The airport-style security queues for Qatar stadiums provide ample time for a mindless scroll through social media.
ver the weekend, one such wait brought me to a video from ITV’s Mark Pougatch styled as an “honest assessment of the World Cup from a broadcaster’s perspective”.
It was grabbing attention.
“The experience here, I have to be absolutely fair, is very calm. It’s very easy and it flows well,” said Pougatch at the end of a two-minute video.
“This is going quite smoothly. Are we allowed to feel that? Are we right to think that?”
He had explained his point, describing how the absence of alcohol around stadiums was creating a healthier environment before praising the straightforward travel, the smooth passage in and out of the venues and the diversity of the travelling fans.
It was all reasonable enough, apart from a core point that perhaps this proves the concept of a one city World Cup is not such a bad idea.
Pougatch’s video had accumulated over 500,000 views by Sunday morning and was being shared enthusiastically by Qatari commentators.
This is on a weekend where it was reported that a Doha 2036 Olympics bid is very much on the cards, a one-city event of course. Suddenly, this month looks like the ideal dress rehearsal.
Pougatch wasn’t running away from the truth around this competition, and has previously spoken about the importance of getting out there to cover the weighty issues that crop up.
He’s very good at his job. However, looking for any broadcaster to give a full perspective of the place is perhaps ambitious.
Their lived experience here is different to the solo traveller. Major broadcast operations travel in bulk, with dozens of staff for the smaller ones and hundreds for the bigger ones. They are checked into the better hotels, or take over high-end apartments.
There’s talk that the presenters and pundits from one big internationally recognised organisation – not Pougatch’s ITV – have taken over the apartments of local residents who were given a decent deal to go elsewhere for a month. To be clear, this deal wasn’t open for negotiation.
Naively enough, as a first-time traveller to Qatar, there was a belief that the place would feel a lot smaller, in the sense that all of the big name guests from various jurisdictions would be all centred around a hub and visible around the place.
Not so. Corridors exist that bring the VIPs and main rights holders to their destination, so they can stay inside that bubble if they wish.
They need to have the curiosity to step outside of that route and explore the fringes that are more revealing.
It’s not that they should feel compelled to do so. There are football pundits here that will shy away from Qatar chat because they don’t feel comfortable or educated enough to wade into the topics. That’s their choice.
But when an individual such as Pougatch, with a huge reach, decides to dip their toes into the waters of Qatar’s performance as a host, they have to be conscious of how their words can be used.
Local media is seizing on any complimentary observations from high-profile guests and effectively using it as evidence that the western press was scaremongering in their negative commentary beforehand.
There’s a whiff of the Trumpian “fake news” chorus about it all, with any good experiences twisted around to sell the message that strong journalism exposing the ills of the hosts was exaggerated.
In places, this spins out into whataboutery territory, possibly even references to the crimes of western European colonisers and the business deals their governments continue to do. Two wrongs make Qatar all right, basically.
Qatari media are also making a big deal of vox pops containing observations from fans who had clearly misinterpreted the misgivings about the hosts.
It’s as though these people were anticipating scenes of carnage, with migrant workers strewn around the streets, when it had been well flagged that the hierarchy were likely to use their might to present the best image possible.
We shouldn’t be surprised that the brightest parts of Doha look and feel good and the trains are running on time.
That’s why declaring a one-city World Cup is operating reasonably well has to come with the pretty significant caveat that it’s only workable in an unchallenged regime with complete control of the terms and conditions and the ability – at whatever cost – to plonk eight FIFA-sized stadiums into a congested area.
Maybe it’s repetitive to keep making this point but it’s important to do so as the positive testimonies stack up.
Let’s remember the factors that have allowed it to run to plan. Schools were closed, office hours cut, while all major construction projects have been put on hold.
Large numbers of foreign workers were unceremoniously evicted from their accommodation a month out from the competition.
The Qatari government claimed this was unrelated to the World Cup and “in line with ongoing comprehensive and long-term plans to re-organise areas of Doha”.
Last week I spoke to a resident from the Philippines who was almost incredulously laughing at the abrupt departure of people who were a feature of the Doha streets every day. “I don’t know where all of the Indians and Bangladeshis are gone,” he said.
He can speak with authority about why this World Cup presents a short-term distorted reality. We were talking in the cab he was driving (it’s always a taxi, isn’t it?), but it’s a new existence for him, a temporary existence.
His 10 years here have been spent working in the construction industry, including six months without pay from his employer.
Life is going reasonably well for him. He came with his wife, who has a good job, so they never had to live in the cramped conditions that are standard for lone arrivals. “It’s bad for bachelors,” he asserted.
Nevertheless, the World Cup was a worry. Finding a stopgap was necessary and he was fortunate to find taxi work. The city is packed with short-term cabbies, learning the job as they go. He’ll be back to business as usual in January. And so will Doha.
He’s got no idea where some of his colleagues are. They know better than to protest about poor working conditions on the streets and he claims that individuals from another company that went public over unpaid wages were deported.
It’s hard to find a footprint for these episodes because Qatar doesn’t have a free press. Naturally enough, migrant workers don’t want to speak on the record or have pictures taken to accompany their tales because of what it will mean for them.
It’s true that this tournament offers unprecedented opportunities to those with the right credentials. Today’s game between Croatia and Japan will be the 18th game that I’ve attended in the space of 13 days. At previous renewals, 13 in 18 days would be some going.
On Thursday it was feasible to take in a Luis Suarez press conference, Romelu Lukaku’s Belgium nightmare and Japan’s dramatic success over Spain in the space of just 10 hours.
How can you type that sentence out without coming across smug? Or at the very least, satisfied.
Fanatical supporters are capitalising on this too and there are Irish fans out here doing two games a day if they have the means. Several media outlets ran features on staff attempts to see four in a day during the early group stage schedule.
This is Disneyland for football fans territory, but allowing this cartoon existence to cloud over how it was created is sportswashing at work.
Especially when ambivalence, however well-meaning, can be used as ammunition.
