The Emirate’s planners are promising the first ‘carbon-neutral’ World Cup and then Fifa realises it does gets hot in those parts…
Three years ago, to secure the organisation of the 2022 Football World Cup, the small but extremely wealthy state of Qatar promised the International Football Federation (FIFA), and the entire world, the impossible.
They proposed to host the most ecological – and the first supposedly entirely carbon-neutral – edition in the history of football, in the desert.
This may seem like an oxymoron considering that in order to play matches in an oven such as the Persian Gulf, where summer temperatures swing dangerously towards the 50°C mark, the stadiums will have to be transformed into air-conditioned bubbles in order to make the climate bearable for players and paying public alike.
Former Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani saw it instead as a formidable challenge and an equally formidable geopolitical marketing operation to show the West that for Sheiks, nothing is impossible, as the Adidas slogan goes.
How the FIFA delegates who selected the 2022 host country were then overcome by an unforeseeable bout of environmentalism, or perhaps struck by the surreal image of 22 players being chased around a pitch by an artificial refrigeration cloud fed by the sun, remains a mystery.
If anything the choice was primarily opposed by those directly involved. “Breathing, playing and living in that heat? You must be crazy!” was the response of the International Football Players Union.
To make the impossible possible, the technical consultants of the vastly wealthy Arab Emirate have designed green stadiums of the future in the sand. Air-conditioned, open-air facilities fuelled by a system of photovoltaic solar panels laid on top and all around the stadiums. Everything is highly modular, eco-sustainable and collapsible, so that once the tournament is over it can all be passed on to more needy countries.
In the meantime, Emirate planners say, average temperatures will be kept at 27°C on the pitch and stands without leaving any carbon footprint; without any environmental cost in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. The World Cup will be concentrated in seven cities within a 60 km radius, with a metro that takes you everywhere and the waste produced by visiting fans will be managed with great efficiency. It will all be wonderful, it will all be perfect.
Football was first exported to the Gulf in 1940 by British workers doing stints on oil platforms off the Qatar coast. Seventy years later, Qatar investors control two of the richest clubs in Europe, Paris Saint Germain and Manchester City, while Al Jazeera is already prepared to buy the television rights to the most important leagues on the old continent (they already own the exclusive rights to live French football). Not much larger than an English county or Connecticut, the Emirate floats on a sea of crude oil and owns vast fields of natural gas. It may be the smallest country to host a World Cup, but it’s also the richest, at least in relation to its size.
Forecasts on the possible depletion of the reserves of black gold, which in the coming decades may force the Persian Gulf state to become an energy importer, seem to have convinced the reigning al-Thani dynasty to earmark almost unlimited funds for reconversion and investment in alternative energies, of which the 2022 sun-cooled stadiums would represent the vanguard. However, some scepticism on this issue does still linger.
A number of financial analysts actually doubt Qatar’s intentions to invest in renewable energies, while studies by academics and environmental organisations have contested the actual sustainability of an air-conditioned World Cup.
The reason for this is that though it may not seem so, football’s carbon footprint is massive. Watering a beautiful playing surface such as Barcelona’s Nou Camp on a sunny day requires up to 54,000 litres of water. Eight million plastic bottles accumulate on the Manchester City stands every year – although the club claims that it recycles as many as 90% of them with the help of the fans. In 2010, the carbon footprint of the South African World Cup was eight times greater than the one in Germany four years earlier.
Last summer, a cosmic dilemma over the ecological sustainability of the Qatar World Cup suddenly started to haunt the man who’d always played it down, FIFA President Joseph Blatter. Perhaps because he wondered about the health of the most highly paid athletes in the world, or the risk of legal actions by clubs in the event of physical problems due to the summer heat in the region.
“You cannot play [football] in summer in Qatar”, he now admits. Welcome, therefore, to the first winter World Cup – or maybe autumn or Arab Spring.
Because the clubs of the main European leagues, which are historically loath to change the rites and rituals of its sport unless it’s in their immediate interest, are firmly against turning the Champions League and national championship schedules on their heads. Blatter assures that a solution will be found. In Germany and in most of Eastern Europe, the leagues have always suspended play over the winter. The countries in the southern hemisphere, on the other hand, are very much looking forward to their first summer World Cup. While in Brazil they’re swearing that theirs will be the first eco-friendly World Cup in history, less than a year from now.
Down in the Gulf they have no doubts: the event will be ‘cool’ and it will happen, and that’s all there is to it. Bora Milutinovic, the cheerful dugout gypsy who has trained five different clubs at five different World Cups and has been taken on as a personal consultant by the Emir, waves the issue away. “The heat? It won’t be a problem, trust me”, he assures. “They even manage to cool your thoughts down here”.
