The party has begun. The draw for the FIFA World Cup was held on Friday evening at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Center. The Netherlands will play in the group stage, which starts in November, against Qatar, Senegal and Ecuador. In 2010, the Qatari were unexpectedly awarded the biggest football event in the world. “Ridiculous”, thinks national coach Louis van Gaal – but there is nothing that can be done about it.
Immediately after the assignment, rumors of bribery started circulating. The assignment to Qatar was followed by investigations, mainly by US justice, some of which are still ongoing. Thanks to the work of the American FBI and various investigative journalists, much has now become clear about Qatar’s working methods and motives. It is a story of bribes and spies, of witnesses and interrogations, of the greed for money. Or, as Van Gaal recently said: “We are playing in a country where FIFA says they want to develop football there. That’s already bullshit […] It is about money, about commercial interests.”
World football association FIFA, the organizer of the World Cup, has always been prone to corruption. A World Cup is worth a lot. Every channel dreams of being able to broadcast the World Cup. Many countries want to organize the tournament. After all, so many people watch it that it can generate hundreds of millions for a television network and billions for the economy of an organizing country.
In short, a World Cup is very popular. And until the allocations of the World Cups to Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022), there were 24 people who decided which country should host the World Cup and how the advertising rights (sponsorship, television) would be distributed. This cocktail of power and interests has led to large-scale corruption at FIFA, as the past two decades have shown.
Of the drivers who awarded the World Cup to Qatar (and to Russia), the majority are now in prison on suspicion of corruption and taking bribes. Former FIFA president Blatter has been removed from office and banned for several years. The allocation of World Cups is now different, more democratic, but ‘Qatar’ can still be seen as an echo of the corrupt past.
In 2013, the American former FIFA director Chuck Blazer (he has since passed away) already admitted bribery in the allocation of the World Cups in France (1998) and South Africa (2010). The Gold Cup, for countries from North and Central America and the Caribbean, was even to arise to allow corruption. The organizers only conceived the tournament so that they could get kickbacks from television stations and marketing agencies. People would be watching the tournament anyway.
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Spying with CIA agent
Against this background and mores at FIFA, Qatar decided to take a shot at organizing the World Cup in 2022. In those years, the desert state was busy gaining influence in top international football. In 2011, this led to the purchase of French club Paris Saint-Germain, just as other countries in the region are buying up European football clubs.
But that only happened after Qatar had won the top prize in global football with the World Cup. And for that it went far. Last November it turned out an investigation from news agency AP based on hundreds of leaked documents that Qatar hired a company owned by a former CIA agent to spy on other countries that wanted to host the tournament.
For example, ex-cop Kevin Chalker deployed a spy posing as a photojournalist to get in on competitors. The ‘photographer’ accompanied FIFA officials who visited stadiums in the United States – who also wanted to host the World Cup – so that they could eavesdrop on which requirements they had to pay attention to.
Through Facebook, Chalker also tried on behalf of Qatar to make contact with ‘targets’ – those involved in other countries who were going to do a ‘World Cup bid’. He did this by posing as an attractive woman to an officer who would like to make an appointment with the target. The Netherlands was one of the other potential organizers (of the 2018 World Cup, voted on at the same time), along with Belgium, although no evidence has been found that Qatar has also spied in the Netherlands.
And of course there was the money. There is a laundry list of suspicious payments linked to Qatar, although a direct link to the World Cup allocation has not always been proven. From the very expensive Rolex watches that German football director Karl-Heinz Rummenigge received after a trip to Qatar (he had to pay a fine because he could not justify the gift at customs) to the job that the son of Belgian football boss Michel D’ Hooghe got in Qatar just after the vote for the 2022 World Cup. Both denied a link with the World Cup.
Other payments are more clearly linked to the Qatari World Cup bid. A Brazilian FIFA director who could vote on the allocation, Ricardo Teixeira, was paid €1.8 million into the bank account of his ten-year-old daughter by an ‘advisor’ of the World Cup plans. According to Teixeira a “private matter”, although he does not have his track record. In 2012, the Swiss Public Prosecutor’s Office announced that Teixeira and his ex-father-in-law (former FIFA boss João Havelange) had received more than $41 million in bribes during their careers in top football.
There is more. Whistleblower Phaedra Almajid, who worked for Qatar’s World Cup bid, told investigators of an ethics committee set up by FIFA that she had seen her colleagues agree on bribes to host the World Cup.
Also listen: an NRC podcast about Abdullah Ibhais, employee of the World Cup organization in Qatar, who has been captured after he criticized the regime
That happened in a hotel room during a football conference in the Angolan capital Luanda. There, several African sports directors are said to have been promised one and a half million dollars in exchange for a vote for Qatar. That was later denied by the African Football Association – the money is said to have been intended to “propose Qatar’s project”.
US prosecutors
Hard evidence also came from Alejandro Burzaco, an Argentine businessman who became a witness before the US government in the corruption case against FIFA. Burzaco admitted to bribing at least 30 football executives to obtain the broadcasting rights to South American football tournaments and World Cup matches with a television company. It would be bribes with a total value of more than 160 million dollars.
One of the directors Burzaco decided to make statements about was, again, Brazilian Ricardo Teixeira. The statements included Qatar. Burzaco told how in January 2011 he was invited to the apartment of Julio Grondona, then the president of the Argentine Football Association – one of the men who could vote for Qatar as World Cup organizer.
Grondona had a telephone conversation with Teixeira in the apartment. When they hung up, Burzaco was instructed to give a million dollars to Grondona. Burzaco, in his made public statement: “[Grondona] explained to me that Ricardo Teixeira owed him a million dollars for voting for Qatar to host the World Cup.”
Whether Teixeira and Grondona were involved in private agreements to ‘award’ the World Cup to Qatar, he did not know, nor did he care. He was used to the fact that football tournaments were awarded to each other in exchange for bribes.
The statement, as part of a larger mountain of evidence, prompted the prosecutor in the United States to state unequivocally in April 2020 for the first time that FIFA officials allowed themselves to be bribed in the allocation of the World Cups in Russia and Qatar. . Three South American football executives are accused by the US of taking bribes to vote for Qatar. For prosecutors, it is the final piece in a years-long case against corruption at FIFA.
Little by little it has become increasingly clear how the note with ‘Qatar’ ended up in the hands of the now deposed FIFA president Blatter. Qatari dignitaries – the country still denies involvement in bribery – danced and cheered. Preparations for the World Cup could begin. At the time, no one could predict that a human drama would follow – that of the many deaths that fell during the construction of facilities in Qatar.