Speaker 1: The World Cup and Qatar this year was preceded by years and years of controversy, charges of shameless corruption, and mistreatment of migrant workers, but then the games finally began. Staff Writer, Sam Knight reported for us on the tournament.
Sam Knight: The first 10 days of the World Cup in Qatar was soccer as it is, rather than as you want it to be. It was venal, closed, and transactional. I saw some terrific goals. I drank Coke and paid with my Visa card. I lined up for the Adidas store. Everything was brand new, air-conditioned, and covered in an almost invisible layer of pale desert dust.
Speaker 1: Sam just got back from Qatar and he shared some of his impressions from on the ground and in the stands.
Sam Knight: This was my first World Cup, yes. Grown up with the tournament, watching it on tv, but this was the first time I'd ever traveled to see it in person. There was something about this particular edition in Qatar, which was just irresistible to try and explore. The whole world was in Qatar because you did feel like you were shifted somewhere else on the world's axis, and the center of this tournament was the Middle East and the Arab-speaking world.
You'd go to the souq in Doha, there'd be the cult prayer as you walked to a game or as you came out. It rang to Moroccan fans, and Tunisian fans, and Saudi fans, and Qatari fans. Literally, a billion or more people in a different way and in a way that made it feel like their own. This was a very tame, and well-behaved, and moderate sporting event. I went to Argentina, Saudi Arabia, which was one of the most exciting early matches in the tournament, and there were thousands of Argentinian fans, and there were tens of thousands of Saudi fans.
If you're a reporter at one of these things, you have your own desk, so you sit at your desk, and then during the game, you write down at your little table what's happening. Then at halftime, I'd go out and mingle in the stadium concourse and wander up to people and have conversations with them. One of the people that I spent a bit of time with was a young Qatari guy called Ali.
It was fascinating chatting to Ali about his parent's feelings before the family went to the opening game, this fear that maybe some soccer fans would come to the World Cup and they just wouldn't leave afterwards. The Qataris to varying degrees were terrified of the influx. Families installed security cameras and checked their window locks. In the days before the World Cup, social media filled with prayers and stoic messages for the test ahead.
The idea of a million soccer fans descending from all corners of the world was terrifying to people who like things to be extremely orderly and organized. I'm a football fan. I'm English. I grew up in London. In English stadiums, it is an immediate sense, memory overload of cigarette smoke, fried food, alcohol, and unbearable language, and a tinge of danger. That was different in Qatar.
It was safer. It was more polite. It was very welcoming in lots of ways. I also had a really good chat on Zoom one day with a young Qatari woman called Asma. She was a mad soccer fan. She was a big Real Madrid fan. She was saying, "I want to get out into Doha and capture the atmosphere, but you know what, there's so many games on tv. I'm just tied to my TV at the moment." She was just absolutely absorbed in it.
Announcer: All but condemned Germany to a second straight hoop stage exit and here comes Morata. Spain got the breakthrough.
Sam Knight: She'd followed the reporting in the buildup to the tournament in great detail and felt honestly confused by how Qatar didn't seem to be able to do anything right. The fact that Dubai, a popular destination for European soccer players and their clubs, didn't seem to attract the same ethical scrutiny drove her crazy. "They go to Dubai and they love Dubai," Asma said.
"They don't care about migrant workers there. They love to take pictures of Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, but they don't care about the people who build Burj Khalifa." It just gets very confusing from an Arab perspective, very, very, very confusing. I think for Qatari people, they literally watched this evolving storyline of how awful they were, and it started with them being the corrupt people who paid for the World Cup.
Then it moved on to the way that migrant workers were treated, and they just felt like to use a soccer expression, the goalposts were shifting every time. It is the frankness of the Qatari system more than its inequity that is unusual. This is a common and almost universal setup. That's what Natasha [unintelligible 00:06:12], a migration scholar at New York University told me.
She said, "And this is one of the reasons that we're all implicated in the system. It's not the Qataris behaving badly, it is us as a global community, really having to confront what it looks like when you rely utterly on a system that deprives people of rights beyond their economic function." I think having been to this World Cup will make me experience the sport a bit differently now, just to have been shifted on my axis a bit.
It's to see a sport that you've known and followed through your whole life from a particular angle really knowing and seeing these games play out in a very different place is something really meaningful and it's happened now so it can happen again.
Speaker 1: Sam Knight's full story At Qatar's World Cup, Where Politics and Pleasure Collide is at newyorker.com.
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