Michel Platini was anticipating a non-public viewers with the president of France when he arrived for lunch on a chilly day in November 2010. As an alternative, as Platini, a legendary French participant who in retirement had risen to change into one of the highly effective males in soccer, stepped right into a lavish salon contained in the president’s official residence, he observed instantly that the person he had come to see, Nicolas Sarkozy, was absent.
As an alternative, Platini was directed towards a small group chatting throughout the room, and to a dialog that will alter the course of his profession, stain his status, and eternally change the game to which he had devoted his life.
Platini smiled as he was formally launched to the lunch’s friends of honor: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who would, inside just a few years, substitute his father because the nation’s absolute ruler. The Qataris had come to Paris to debate a plan that bordered on the fantastical: Their tiny, impossibly rich Gulf state wished to host the World Cup.
Platini, a vice chairman of FIFA, soccer’s world governing physique, had lengthy been cool to the thought. A 12 months earlier, he had instructed associates that he believed permitting Qatar — a rustic with none significant soccer custom, one missing primary infrastructure like stadiums — to stage the most important sporting occasion on this planet would show disastrous for FIFA. Solely two months beforehand, he had confided to a rival United States bid that he wished the 2022 tournament to go “wherever however Qatar.”
Sooner or later that afternoon, although, Platini’s reservations melted away. What occurred to vary his thoughts over lunch with a late-arriving Sarkozy and the 2 Qataris stays, greater than a decade later, resolutely obscure and fiercely contested. Platini himself has provided no less than two distinct variations of occasions — in each he stated his vote was his personal selection, and never reflective of out of doors affect — and in 2019 he was detained, however not charged, by French investigators stated to be wanting into the assembly.
By then, although, the deal was executed: Every week after the lunch, inside a cavernous convention corridor in Zurich, Qatar was confirmed because the host of the 2022 World Cup.
The world’s hottest sport has been reckoning with the results of that call ever since.
American investigators and FIFA itself have since stated a number of FIFA board members accepted bribes to swing the vote to Qatar. (Platini was not amongst them.) A broad corruption investigation into how FIFA conducts enterprise led to dozens of arrests. These circumstances and others helped carry down all the management of FIFA, and nearly toppled the institution itself.
However the resolution additionally irrevocably altered the economics of top-flight soccer. Having gained the World Cup, Qatar rapidly moved to determine itself as a real energy within the sport. Inside a 12 months of the lunch on the Élysée Palace, Qatari pursuits had purchased the French workforce Paris St.-Germain, and a Qatari-owned sports activities community had begun pouring cash into European soccer by shopping for up broadcasting rights. That inflow of money not solely affected what prime gamers earned and the place they performed: It additionally briefly threatened to drive an irreconcilable wedge between a handful of the game’s richest groups and the remainder of the sport.
On the identical time, it impressed a frenzy of development as a tiny Gulf nation was, in impact, remade in a surprising nation-building challenge that, in keeping with human rights teams, value 1000’s of migrant employees their lives, a determine Qatar rejects.
And now, with long-feared cultural disputes enjoying out, it has arrived at a degree that when appeared unthinkable: tons of of the world’s most interesting soccer gamers and greater than 1,000,000 followers gathering in a thumb-shaped peninsula within the Persian Gulf, prepared for the match that modified the sport.