Report: Qatar World Cup To Be Played In The Winter
By Sean Maslin
A Boxing Day World Cup final is apparently within reach. After years of deliberation, angry messages, and threats of boycotts it appears that the 2022 FIFA World Cup will actually take place in the winter.
In a report conducted by Sports Illustrated earlier this week revealed that a deal had been reached to schedule the 2022 World Cup in Qatar during the months of January and February. The plan will be put to a vote during FIFA’s Executive Committee meeting, set to take place in March.
Although the World Cup is typically held during the summer months, fears over player safety in the Qatari summer have put the entire bid into question. Summers in Qatar can typically be extremely hot with temperatures boiling over 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
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Despite the Qatari Football Association promising that they could hold a World Cup in the summer (including developing
that could cool stadiums and entire neighborhoods) there has been a large movement by both player and football association officials to a different time of the year.
The November-December time period has long been the front-runner for an alternate time period to host the 2022 World Cup. Qatar in November and December is generally pretty tolerable and globally it would be the time period where club teams would be the least affected.
There is just one giant stumbling block to this plan: Europe. November and December are huge months on the European calendar with the regular season underway and league and continental tournaments going on.
UEFA is very reticent towards international tournaments going on during their club seasons and European clubs have been accused of pressuring their players to shirk international call-ups between the months of September and May. A recent example of this is with West Ham United’s Diafra Sakho who did not play for Senegal during the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations due to an injury yet featured for the Hammers during a recent FA Cup match.
While UEFA were reportedly pushing for an April and May World Cup, it appears that they have made a compromise with FIFA. SI’s report indicates that only one European season will be affected and that FIFA may be willing to cut some international dates. There would still be some adjustments that need to be made. But given that most European leagues take off for an extended period during the Christmas holiday (with the exception of the Premier League) there should be room to move matches around.
How does this affect US Soccer and MLS? Quite a bit. If the tournament were to take place during the November-December window that would mean it would run directly against the MLS Playoffs and the MLS Cup. MLS would need to either play a reduced schedule during 2022 or play a compacted schedule where teams would play 2 matches a week to play a full 34 game schedule.
Beyond the scheduling issues, the Qatar bid has also been scrutinized due to their spotty human rights record. The biggest concern that has been waged is over their migrant worker system, which would be used to build many of the World Cup stadiums. Issues like visas being revoked, workers being denied the right to leave the country, and not being paid at all have placed a stain on Qatar’s World Cup bid.
But the human rights issues have almost always been tied to the scheduling issue. Without UEFA’s support, those that want to re-open the Qatar World Cup bid will find it more difficult to find people on the Executive Committee willing to bring their thoughts up before FIFA. FIFA is not a democracy.