Closer Look: Qatar’s Bid To Host The World Cup

In a few short months, FIFA will determine the hosts for the 2018 and the 2022 World Cups.  Among the dark horse contenders is the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar.

Qatar is home to 1.6 million people and has an incredibly diverse economy by Middle Eastern standards, which ranges all the way from oil to natural gas to petroleum byproducts.

While Qatar currently lacks the stadiums necessary to host the Cup, they have proposed building nine state-of-the-art stadiums that exude all of the understated good taste one would expect from a Middle Eastern sheikh hemorrhaging petrodollars.

The centerpiece of the planned venues (rendering pictured above) is a 90,000 seat arena built entirely out of the ash of burnt $1,000 bills situated atop an indoor mountain of artificial ice (which itself is completely submerged in the Persian Gulf) .

The plans for building these incredible stadiums track the airtight “Dubai model” of development: First, Qatar will take on a ridiculously crippling debt load.  Second, they will fly in tens of thousands of migrant workers from south Asia, take their passports, pay them hourly rates that would make Phil Knight blush and then refuse to return to them their passports until they repay the cost of their flight at an exorbitantly usurious rate.  Third, they will work those migrants around the clock and build incredibly lavish over the top structures.  Fourth, rake in the MEGA PROFITS!!!

Some critics of the Qatari have complained that these over the top stadiums are unnecessary and that once the cup is over they will go largely unfilled.  Officials from the Qatar FA have firmly rebuffed these allegations.  “Our current stadiums, which fit only about 20,000 supporters, are literally bursting at the seams,” explained Qatari FA Secretary General Abdulaziz Al Mohannadi, “and by ‘bursting at the seams’ I mean, of course, that they are almost sometimes occasionally practically half full.”