Among the many controversial subjects relating to the 2022 World Cup, the main one surrounds the conditions for awarding the tournament to Qatar in 2010. This question has been the subject of several media and legal inquiries.
The Qatargate earthquake
On December 2, 2010 in Zurich, the FIFA Executive Committee entrusted the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar to the detriment of the United States by 14 votes to 8 in the fourth round of voting. The choice of the small Emirate, a demographic and footballing dwarf, came as a huge surprise, especially since, as ex-FIFA President Sepp Blatterlikes to recall it in each interview on the subject, Qatar possessed “the worst technical application file“, with in particular almost non-existent infrastructures. How the hell then did he inherit the competition?
In January 2013, the magazine France Soccerknown and respected throughout the world as the originator of the Ballon d’Or, publishes a shocking investigation showing not evidence of corruption, but “a bundle of clues that suggests that Qatar was able to be generous with the right peopleto curry favor with the FIFA Executive Committee.
The famous Elysée dinner
At the heart of the suspicions is the famous lunch held at the Elysée Palace on November 23, 2010, just nine days before the vote. Present are Nicolas Sarkozy, then President of the Republic in France, Michel Platini, at the time omnipotent President of UEFA and member of the Executive Committee of FIFA, but also the Qatari Crown Prince of the time Tamim Hamad al-Thani and Qatari Prime Minister Hamad Ben Jassem.
Did France help Qatar to obtain the football world cup in exchange for compensation? Everything would have been played during a dinner at the Elysée in 2010 with Nicolas Sarkozy. A joint investigation by the Investigation Unit and Complément d’Enquête on France 2. pic.twitter.com/ftJbehsewO
– France Inter (@franceinter) October 13, 2022
Many suspect Sarkozy of having played matchmaker between the Qataris and Platini, who was one of the voters for the award and who is believed to have some influence over three other European voters (Cypriot Marios Lefkaritis, Spaniard Angel Maria Villar and the Turkish Senes Erzik). At first reluctant to the candidacy of Qatar, “Platoche” would have changed his mind following this dinner. “History has shown that the intervention of the French presidency on a member of the FIFA executive committee changed the vote“, released Blatter in the show Further Investigation last October 13. “I thought I understood that France would be happy if I voted for Qatar, but no one ever asked me anything“Admitted in 2014 Platini, before tempering. “There was no possibility of influencing me on anything. (…) Many people knew that I was going to vote for Qatar.»
In fact, each of the participants in this dinner will have found their account. First, Qatar, of course, with the awarding of the World Cup, possibly following the intervention of Platini. On the other hand, Sarkozy, supporter of Paris Saint-Germain and friend of Sébastien Bazin, then representative of Colony Capital, which owned and sought to sell the capital club. Everyone knows the rest of the story, Qatar will buy PSG in 2011, for a price of 64 million euros that several experts, like businessman Luc Dayan, consider disproportionate. Sarkozy would not be foreign to it and he would have been amply rewarded for this “service” rendered to his friend.
“The Sarkozy father and son were later paid by Accor, when Sébastien Bazin became the boss of the hotel group in 2014“, added recently Mediapart. “It wasn’t me who told Tamim to buy PSG or Sébastien Bazin to sell PSG“, denied for his part the ex-head of state in 2018 for The Evening Team. Another suspected consideration: Qatar’s purchase from France of 24 Rafale fighter jets for an XXL contract of 6 billion euros, which would have followed this dinner, even if Sarkozy will not be able to finalize the deal, which will ultimately be concluded by his successor François Hollande in 2015. Finally, on the Platini side, following a note found during a search of the premises of Colony Capital, some are wondering about the concomitance between this dinner and the appointment, in April 2011, of his son, Laurent Platini, as director of the Qatari equipment manufacturer Burrda Sport, a subsidiary of the Qatar Sport Investment fund, which owns PSG…
The role of Mohamed Bin Hammam
Almighty president of the Asian Football Confederation between 2002 and 2011, the Qatari Mohamed Bin Hammam was expelled for life by FIFA in 2012 for acts of corruption during the presidential election of the body in 2011. But the leader would have previously played a key role in the awarding of the World Cup. Presented by The world as “the great architect of victory at the Emirate’s ballot boxes» but also a «great corrupter“, he would have spent more than five million dollars for the leaders of world football to vote for Qatar, accused the Sunday Times. Bin Hammam would notably have rallied the votes of the members of Concacaf (Confederation of North America, Central America and the Caribbean).
Beyond the Elysée dinner and Bin Hammam, the German media Picture revealed in 2017 that a “former executive member of FIFA congratulated members of the Qatari Federation and thanked them by email for a transfer of several hundred thousand eurosa few days after the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar. According to the same source,three FIFA executive members with voting rights (Brazilian Ricardo Teixeira, Argentinian Julio Grondona and Paraguayan Nicolas Leoz) went to a party in Rio on a private Qatar Football Federation jet ahead of the vote for the awarding of the competition”.
Judicial inquiries
Inevitably, after such revelations, judicial inquiries were opened in several countries. In France, after three years of preliminary investigation, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office launched a judicial investigation in 2019 into the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, but no indictment has been pronounced so far. Ditto for the surveys carried out in Switzerland and the United States.
For its part, FIFA conducted an internal investigation through the president of the investigative chamber of its ethics committee, Michael J. Garcia, who in 2014 submitted a 400-page report on the conditions of attribution. of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. While the document highlighted “problems, serious and far-reaching, in the application and selection processof these two competitions, Garcia resigned a few months later, accusing the executive committee of having opted for a biased reading of his work.
Moreover, FIFA had chosen to keep this report secret, until being forced to publish it in 2017 after a part leaked in the columns of the German newspaper Picture. Despite “suspicious behavior“, the governing body of the round ball had estimated, that on reading this report, there was nothing to question the attribution of the 2018 and 2022 editions…
