The Ugly Game: The Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup Read online

  The foreign riggers brought with them their love of football, and the game they played all along the shore and on patches of scrub throughout the city began to catch the attention of the local population. By 1950, when Mohamed was just reaching his first birthday, Qatar’s first amateur football team, Al-Najah, was formed. It fell to the Qatar Petroleum Company to organise the country’s inaugural football competition – the Ezz Eddin Tournament in Dukhan – in 1951. The Qatar Football Association was set up almost a decade later in 1960, when Mohamed was 11, and when he turned 21, in 1970, the country’s national association was finally recognised by FIFA.

  By the time Bin Hammam had grown into a smart young entrepreneur in his early twenties, the country’s fortunes were transformed. Qatar threw off the yoke of British protection in 1971 and the ruling Al Thani family took full control of oil operations, cranking up the extraction of the country’s energy reserves, pouring the massive revenues into the swelling coffers of its sovereign wealth fund and setting the Gulf state on a fast track to becoming one of the world’s richest countries. Bin Hammam’s own company, Kemco, was founded in the same year the oil industry was nationalised, 1974, when he was just 25. With the oil money flooding in, building projects were mushrooming all over town, and the young businessman grabbed the opportunity. Kemco began life as an electro-mechanical engineering firm, with the tools and talent required to help build the glass skyscrapers erupting all along the West Bay waterfront. With each new development that sprang up along the shore where he’d watched the oil workers play as a boy, Bin Hammam’s bank balance expanded. Before long he was a millionaire.

  For all that business was booming, Bin Hammam still found plenty of time to pursue his childhood passion. Aged just 18, Bin Hammam had fallen for a local girl and decided to get married, abandoning any boyish hopes of a playing career. Instead, in the early 1970s he took up the mantle of running Al Rayyan football club – nicknamed the Lions – which had been formed only a few years before as an amateur team run out of a two-bed house in Rayyan town. In 1972 the Qatar Stars League was formalised, and Al Rayyan played in its first season. Bin Hammam proved a talented manager, and he would steer his Lions to multiple championship titles in the QSL during his presidency, all the while keeping a firm hand on the Kemco tiller.

  Rayyan was the home town of Qatar’s ruling Emir, Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani, and Bin Hammam’s transformation of the shambolic local side into a winning team did not go unnoticed. This dapper businessman with his love of the foreign game of football particularly caught the eye of Qatar’s heir apparent, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, himself an ambitious youth with western sensibilities. Three years Bin Hammam’s junior and fresh out of Sandhurst, the young royal had come back to Qatar with all the polish of a British education and big ideas about what his country could achieve. He remembered Bin Hammam as a local boy from his early school years in Doha, before he had crossed the waters to pursue his education in England, and he liked what the self-made multi-millionaire was doing with Kemco and Al Rayyan now.

  Sheikh Hamad was a tall man with shoulders like granite boulders and a forbidding military moustache. He hurtled up the ranks of Qatar’s emerging military to become commander-in-chief at the age of 25, and took charge of the Supreme Planning Council, which sets the country’s economic and social policies, in the early 1980s. Qatar was getting seriously rich, but Sheikh Hamad believed it was not powering forward quickly enough. He wanted his Gulf homeland to become a truly modern country. The crown prince was a keen sportsman who had observed the power of football to unite a nation during his education in Britain. He saw the galvanising potential of the game Bin Hammam loved. The pair became as close to being friends as an ordinary boy of African descent can with a member of the Qatari royal family. Bin Hammam sat with his head bowed in reverence when Sheikh Hamad was in the room – but when he was invited to speak, the crown prince listened.

  With the patronage of the royals came certain special privileges, and Kemco began to win more and more major state contracts. It wasn’t long before the millions in the bank became billions, and Bin Hammam was one of the richest men in town. By 1992 he had climbed to the top of the Qatari football ladder too, becoming the president of the country’s football association. In his first year at the helm, he arranged for Qatar to host the Gulf Cup of Nations and steered the country’s national team to victory in the tournament.

  By now, Sheikh Hamad was getting restless. His father, the Emir Sheikh Khalifa, had presided over impressive economic growth since he took power after independence, but he was a traditionalist who favoured a stately pace of change. Sheikh Hamad didn’t have that kind of patience. Sheikh Khalifa had handed him a growing portfolio of royal responsibilities, including control over the country’s oil and gas development programme, but not enough to satiate his thirst for power. By 1995, the crown prince was ready to make his lunge. He waited until his father was away on holiday in Geneva before seizing control of the Amiri Diwan Palace with the backing of the rest of the royal family. Next, he hired an American law firm to freeze his father’s international bank accounts and head off any countermoves the old Emir might try to make. The coup was bloodless, but the crown prince had shown he had ice in his veins by freezing his father out of Doha. Sheikh Khalifa endured a decade of exile in France and Abu Dhabi before being allowed to return home in 2004.

  With the old guard out of the way, Sheikh Hamad’s power in Qatar was absolute and he could begin the rapid modernisation he had been dreaming of for years. Under the rule of the new Emir, Qatar’s natural gas production would soar to 77 million tonnes per year. By 2008, Qatar’s gross domestic product had reached $84,812 per capita – making it the world’s richest country – and 76.8 per cent of that wealth came from oil and gas. But Sheikh Hamad wanted his nation to become so much more than just an energy-rich Gulf statelet, and he knew he needed to shore up Qatar’s position in the world for a future when the mineral reserves finally ran out. He intended to position Qatar as a major global power extending its financial, political and cultural tentacles all around the globe. Property, the arts, industry, media, sport, education – these were the building blocks of a truly modern nation.

  So Sheikh Hamad would set up the Qatar Investment Authority to spread $100 billion of the country’s sovereign wealth internationally. He would turn the Gulf state into a crucial strategic partner of the US government in the Middle East, allowing his new American allies to construct two regionally pivotal military bases on Qatari soil and inviting several world-class US universities to open campuses in Doha. He founded the Arabic news network Al Jazeera in 1996 and later established the Qatar Museums Authority which transformed the country into the world’s biggest contemporary art buyer. And then he would turn his attention to sport. He knew that global glory and prestige attaches to no one like it does to the world’s sports superstars. He wanted to transform Qatar into the international sporting capital of the 21st century.

  The Emir set about assembling a group of trusted favourites to help him steer Qatar into its glittering future, and his old friend Bin Hammam was an obvious choice to help him realise his sporting ambitions. The billionaire football lover was given a seat on the Emir’s 35-man advisory council – his Majlis Al Shura – charged with deliberating on new laws, economic and social policy, cultural development and the general glorification of Qatar.

  Bin Hammam had ascended to the very highest echelons of Qatari society that it was possible to reach without royal blood. Charm, nous and determination had carried him a long way from his modest origins, but he could never escape his ancestry altogether. The other courtiers were jealous of this outsider’s newfound status and as he passed between the colonnades of the vast white palace on the Corniche, he could hear their whispers. They called him ‘The Slave’. However high he climbed, however limitless his fortune, Bin Hammam would always be an interloper in the upper reaches of Qatari society, where pure Arab blood was the only true mark of nobility. He wo
uld always be looking over his shoulder; always anxious to jump higher than all the other favourites to please the Emir; always striving for the chance to really put himself and his family on the map of Qatar forever.

  By the time he reached his late forties, Bin Hammam was a super-rich businessman who ruled over Qatari football and held a coveted place in the inner sanctum of the Amiri Diwan Palace – but he wanted more. Determined to shore up his status at home and prove his worth on an international stage, he ran for election to the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation – the body which controlled every member association across the continent from its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur – and won. It was 1996, the same year Bin Hammam joined the Emir’s advisory council, and now he had transcended Qatari football to take a powerful position at the helm of the Asian game. It wasn’t enough. Next, he extended his gaze far past the Doha city gates, and beyond all of Asia, to the distant European kingdom of FIFA. There was no higher place in football. FIFA dictated the rules of the game and was the keeper of soccer’s most sought-after prize, the 18-carat gold World Cup trophy. All the star players that Bin Hammam had so admired in his youth had adorned this glittering tournament. It was the greatest show on earth.

  The Fédération Internationale de Football Association controls the beautiful game from its hilltop headquarters in the Swiss city of Zurich. The World Cup is the biggest and best-loved sporting tournament on the planet, and FIFA sweeps the hundreds of millions of dollars that flow in from marketing, sponsorship deals and TV rights into its vast reserves. World football’s governing body is controlled by an elite cabal of two dozen men who fly into Zurich from the far-flung corners of the world to meet in secrecy and call the shots on the sport. While FIFA’s congress, with a representative from each national football federation, met once a year and voted in the president every four, the ruling executive committee (Exco) of 24 men took many of the most important decisions including which country should host the World Cup. Bin Hammam wanted to be part of their club. He ran for election onto the executive committee in 1996, the same year he ascended to the Emir’s advisory council and the AFC, and his winning streak continued. The Qatari football-lover took his place around FIFA’s boardroom table and joined in the running of the international game.

  This was a very long way from Doha’s sandy desert pitches and the gleaming corridors of the Diwan Palace. FIFA was a brave new world where creed and colour were no bar to prestige and recognition. Here, as Bin Hammam would quickly discover, those things were up for sale to the highest bidder.

  Six years on, the delegates at FIFA’s 53rd annual congress in Seoul, South Korea, were sipping their evening drinks between the tall white columns in the atrium of the Grand Hilton Hotel. It was a humid May evening in 2002, the night before world football’s presidential election, and the lobby was alive with chatter and political intrigue. Speculation was mounting. Could the FIFA president Sepp Blatter hold on for a second term the next day? He was facing formidable opposition from Issa Hayatou, the powerful Cameroonian chief of the Confederation of African Football (CAF). What was more, his authority had been sensationally rocked days before by a legal complaint filed by 11 members of his own executive committee accusing him of abuse of power and financial mismanagement. Surely the president was finished? It would take something pretty spectacular to turn things around now.

  Blatter was a small, square-set Swiss bureaucrat in his mid-sixties with silvery tufts of hair at his temples and a sly twinkle in his eye. He had been elected in 1998 when his mentor, the suave Brazilian João Havelange, stepped down after 24 years in power, and by anyone’s reckoning that was a tough act to follow. Havelange had transformed FIFA from a small gentlemen’s club with just eight employees presiding modestly over the organisation of the World Cup into a global powerhouse with hundreds of staff and billions of dollars in the bank. All this was made possible by a golden alliance formed early in his presidency with Horst Dassler, the Adidas scion, who came to be known as the godfather of sports sponsorship.

  Havelange had campaigned in the 1974 election on a platform of expansion, promising to double the size of the World Cup, and he needed money to make it happen. Adidas had plenty of cash to offer, and it wanted to supply FIFA with branded sports gear to market its products to football fans around the world. So the game’s first major sponsorship deal was born. Adidas and Coca-Cola were the first big corporations to pile in and pay millions of dollars to slap their branding all over every available surface at the World Cup, and they were closely followed by fast food chains, electronics giants, beer companies and luxury watchmakers galore.

  Spotting the television transmitter masts shooting up in every direction in the 1970s, Havelange had been quick to realise the riches that would flow from selling the rights to beam the world’s best-loved sporting tournament into homes all around the planet. The FIFA president packaged up the broadcast rights to future World Cups into bundles and put them on sale. Soon enough FIFA was raking in billions from TV, too. Just as Havelange had promised, the World Cup ballooned in size from just 16 teams in the final to 32 under his watch. More teams meant more matches, and more matches meant more broadcast money. With so much cash flooding in, Havelange had built FIFA its smart new base in Zurich, and hired an army of full-time staff, spin doctors and money men to turn world football’s governing body into the slick machine it is today.

  Blatter worked for Dassler at Adidas headquarters in the French commune of Landersheim before migrating over to FIFA in 1975 to become its technical director in the first wave of hiring after the sponsorship gold-rush began. A slick PR man, schooled by the godfather himself in the arts of sports branding, Blatter had buckets of ingratiating charm, a background in business administration and an instinctive love of money. He was the perfect protégé for Havelange. The new technical director was tasked with spending Coca-Cola’s millions on new schemes to create more coaches, referees and sports doctors, and quickly ascended to become FIFA’s secretary general in 1981. When his master stepped down at the grand old age of 82, he was the natural successor.

  Football had turned into seriously big business by the time Blatter took over in 1998, with the non-US TV rights to the next three World Cups on sale for $2.2 billion. The new FIFA president had a lot to live up to. Sure, he’d earned his spurs holding the purse strings for 17 years as secretary general, but Havelange was a giant in the mercenary world of international football and his were big boots for his small Swiss successor to fill. When Blatter took the head of the FIFA boardroom table, he looked around the room and asked himself how to win the trust and respect of the men staring back at him. It didn’t take long to spot the dollar signs in their eyes that gave him his answer. Blatter was the first president to professionalise his hitherto voluntary executive committee, offering hefty salaries and gold-plated benefits to the men seated around him. Their pay and perks were to be a closely guarded secret, but leaked documents revealed that by 2014 they were pocketing salaries of $200,000 for a handful of days’ work a year and topping up their wallets with daily allowances of $700 in cash.

  Blatter had paid handsomely for the loyalty of his board, and he had sprayed FIFA’s cash around the planet in the form of generous development grants to national associations in his first presidential term. But now, here he was on the eve of his re-election in 2002 facing an insurrection. His own secretary general, Michel Zen-Ruffinen, had lashed out at Blatter’s dictatorial style and produced an explosive report accusing him of misleading accounting practices and conflicts of interest, prompting the 11 members of his well-paid executive committee to file a criminal complaint against him with the Zurich courts. How dare they? And as if that wasn’t bad enough, his opponent Hayatou was capitalising on the trouble by running on a ticket of transparency, which had won him the backing of the European football confederation, UEFA, and a raft of powerful figures on the executive committee.

  Hayatou had a face like a bloodhound on a tall, athletic frame. The for
mer middle-distance runner and basketball player had loomed over football’s high politics for two decades, having become president of CAF in 1988 and joined the executive committee two years later. Hayatou was the son of a local Sultan in Cameroon and he ruled over African football with a regal air. He had pocketed the secret salary, bonuses and allowances offered by Blatter with the same alacrity as his colleagues, but now he was promising to publish FIFA’s accounts each year and reveal the pay of the president as part of his sudden enthusiasm for transparency. Hayatou was a heavyweight and he did not pull his punches. ‘The image of FIFA is becoming very negative, due to the lack of leadership and illegal practices committed by its president,’ he told reporters. Heresy! But his pious stance had won him pledges of support across Europe, and he ruled over Africa’s 54 national associations whose bosses held more than half of the votes needed to win in the presidential race. He was a mean opponent to have to beat, and Blatter was still reeling on the ropes from Zen-Ruffinen’s attack.

  The delegates whispering intrigue to one another in the Grand Hilton on the eve of the vote in May 2002 could have been forgiven for writing the president off when they gathered in the lobby for their nightcaps. But something strange was happening in the hotel that night, and suddenly it seemed as though the game was changing.

  From the lobby floor, the chiefs of African football could be seen traipsing one by one up the stairs towards a room on the upper level of the five-star hotel’s grand atrium. Each would return after a few minutes, then the next would take his turn. Their votes would be crucial to victory. Would it be Blatter or Hayatou? The football officials lounging in wicker armchairs amid the tropical plants on the atrium floor were intrigued. Where were the Africans going? One or two plucky juniors made it their business to find out, and word quickly began to spread that the officials were heading into the penthouse suite of a powerful figure in world football. They went in one by one and emerged a few minutes later with a discreet smile for the next man in line. Which power-broker was holding private audiences with these crucial voters behind that closed bedroom door?