Gulati, U.S. lose 2022 World Cup bid to Qatar

Qatar. If it wasn’t on the map 24 hours ago, it is now. On Thursday, the tiny Middle Eastern emirate beat out Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States in a FIFA executive committee ballot to win the 2022 World Cup bid.

The peninsula nation, which is bordered by Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf—it’s also close to Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran—has a population of just 1.7 million. Its soccer team has never even qualified for World Cup play. Though it’s not famous for its prowess on the soccer pitch, you may know of Qatar as the home of the news network Al Jazeera, or perhaps as the namesake for the World Trade Organization’s Doha Development Round negotiations.

Qatar is also a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. According to the International Monetary Fund, the emirate, which sits on enormous oil and gas reserves, has the second-highest per capita GDP in the world. The average Qatari is a world leader in fossil fuel consumption, contributing 55.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year. That’s 25 metric tons more than the next-highest offending country. I’m sure the outdoor air conditioning systems promised at the World Cup stadiums will help improve those numbers.

By all accounts, the U.S. should have come away with the bid. For one thing, the infrastructure here is already in place, whereas Qatar has to build nine new stadiums before kickoff. And from a revenue standpoint, the U.S. makes sense. The 1994 World Cup, which was held in the U.S., still hangs on to the highest attendance total in the tournament’s history, even though the format has expanded from 52 to 64 matches since then. At 3.6 million, that attendance mark is more than double Qatar’s entire population.

And then there is the argument so frequently embraced by Columbia’s own economics professor, Sunil Gulati, president of the United States Soccer Federation and the main force behind the 2022 bid. Gulati likes to emphasize that soccer is gaining popularity in the United States and that America represents a huge opportunity for the sport to expand its reach in this crucial corner of the globe.

Gulati has dedicated much of his life to strengthening soccer’s footprint in the United States, and yesterday’s results represented a significant personal setback for him. In a conference call with the media after the bid announcement, Gulati expressed his concern that losing the ballot would slow down the development of soccer in America.

“What we had tried to tell the story to FIFA, and it resonated certainly in the U.S., is that getting the right to host this event 12 years from now, with that sort of build-up time, was the equivalent of putting your foot on the accelerator and really taking big jumps,” he said.

He added later, “We said all along, this isn’t only about the technical report. It’s an election, and there’s lots of things that go into that—in this case, a new part of the world and a pan-Middle East proposal.” When pushed about the realities of the executive committee balloting, Gulati only said, “It’s politics, it’s friendships and relationships, it’s alliances, it’s tactics.”

Not everyone was so diplomatic. Eric Wynalda, who used to play for the U.S. national team, was reached for a telephone interview with the Associated Press. “Basically, oil and natural gas won today,” he said. “This was not about merit. This was about money.”

But this doesn’t make sense either. A United States World Cup would bring in significantly more revenue at much lower costs.

And what did Qatar have going for it? One of its main arguments rings hollow to me. The monarchical nation claims that it is unfairly seen as a society where women are denied rights in a region where conflict and strife is widespread. Qatar hopes both to change these perceptions and to promote peace in the region by hosting the tournament.

But shouldn’t peace, stability, and human rights (not to mention democracy) come first? Why should a nation be rewarded for the promise of progress instead of for progress itself?

So where did we go wrong?

For one thing, FIFA is not like many other international organizations in which the United States or other great powers wield disproportionate authority. The executive committee is made up of 24 members from 24 countries, although two are currently banned—Tahiti’s for breaching FIFA’s code of confidentiality and Nigeria’s for attempting to sell his vote. America holds no veto power and can simply be outvoted.

Did anti-American sentiment play a significant role in the outcome? Hard to say. Then again, gaining FIFA’s approval is not necessarily a badge of honor: The organization and its leadership, including President Sepp Blatter, have regularly been accused of corruption and, on a simpler level, poor management. It’s not hard to see why. There seems to be nothing sound, either from a financial point of view or in the interests of the game’s future, about the executive committee’s decision.

But the damage is done. It’s a sad day for American soccer fans and a sad day for our favorite “Principles” professor.