What will be the legacy of the Qatar World Cup?

In the glitzy Fifa museum, in squeaky-clean downtown Zurich, there is a new exhibition which sums up the upbeat, inclusive image which football’s world governing body is so eager to portray. It’s called ‘211 Cultures – One Game’, and it consists of 211 items of football ephemera, one from each of Fifa’s member associations all around the world.

Most of these items are fairly anodyne: trophies, fan regalia, football shirts and suchlike – curios you tend to find in any sports museum. A few are items of genuine historical interest: the Spanish contribution is a table football set, invented during the Spanish Civil War by a Spaniard called Alejandro Finisterre, after a bomb blast in Madrid left him lame and unable to play the game he loved.

The English FA have donated a pair of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s football boots, which he wore in Liverpool’s first match after those pesky Covid restrictions were lifted. The boots are emblazoned with the slogan Black Lives Matter.

'Tonight, my boots will carry the message Black Lives Matter,' said Alexander-Arnold at the time. 'The system is broken, it’s stacked against sections of our society, and we all have a responsibility to fix it.' Alexander-Arnold, one of the world’s best full-backs, is part of the 26-man England squad which has travelled to Qatar for the World Cup.

Regardless of what you think about Alexander-Arnold’s stance, the inclusion of these football boots encapsulates an awkward paradox at the heart of this museum – and the whole Fifa project, for that matter. During the World Cup in Qatar, as in various previous World Cups, we punters will be implored to stop asking impertinent questions about the world beyond the touchline and simply focus on the football. Those boots reveal that, whatever Fifa or the Qataris might prefer, the wider world has always had a nasty habit of intruding on the field of play.

This lavish museum focuses on all the stuff that’s happened on the pitch, ever since the Fédération Internationale de Football Association was founded in Paris in 1904 (it moved to Zurich in 1934 – its headquarters are still here today). I suppose that’s fair enough – it’s supposed to be fun for all the family – but I was hoping for something more, a stronger sense of how football grew out of the creative synergy of two contrasting yet strangely compatible sporting cultures: Britain’s public schools and its industrial working class.

A hundred and fifty years since the first international football match (a 0-0 draw between Scotland and England) that extraordinary social hybrid which only Britain could have created - the posh amateurs at the FA, the proletarian professionals of the Football League – has finally been eclipsed by globalisation, and the latest World Cup is the inevitable result. Follow the Money is football’s mantra, and if you follow the money to its final destination, you’ll end up playing football in a shiny new stadium in the middle of the desert, in a country with the world’s richest citizens, a hot and arid peninsula in the Persian Gulf called Qatar.

Would this sleek museum dare to scrutinise how and why football ended up in this obscure outpost? Not on your nelly. I wasn’t expecting a fearless exposé of working conditions in the Qatari construction industry (I’m not that naïve), but I thought there might be some discussion about the challenge of mounting a World Cup in a place with such a strict attitude to booze, or women’s rights, or homosexuality.

This is not the first World Cup to be hosted by a regime that doesn’t conform to our nice-and-easy touchy-feely liberal-democratic values. There was the last World Cup in Russia, just four years after Putin’s invasion of Crimea. Before that it was Argentina in 1978, under the auspices of a military junta that ‘disappeared’ thousands of dissidents. Way back in 1934, the World Cup was already being exploited for political purposes, when Mussolini hijacked the tournament in a pioneering piece of sportswashing, anticipating Hitler’s 1936 Olympics.

Paul Breitner, a West German World Cup winner in 1974, refused to play in Argentina in 1978. Should today’s footballers follow his selfless example? Of course not. For the players themselves, the game exists in glorious isolation. It’s a separate world, a parallel universe – or at least, it ought to be. Where you’re playing and who’s watching shouldn’t enter into it. Anywhere you go, the pitch is just the same, and for the duration of the game the world beyond ceases to matter. That’s the beauty of it – that’s what it’s all about. I’ve seen training-ground games between Premier League teams that were every bit as good as the matches I’ve seen at Anfield or Ibrox or the Nou Camp. Behind-closed-doors matches played in empty stadia during Covid proved us fans aren’t quite as important as we like to think.

For soccer tourists and indentured pundits, clearly it’s a bit more complicated. Should you go to Qatar? Should you spend your money there? Should you accept Qatari hospitality? I’ve done all these things, so I can hardly tell anyone else not to. I’ve been there three times.

I first went to Qatar ten years ago, to write a piece for High Life, BA’s glossy in-flight mag. Qatar had been awarded the World Cup, and I was curious to see what on earth we were letting ourselves in for. I went to Aspire, Doha’s Sports City, a sprawling sporting campus where Europe’s leading clubs go for winter training. I went to Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art, designed by Sino-American starchitect IM Pei. It’s a beautiful building, austere and understated, unlike the brash skyscrapers across the bay. I drove out into the desert and saw – well, not a lot, in fact: a few antique forts, a few dusty fishing ports, dwarfed by the flat horizon. A grey sea of sand and rubble, it’s like the surface of the moon.

I went back a few years later, to write the words for a book of photographs. This time we went all over. We drove to Khawr al Udayd, the serene and lifeless inland sea that marks the border with Saudi Arabia. Along the way, I saw huge new stadia, rising up out of nothing. These buildings were futuristic – temples of glass and stainless steel, but the project seemed archaic: pharaohs building pyramids; King Midas, blessed and cursed by the power to turn everything he touched into gold. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…’ Without their vast reservoirs of natural gas, would these Qataris still be noble nomads? Would they still be camping in the desert, rather than staging World Cups? It’s hard to feel sorry for folk who are so unfathomably wealthy, but I couldn’t help feeling that in their frantic dash to modernise, they’d lost something precious along the way.

From the air-conditioned seclusion of my chauffeur-driven 4x4, I watched the gangs of migrant workers who were toiling on Qatar's construction sites – erecting scaffolding, pouring concrete, earning money to send back to their families in Nepal. Their faces were hidden behind goggles and bandanas, worn to shield them from the dust and heat. In the evening I saw them sitting on buses, waiting to be ferried back to their accommodation. They looked exhausted, defeated.

I went to Doha’s Arabi Stadium to watch the national team play a friendly international against Bahrain. The standard wasn’t up to much – I reckon either side would have struggled against an English fourth or fifth tier team – but it was an enjoyable evening all the same, and the atmosphere was fairly lively. Qataris clearly enjoy their soccer, albeit on a modest scale.

Wandering around Zurich’s Fifa Museum, a decade later, it struck me that this museum and the Qatari World Cup are two sides of the same coin. They both represent football’s migration from its parochial origins to global status, and that’s why it hurts for Britons, more than anyone – not because we invented the game, but because it’s moved so far from its local roots to a place we no longer recognise.

I started going to football 45 years ago. The first live match I saw, I stood on the Kop at Anfield to see Liverpool beat Oldham Athletic 3-1 in the FA Cup (Kevin Keegan scored a fine free kick). I was 12 years old and I was smitten. I went fairly often after that – not a hardcore fan by any means, but most home games. I used to help out on a milk round on Saturday mornings, which paid one pound. On Saturday afternoons that pound bought me admission to the Spion Kop, to watch the European Champions.

In some ways it was pretty tawdry – the terraces were so packed that it was impossible to reach the gents, so blokes used to take a piss right beside you. ‘Mind your backs,’ you’d hear them say. The huge surging masses on the Kop would pick you up and lift you off your feet. Sometimes, it was hard to breathe – exhilarating at the time, but a spooky memory after Hillsborough. Yet it was exciting and spontaneous and affordable for everyone.

When I went away to university, I stood on the terraces at Stoke City. When I graduated and came to London I stood on the North Bank at Highbury, watching George Graham’s championship winning side, but after terraces made way for all-seater stadia, it was never quite the same. I started taking my son to Griffin Park, where they still had terraces, to watch Brentford toiling away in Leagues One and Two, but now Brentford are playing in the Premier League, and Griffin Park is long gone.

Nowadays, on Saturdays, I go to watch my son playing for his local club, Loughborough Dynamo, in the Northern Premier League. Most of the players started out at big clubs (my son was at Watford from 8-16 and did a one-year pro at Burnley) so the standard is surprisingly high. I like to think his semi-pro team could give the Qatari national side a decent game.

I shuffled around the Fifa Museum’s permanent exhibition, an Aladdin’s Cave of football memorabilia. It’s an amazing collection, full of priceless artefacts, and I should have been enthralled, but it felt like an embarrassment of riches, and it left me oddly underwhelmed. I was about to make my exit through the gift shop (fancy a Brazil shirt signed by Pele, a snip at 1590 Swiss Francs, or one of Dennis Bergkamp's signed football boots, for a mere 650 CHF?) when I finally found the library. Would this be any different?

It was indeed. The Fifa Museum library is an absolute treasure trove: over 7,000 books, documents and periodicals, dating back over a century: Billy Bremner's Book of Football, One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie, Association Football & The Men Who Made It, published a hundred years ago, in 1922. For me the highlights were the old football annuals of my childhood: Shoot, Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book, The FA Book for Boys… I left the museum with my faith in football almost restored.

What will be left of the Qatari World Cup in a hundred years’ time? Will these new stadiums be the seedbeds for new cities? Will Qatar become a new football superpower? Or will the desert reconquer this bizarre citadel? What will happen when the oil runs out? Will nature reassert its power?

I know I’ll never return to Qatar, and that’s a shame. I’ll miss the kindness of strangers in the mosques and souks. I’ll miss Mohammed, my Palestinian driver, who invited me back to his rudimentary house for dinner (all the menfolk in one room, sat on the floor, eating mezze with our fingers – all the women out of sight, busy in the kitchen, Mohammed said they’d eat after I’d gone).

But when I think about the new stadia I saw rising up out of the desert, shimmering in the heat haze, I recall the closing lines of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a boy at Eton when football was in its gestation there:

“Nothing besides remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.