Letter from Doha: Fifa learning they may not be in control of this World Cup

The constant criticism of the Australian captain and keeper Ryan, ironically, has been that he’s just not tall enough for the elite levels of the game. The version of him that appears here along Al Corniche, the crescent-shaped road and pedestrian parkway that hugs Doha’s bay, is 12 storeys high. If the Socceroos do nothing else at this World Cup — a highly likely prospect to be fair — then at least this giant incarnation of Ryan was providing merciful shade to the dozens of workers below him on Friday morning.

They were doing a bit of everything it seemed: fixing some lights, drilling some holes, lugging some wheelbarrows and hammering away at something. It may have been literal bells and whistles actually. All the way along the Corniche, with the empty wooden dhow boats bobbing on the harbour walls, the migrant workers pierced the morning air with the noises of last-minuteness. Qatar is still scrambling all the way to Sunday. Mostly with decorative elements, installations and unnecessary additional layers of fencing and signage and clutter. The little stuff.

But sometimes the big stuff too.

An eye-waveringly overpriced Budweiser should never have found itself bracketed as ‘the big stuff’ but here we are. Here, in this scorched place that is one of the most water-stressed countries on the planet, it was a pissy, bland-as-bathwater Bud that got everyone worked up. Why? Because of what the pint represented.

Qatar’s ability to rewrite and just rip up the rules has been going on for a dozen years now. Twelve bloody years, in which they sacrificed the bodies of migrants in the building out of their absurd promise. Twelve years to make decisions on something as, sure, morally tricky but ultimately pretty simple as when and where the Budweisers will be sold. And yet on the eve of the tournament and with the masses landing at a rapid rate as the Qatar Airways planes descended over the workers and the bay all morning, they reneged on another promise.

The worry, as expressed so succinctly by the Football Supporters Alliance, was not the beer but “if they can change their minds on this at a moment’s notice…supporters will have understandable concerns about whether they will fulfil other promises relating to accommodation, transport or cultural issues”.

So, while the VIPs and the Fifa executive class will continue to enjoy booze in the stadium suites, including Fifa’s own brand of champagne, the alternative for those in the cheap seats will be a non-alcoholic Bud Zero, of course not itself cheap at €8 a pop. On the menus displayed at the Fifa Fan Festival on Wednesday, when it was still very much the secondary option, the tagline beside Bud Zero read: “Drink wiser. Cheer better.” No choice now lads, cheer better.

It’s a mess. And yet in so many ways it’s all that Fifa have craved. World Cups and to a greater extent Olympic Games, are such peculiar spectacles. Planet Fifa or IOC landing down and doing their best to take over a country or city before raking in the profits and just as suddenly departing, leaving the host to herd the white elephants.

Criss-crossing Doha the past few days it has struck that this was something new: Planet Fifa built from scratch for them. No need to try to conquer resistant corners of a resistant citadel, the Emir and ruling family have helped fulfil Gianni Infantino’s wildest dreams. A blank canvass for marketing and making millions. As he again learned Friday afternoon, when the local powers adopted a ‘what are you going to do, cancel the World Cup?’ stance, this has all come at a cost. Control ain’t what it used to be. A significant amount of it looks to be in Qatari hands.

One of the most striking things about Qatar is how few Qataris there are. The numbers are out there to be read and digested: the population sits a little under three million people but just 330,000 of them are Qatari, the remainder migrants. For context that number would put Qatar fifth in the list of Irish counties by population, nestled between Down and Galway.

The Guardian’s Saturday Magazine did a genuinely lovely feature last week on ex-pat kids across England who will be cheering for the country of their birth or heritage at the World Cup, photographing them in their country’s kit. The majority were young with a one or two in their very early teens. The Qatari entrant was 22.

It feels that way here. Conversations with Moroccans, people from India or Egypt have been friendly and fascinating. And frequent. But meeting and greeting Qataris in daily interactions? We’re working on it but for now: rare.

Rarely can FIFA have so desperately craved kickoff, which ironically, was also unilaterally moved forward by the Qatari royal family. There’s no guarantee that the issues will dissipate. Those lights and bells and whistles on the Corniche might be all hung up by Sunday morning but there’s a real tournament to begin and so many venues and systems here have yet to be given any kind of stress test. Sunday night will tell a lot. But kickoff will bring indeed relief.

That’s because the bewitching beauty of a World Cup is something that remains inevitable. Tommy Martin wrote movingly in the Examiner this week about the “bit of that golden trophy that remains untarnished even after all the filth”. That’s the bit that only begins on Sunday night. And while it may be expecting too much for the host nation and Ecuador, two of the four lowest-ranked teams in the tournament, to provide that beauty, they may just. And, either way, it will arrive eventually and often. It’s inevitable.

But it’s also without question that it cannot redeem the game’s powerbrokers to the same degree that it did in Russia or Brazil or in those other darkest of World Cups — Argentina in 1978 and Italy in 1934. Nothing could.

By late afternoon the sun was rapidly dropping down into the desert behind the towers of Doha. The days may still be in the mid-30s in this winter World Cup which the host nation has contorted to fit into its terrain and climate. But the nights close in quickly here, sunset begins around 4.45pm in mid-November.

Mat Ryan’s help was no longer needed but they were still there, fixing and drilling and lugging and lifting. Some of the newly arranged light fixtures were beginning to glimmer as buses whirred past with new arrivals. Qatar, with all its power to write its own rules, and the money to have others do all of its work, will be ready for the world. The world had better be ready to never forget how we got here and what it cost. A whole lot more than a €12 Budweiser.

Time for football and some beauty. Badly needed.