Choosing Qatar to host a global party event like the World Cup was always going to be controversial and raise a number of questions. What were those involved hoping to achieve and where does football go from here?

With a shade over a week now passed of this most unusual World Cup – and over a third of the total games played – it certainly feels like no other major tournament, even as a viewer from a distance.

On the field, it has been the World Cup of shocks; landmark wins for Saudi Arabia and Japan against global heavyweights Argentina and Germany respectively, while other heavily-backed sides, such as Belgium and the Netherlands have yet to set the tournament alight as might have been expected.

France look strong, as do Brazil; Spain have started spectacularly with a 7-0 win while England have already scored six in one game as well as being outplayed in a 0-0 draw with the USA. Generally, the football has been ok – some really closely contested games, more goalless draws than you’d like but on the whole, not bad.

However, even with the football well underway and the tournament taking shape, this is still an event where the action on the field takes a back seat to the wider issues. Prior to the start of the tournament, it was impossible to avoid discussion and analysis of how we came to find ourselves gearing up for a winter World Cup in a tiny desert country with no history or tradition of football.

While the World Cup might not be the pinnacle of football any more thanks to the growth of the Champions League, Premier League and other major competitions in Europe, it still holds a special place in the heart of fans from all corners of the Earth. From a personal perspective, watching the World Cup was where my own passion and love for the game began – in 1990, aged just eight, I knew practically nothing about football, but took it to heart during that summer, watching England reach the semi finals and then discovering that there are lows to accompany the highs.

Eight years later, France ’98 came at a time when my own passion for football was probably as great as it ever would be. I loved that tournament and the players who lit it up – Davor Suker’s goals, Dennis Bergkamp’s winner against Argentina and Zinedine Zidane’s midfield artistry for the hosts. Even now, if I stop and think of a time where I most enjoyed and devoured football, it was that World Cup.

Unfortunately, it is that scale of universal appeal that makes football in general and specifically the World Cup such a valuable target for corporations, governments and individuals to launder their reputation. Both the current World Cup and the 2018 edition in Russia have been used cynically to achieve governmental goals, facilitated by FIFA, a governing body brought to its knees by a series of investigations and corruption allegations.

Both these two tournaments were awarded to their respective hosts in 2010 after ballots held by among FIFA’s Executive Committee. Watching the Netflix documentary FIFA Uncovered just before this World Cup started was illuminating, detailing the scale and depth of corruption among the halls of power in the governing body, where practically every major decision could be connected to illegal payments in order to grease the wheels and gain favour.

Winning the right to host the 2018 World Cup was a key element in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to stoke nationalism at home and develop a siege mentality among the populous. Alongside the country’s hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics, where Russia were subsequently exposed for running an industrial-scale doping programme, organising the World Cup went some way to cementing the country’s place on the global scene – while still annexing Crimea in 2014, which started the chain of events that led to this year’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Qatar’s motives for holding the 2022 World Cup are almost certainly less aggressive, but they are still surely rooted in political ends. Qatar is a small country in the Gulf with huge access to valuable energy resources but difficult relations with its near-neighbours, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Going back to before the decision was made to award Qatar the World Cup, the country’s ruling monarchy made a series of plays aimed at gaining a place among the world’s more established societies, most notably France and the UK, often through deals for arms and fossil fuels.

However, the country’s rulers also recognised sport as being an incredibly powerful way of improving their global reputation and fast-tracking a route to rubbing shoulders with the big boys. The country rapidly invested in facilities and overseas expertise through its Aspire academy, looking to provide local athletes with the resources and access to develop their skills and eventually compete with the best in the world.

Over time, those facilities have also played host to multiple global sports events, including the Asian Games and Athletics’ World Championships. Alongside this internal investment, Qatar have sought to gain profile globally by investing in sponsorships, shareholdings and ownerships of European sports giants – perhaps the best known being the purchase of Paris St-Germain in 2011 and multiple sponsorship deals through the state-owned Qatar Airways, including Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

The deal to buy PSG in particular has created many headlines for the country’s government, some positive and some negative. Through a sustained but haphazard strategy of signing some of the game’s best-known players at huge cost, including Neymar from Barcelona for a world-record fee and Kylian Mbappé from Monaco, a pair of deals that undoubtedly inflated the entire transfer market since, PSG have become something of a universal enemy in European football. They consistently win their domestic league by a large margin, while seeming to flounder at a continental level, much to the enjoyment of anyone disagreeing with The Project.

Reports have suggested that buying PSG and then pumping millions of dollars into the French domestic league through a television broadcast deal with Qatar’s state-owned broadcaster beIN Sport was part of a developing partnership between the two countries that went beyond sport. When Qatar Sports Investment (QSI), the vehicle handing out the money, secured the deal to buy the Paris club, it required the blessing of Michel Platini, former superstar of the French national team and then President of Europe’s governing body, UEFA, as well the Republic’s President at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Just a year previously, Platini, a member of FIFA’s Executive Committee and therefore instrumental in the voting for choosing a World Cup host in his role as head of European football, had surprised many onlookers by seemingly changing his mind at the very last moment and choosing Qatar over the USA, as he had been expected to do. Platini would go on to be banned from football administration for life following a series of unexplained payments from FIFA President Sepp Blatter, a judgement which continues to be contested by both.

When the ExCo chose Qatar to host the World Cup, it went against the recommendations of the organisation’s own experts, who felt that the country did not have the infrastructure to hold the competition and also that it would be impossible to play the tournament in its traditional June/July calendar slot.

Qatar is roughly the size of Devon and Cornwall combined with a total population of just under 3 million, which is approximately the same as Greater Manchester. Of those 3 million, around 76% live in the city of Doha, with much of the rest of the country being uninhabitable. In a typical July, the temperature rarely falls below 35° during the day and averages around 42°, meaning that a switch to a winter World Cup was always certain, despite the original plans of the organising committee. Eventually, FIFA decided to move the tournament to the winter in 2015.

Of the eight, air-conditioned stadiums being used for the World Cup, seven had to built from scratch and will mostly be demolished and sold off for parts when the tournament finishes. With roughly 1.5 million people visiting Doha for the tournament, this was likely to be an unprecedented level of influx for the country, which required the construction of hotels, a metro system, a port and a myriad of temporary accommodation. It would also require the complete remodelling of downtown Doha and the construction of effectively an entire new city in the shape of Lusail, the district which will eventually host the World Cup final.

In total, the construction projects required to facilitate the World Cup are estimated to have cost $220 billion dollars – more than all the previous World Cups and Summer Olympics combined, such is the scale of the work needed to host this event.

To complete all that work in such a short space of time and with such a small population, it should come as no surprise that the country has needed to import practically the entirety of its workforce, at immense human cost – it is thought that 6,500 migrant workers have died during this project, with zero compensation for their families. While the controversial Kafala scheme for controlling migrant workers has been repealed during this time, there are still many questions being asked about the rights of those involved in building this World Cup and the lives lost along the way.

As a conservative, Muslim country, Qatar has strict laws in place regarding, amongst other things, consuming alcohol, homosexuality and women’s rights. As the world’s most popular sport, football is enjoyed all over the globe in a variety of different ways and is open to everyone, regardless of race, religion or sexual preference. Choosing to bring the World Cup to a country like Qatar creates a problem in this respect – as FIFA have tried to maintain in the run up to the tournament, everyone is welcome to visit and watch the tournament, but you will need to respect the local laws while doing so. That’s fine, but in a country where it is illegal to be homosexual, you are effectively asking people to be something they’re not in order to watch some football.

The sale and consumption of alcohol is also an issue, even if perhaps not quite so at odds with individuals’ fundamental existence. Having a beer at or before the football isn’t quite a right, but it is an essential ingredient in many fans’ matchday experience. Add to that the last-minute change of plan from the organisers to ban the sale of alcohol from stadium perimeter areas, and you get a sense that this is a country whose values are very much at odds with much of what makes up a typical football match event.

Perhaps if these things and these people go so strongly against the laws of a country and the beliefs of its people that your visitors must change their behaviours and hide their identities, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to invite them in the first place.

Prior to the tournament, the scale and number of investigative reports into the Qatar government’s approaches to human rights and what might lie in store for visiting fans went through the roof, with players and teams planning to show their support for those affected (often through minimal-effort gestures, in all fairness). On the eve of the first game, we saw the bizarre press conference from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, where he attempted to show empathy for all those groups affected, but ultimately drew a parallel between racial abuse and having freckles while also suggesting that Europeans should spend 3,000 years thinking about their own nations’ past crimes before questioning how Qatar treats people today.

And don’t forget the last-minute decision to threaten players with unlimited sanctions if they chose to wear the unauthorised One Love armband in support of LGBTQ+ rights.

Weighing all of this up makes the decisions taken to arrive at a World Cup in Qatar look questionable at best. This is a country with no history or tradition of football and no real experience of tourism on the scale needed for a major tournament. It is a traditional and conservative country with laws rooted in religion that clash with the culture and nature of football and its supporter base.

In order to bring the tournament to Qatar, it has required changes to the global footballing calendar that will take multiple seasons to unravel, impacting the players involved by adding travel and playing time to their schedules, risking burnout and injury, while leaving players not taking part in the tournament without games for a month.

The scale, size and cost of hosting a World Cup – or Olympics, for that matter – has spiralled beyond the reach of most nations in recent times. It’s no surprise that we now live in a time where the only countries capable of hosting a major sporting event on their own seem to either be controlled by a dictator with an agenda to serve or a petrostate with bottomless pockets (or maybe a government willing to saddle its people with near-eternal debt to service). In future, there surely needs to be a re-think of how major sports events operate and how to make them accessible to more nations.

In the meantime, we’re stuck with the conflicting emotions created by the Qatar World Cup. Obviously we love the action, the football and the drama it brings. There is a purity to international football, protected, to a degree, from the financial disparity that taints the club game and brings a very different spectacle where success cannot just be bought, even if the tournaments themselves seemingly can be.

We want new memories to be made, both for ageing fossils like me and for the next generation of fans so they can forever treasure their own versions of Italia ’90 or France ’98. But we surely cannot allow the sport’s governing bodies to again sell out the game’s crown jewel for their own benefits and for the sportswashing agendas of governments, like it has with this edition.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no way that Qatar should have been chosen to host this World Cup – the financial and human cost of essentially building an entire host venue practically from scratch is not sustainable in any way and can only leave a negative legacy for everyone involved. Not to mention the environmental impact of all those air-conditioned stadiums and flying fans in and out of the country to watch their teams in action.

So on we go, watching the football while placing asterisks next to everything we see. It’s hard to imagine that this is the impact the Qatari government and its people wanted from welcoming the world to its door.