IT WAS NOT the sort of pre-tournament publicity that the organisers would have hoped for. On November 20th Qatar’s footballers will take on Ecuador in the first match of the 2022 World Cup, the biggest event in the global sporting calendar. Yet just 13 days before, Sepp Blatter, a former president of FIFA, world football’s governing body, told a Swiss newspaper that, in his opinion, awarding the World Cup to Qatar had been a “mistake”.
In 2010, when Mr Blatter pulled the card from the envelope and publicly announced Qatar’s victory—to general astonishment—he was forced, for the sake of diplomacy, to take a rather different line. Football, he announced, was going to “new lands”; the idea was to broaden the game’s appeal. Few other observers were willing to defend the deal. Accusations of corruption and bribery flew; though a report commissioned by FIFA and eventually published in 2014 gave Qatar’s bid its seal of approval, with a few reservations.