenses paid trip that got a lot of bad publicity because it basically sucked up to the guys in charge. Your trip seemed different, both in the sense that you weren't getting your expenses paid by the country's rulers, and also in the sense that you didn't seem to have any access to any high muckety-mucks. Was that part of the plan? Was the idea for this, like, “Hey Roth, we're going to send you to Qatar for a few days and see what you come up with after you wander around the streets?”
It's weird. Right up until I left, I wasn't sure what I was going to write. I wrote a column for SB about Qatar and the World Cup after the Guardian story about how terribly the foreign labourers were being treated, and it was all righteous and just literally written from a couch in New York City. When my editor asked a few weeks later if I'd be willing to actually go to Qatar, I didn't really know if he was asking in an abstract sense or not, but the answer was yes both ways, so I told him as much. Then I got really nervous about it, because this is a lot different than making a bunch of doofy jokes about how Ben Roethlisberger looks like a boiled ham that's been injected with Cialis, or whatever it is I usually do. I didn't know if I was supposed to write about the World Cup in particular, or Qatar, or whatever else. I think [editor] Spencer Hall's idea all along was to send me there, let me wander around and see what happened. I think that was probably best.

Annons

But I would absolutely have talked to more muckety-mucks if I could've. I had a lot of smaller conversations with people down the food chain and took a lot of notes, but while I dealt some with people [involved in] the 2022 bid – they were really helpful and nice, unsurprisingly – I didn't really push to speak with Sheikh Mohammed bin-Hamad Al Thani, who's running the bid and is by all accounts a really smart and impressive guy who wants to do the right things. For the story I wound up writing, talking to random people on the street and a few experts with experience in the region wound up being more helpful.

What you've done for most of your career is columns that didn't seem to involve a lot of legwork. What was it like getting sent all the way around the world to poke around?
Fucking awesome, and also kind of hard. I've done reported things and on-site things before, but never anything that involved going someplace really far away, by myself, with an open mandate to write whatever seemed best to write. I liked the challenge of it, but didn't like the constant sense of not being in control – which is part of travelling, but also a result of the fact that I went over there not knowing terribly much, and so was constantly having to update and revise and recalibrate.

So much of writing columns, about sports or anything else, is grounded in this fragile and mostly fake sense of expertise – presenting your opinion as if it's something more than that, or sort of frantically pretending that some given thing is more significant than it is. I'm pretty much incapable, just in terms of my personality, of serving up Piping Hot Takes on sports stories of the moment. There has to be something sort of wrong with you to either be or effectively pretend to feel really intense things about sports for eight hours a day, which is why watching ESPN's daytime programming makes me want to gobble Xanax like they're Mike and Ike's. But responding to stories in a columnist-y way is still really reactive. It's really bracing to be able to admit that you don't know something, and then write your way into some understanding of that experience.

Do you think the 2022 World Cup will actually manage not to be a disaster for everyone who comes to watch the games?
I kind of do, if only because of how difficult it is for me to imagine Qatar – or anything – nine years into the future. They already have figured out how to air-condition one of the stadiums they'll be upgrading for the World Cup, although they do not use the Amazing World-Changing Solar-Powered A/C System they talk about in their FIFA pitch, because it doesn't exist yet. It's basically like running the A/C really high in a motorcycle, but if that's as good as it gets, it'd still be something. I also think they're going to make some strides on their many labour issues, if only because I think they understand they have to – they've been way more receptive to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch than I could imagine Russia, for instance, ever being.

I don't know that there's any real way to undo the essential ridiculousness of holding a World Cup in 115-degree weather, but I have an oddly easy time imagining Qatar mitigating it pretty effectively through the sheer force of massive expenditure on massive expenditure. Ditto the alcohol restrictions and the rest; they will not make it easy, and they will do it their way and their way only, but all of that can be made to work if they want it to. And not all of the things they pitch are totally bullshit.

It really would be cool to have all those games so close together, and if the infrastructure is up to the task, people really could go to two World Cup games in a day. It doesn't mean the World Cup should be in Qatar, and lord knows it doesn't mean it got there the right way – I don't think much of anything having to do with FIFA or the Olympics or anything else run by the globo-sports elite ever gets done for anything but totally shameful or craven reasons. But I can't help but think they might be able to pull it off. I look forward greatly to seeing how weird it will actually be.

Read David Roth on Qatar here, and follow him on Twitter: @david_j_roth