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The Five-Year Anniversary Of The Baffling 2022 World Cup Vote, The Beginning Of FIFA's Reckoning

Five years ago this week, FIFA stunned the world by voting to play the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The scandalous aftermath has crippled the organization.
Photo by WALTER BIERI/EPA

"The winner to organize the two twenty-two FIFA World Cup is … Qatar!"

It has been five years since FIFA overboss Sepp Blatter announced those fateful words on December 2, 2010, and a lot has happened to the organization since—primarily, evidence and allegations of widespread corruption, money laundering, and fraud, some of it going back decades.

Read More: More FIFA Officials Arrested In Dawn Raids

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In retrospect, that 2010 Blatter announcement was the biggest public hint to date that even the World Cup—the only reason people put up with FIFA's shenanigans in the first place—was crooked, too.

Both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups were announced that day, the first time FIFA combined two World Cup bids into one round. The countries competing with Qatar—Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States—didn't need 12 years to prepare for hosting the event. Only Qatar could have benefitted from the extra four years.

When Blatter announced the tiny Middle Eastern nation as the winner, one question immediately blurted out of everyone's mouth: Why?

Following numerous investigations and arrests, including several more on Thursday, we now know the answer. Follow the money. Yet despite all of the skeletons that have tumbled out of Blatter's closet since 2010, it's still hard to believe Qatar is going to host a World Cup. All the reasons it was a bad fit in 2010 remain valid. Qatar is smaller than Connecticut. It has one major airport. It is in the middle of the desert. It doesn't have enough stadiums, hotel rooms, public transportation, or airport capacity. It's logistical task is akin to building the New York metro area's transportation system from scratch with the capacity to accommodate 12 stadiums' worth of traffic simultaneously. Did we mention Qatar being in the middle of a desert? It gets hot there! Especially in the summer, when the World Cup is traditionally played.

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It was for for all the the above that FIFA itself deemed Qatar's bid a "high risk."

Oh, and then there are the human rights problems. If you are Muslim in Qatar, you can be put to death for extramarital sex, a punishment that applies to same-sex couples as well, given that they can't marry. Drinking alcohol in Qatar is of dubious legality. Most importantly, there's the existence of the Kafala system for monitoring laborers, and the mistreatment of foreign workers responsible for building, well, everything—including all of those World Cup stadiums.

Blatter and Sheik Mohammed bin Hamad al-Than, chairman of the Qatar 2022 bid committee. Photo by EPA.

The BBC Live Blog from the day of the announcement captured the shock well. When even the normally stoic BBC is apoplectic, you know shit went down. How unlikely was Qatar's win? The blog only mentioned the country three times in a span of more than seven hours before Blatter's announcement: once was to say Qatar existed; another was to mention its delegate was likely voting for the Spain/Portugal 2018 bid; and a third was when "Dean in Luton" sent a most prophetic text:

"As much as I'd love to see it here, if Fifa want to prove this is a global game and have a lasting effect worldwide, Russia and Qatar should be the hosts. It's the World Cup, let's take it around the world."

An hour after that text, Blatter announced the two winning bids. "Now, that is a shock," the BBC live blogger wrote, showing no respect to Dean from Luton. "Fifa choose to take the World Cup to the Middle East, and to Qatar. Not many people saw that one coming."

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Unsurprisingly, the BBC focused on England's spectacular failure to capture the 2018 bid. In general, controversy over the 2018 bid has always been overshadowed by 2022, despite Russia's own corruption allegations and the rampant racism in Russian soccer.

Despite receiving high marks in FIFA's bid assessment, England received only two votes: one from itself, and the other reportedly from then-African Confederation president Issa Hayatou—who, incidentally, is currently FIFA's acting president during Blatter's suspension. (Because this is FIFA, voting took place under a secret ballot, so we don't know for sure who voted for whom). Of the 2018 bids—Belgium/the Netherlands, England, Portugal/Spain, and Russia—it's surprising but not inherently ridiculous that Russia won. Eastern Europe has never hosted a World Cup, and Russia had already won the bid to host the Sochi games. Still, the other three bids carried much less risk.

This was not the case for Qatar 2022. The surprise over the vote echoed across the world. At first, some tried to give FIFA the benefit of the doubt. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, then a New York Times blog, floated a few possibilities, including anti-American sentiment, regional politics, and development and expansion of the sport. The New York Times also reported, "Some soccer officials believe Blatter is angling for a Nobel Peace Prize, having now orchestrated the awarding of the World Cup to South Africa in 2010, and soon to Russia and the Middle East, even if his chances of winning such an award might seem remote."

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In his list of possible explanations, Silver also added, "Another theory—popular in the blogosphere—is that Qatar bought itself the World Cup through bribery or other means. There is, simply put, absolutely no hard evidence of this."

Even at the time, this simply wasn't true. There was plenty of hard evidence the World Cup bidding process was a rat's nest. A few months before the vote, two FIFA executive committee members—Amos Adamu of Nigeria and Reynald Temarii of Tahiti—were suspended and had their voting rights stripped because they were caught on camera by Sunday Times reporters offering their votes for cash. Four former executive committee members were also suspended for suspicion of breaching "ethical rules," which may have involved collusion between the bidding nations to vote for each other.

Still, we know far more about the extent of the corruption now. Fun fact: Only two of the 22 people who voted that day don't have ties to corruption or bribery. (Update: today's indictment leaves only one clean voter! More details below.) Here's a quick rundown:

Sepp Blatter: Suspended, and how bad does it have to be for the Teflon Don to get in trouble?

Julio Grondona: Dead, so FIFA threw his corpse under the bus when the shit hit the fan.

Issa Hayatou: Acting FIFA president due to Blatter's suspension. Accused of taking bribes from Qatar.

Chung Mong-joon: Banned for six years.

Jack Warner: Bribes, bribes, bribes, bribes.

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Ángel María Villar Llona: Under investigation by FIFA's oxymoronic ethics committee.

Michel Platini: Suspended.

Geoff Thompson: Allegedly entered into a vote-swapping pact with Mong-joon, who then reneged on the deal.

Michel D'Hooghe: He of the infamous "friendly gesture" painting.

Ricardo Teixeira: Named in bribery case, resigned.

Mohammed Bin Hammam: The architect of Qatar 2022 and all its dealings. Banned for life, which is the longest you can be banned.

Şenes Erzik: Actually clean! Everybody take a shot.

Chuck Blazer: The bearded, be-scootered face of FIFA corruption. Banned for life. Snitch.

Worawi Makudi: Suspended.

Nicolas Leoz: Indicted by U.S. Justice Department.

Junji Ogura: Allegedly paid officials for support in co-hosting 2002 World Cup.

Marios Lefkaritis: Recipient of lots of Qatari money for very suspicious land deal.

Jacques Anouma: Accused of taking bribes from Qatar.

Franz Beckenbauer: Currently under suspicion for paying bribes buying 2006 World Cup for Germany.

Rafael Salguero: Actually clean! Another shot. (Update: after publication, the full list of today's indictments was released, and, whadya know, our formerly "clean" friend Rafael Salguero is on the list! So, regurgitate the shot, or something.)

Hany Abo Rida: Under suspicion in 2011 for ties to Bin Hammam.

Vitaly Mutko: Key player in the current Russian doping scandal. Chair of 2018 organizing committee.

The fallout from Blatter's announcement is ongoing. Two World Cups will be played in ill-prepared authoritarian countries, the ramifications of which are yet to be fully felt. Potentially thousands of lives will be lost due to irresponsible labor systems, as well as the mistreatment of millions of people. Families in countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India, among others, have experienced tremendous loss as an indirect result of FIFA's greed. As stadiums, transportation networks, and even entire cities wait to be built, more will feel their pain. And we still have seven years to go.

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As for FIFA, the organization appears to be crumbling. The very man who proclaimed "Qatar!" is banned, possibly for life. A multinational criminal investigation has yielded dozens of indictments, with potentially more to come. FIFA itself will be synonymous with corruption for decades, possibly even generations, despite the very best efforts of its paid-for cinematic hagiographers.

Still, there is a very curious detail of the December 2, 2010 announcement: Blatter completely bungles the year "2022." If you watch the video, he stumbles on the number just as he peers into the envelope to steal a glance at the winner. If it was all fixed, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. Still, you can see the quick flash across his face before the complete muffing of the year. "Two twenty-two," he says.

Let's go through the looking glass: Perhaps "two twenty-two" is a tiny, tremendously circumstantial shred of evidence that Blatter was just as shocked as everyone else, something he hinted at in a recent interview. "For the World Cups it was agreed that we go to Russia because it's never been in Russia, eastern Europe, and for 2022 we go back to America," he said.

Maybe, just maybe, Qatar was never a part of his plan, and for that fleeting moment, Blatter was like the rest of the world: dumbfounded, perplexed, worried for the future of his organization and for global soccer, afriad that this would be the nail in the coffin he had let others build for him and his life's work.

On the other hand, maybe his stumble is due to his imperfect English. Maybe, like awarding the 2022 World Cup to Qatar in the first place, it was a mistake.