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Gianni Infantino had promised this would be the greenest World Cup ever. “(We) aim to make the Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022 carbon neutral”, he said in a video posted on Fifa’s YouTube channel on 5 June 2022, to coincide with World Environment Day.
As a signatory of the UN Convention on Climate Change’s Sports for Climate Action Framework, whose stated ambition is to achieve Net Zero by 2040, world football’s governing body would actually be ahead of that timetable if it managed to organise the first-ever carbon neutral global sports event.
According to Fifa’s assessment, Qatar had “pledged to mitigate and offset all of the tournament’s greenhouse gas emissions, while advancing low-carbon solutions in Qatar and the region”.
How this could be achieved was far from obvious. Preliminary analysis done by carbon finance consultancy SouthPole (*) at the behest of the organisers and Fifa estimated that the Qatar World Cup would generate a total of 3.6 megatons of CO2, 1.5 megatons more than Russia 2018, the equivalent of the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by Iceland over a whole year. This took into account the emissions generated by the construction of the infrastructure needed to host the tournament, which included the building from scratch of seven stadiums and the renovation of an eighth.
Not everyone was convinced by SouthPole’s arithmetics. For independent environmental assessors such as Carbon Market Watch, this represented a wild under-estimate of the actual impact of the tournament, which their researchers said could reach ten times that.
One reason for that was that Fifa’s and Qatar’s calculations predicted a 60-year lifespan for the stadiums, when the World Cup would only last for 30 days, 19 more could be added for the hosting of the 2019 and 2021 Fifa Club World Cups. Seven of these eight stadiums would also be used when Qatar hosted the 2024 AFC Asian Cup. That’s another 30 days, 79 days in total. Then what?
The world was assured that plans were in place to make sure that the colossal “zero-waste” venues built to welcome players, officials and fans in November and December 2022 would not be left to rot in the sun, as so many reminders of 21st century sport succumbing to folie des grandeurs, a ruinous white elephants graveyard.
Some sections of some of the stadiums were to be removed, recycled or donated to less privileged countries. Two of the new arenas, Al Janoub and Ahmad bin Ali, would be resized in order to accommodate Al Wakrah and al Rayyan, clubs which play in the Qatar Stars League, the country’s top division.
Another would be put at the disposal of the Qatari women’s national team. The spectacular Stadium 974, built using disused containers, would be dismantled and offered – gratis – to another nation.
That was then. So how is it now?
Empty or Deserted stadiums
The Education City Stadium, which hosted eight World Cup matches, had been earmarked to become the home of Qatar women’s national football team, once its upper tier had been removed and its capacity had been reduced from 40,000 to 20,000 spectators.
The stadium has been used since the World Cup, most notably for community events involving female athletes and for hosting Qatar’s National Sports Day as well as four games of the 2023 Asian Cup and the final of the 2024 Amir Cup.
But as of September 2024, there still is no such thing as a Qatar women’s national football team. While there are girls and women who play football in the emirate (at the academy of Qatari-owned French club Paris Saint-Germain FC, for example), its national women’s team took part in its last official game on 19 April 2014, when it was defeated 2-8 by Bahrain at an international tournament held in Jordan.
The “unofficial friendly” which took place between “Qatar” and “Afghanistan” in an empty Khalifa International Stadium in November 2021 did not feature AFC or Fifa-recognised teams. This 10 year period of inactivity means that the Qatar women’s national team is no longer ranked by Fifa. In other words, it no longer exists.
The Qatar Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy did not reply specifically to questions about the future of the Qatar Women’s National Football Team – if it has one.
“The Education City Stadium is being transformed into a hub for girls and women to play sports and for hosting events geared towards improving both the physical and mental health of women”, it said in a statement.
What of the clubs, then?
Though official attendance statistics for the Qatar Stars League are not available, footage of recent games played by the two clubs which moved into World Cup venues in August 2023, Al Wakrah and Al Rayyan, show swathes of empty seats and whole sections of the stadium which are deserted – a far cry from the record crowd of 28,397 which attended Al Rayyan’s 1-0 win over Al Arabi at the outset of the 2023-24 season.
It doesn’t look as if staging two Club World Cups, one Asian Cup and one World Cup on Qatari soil in the space of five years has triggered the mass enthusiasm for the game which the Supreme Committee must have hoped for.
The last available attendance figures date from the 2016-17 season, when the average crowd at a Qatar Stars League game was a disappointing 672 – only a fraction more than the number of spectators who watch England’s Northern Premier League, the seventh tier of the English football pyramid.
Yet those stadiums must be looked after. The pitches must be watered and kept trim. The lights must be switched on, even if nobody’s in the room, in a country where 99% of electricity is generated by fossil-fuelled power stations. A sixty-year lifespan, maybe, but what a miserable life it’ll be.
