(crowd cheering)
- [Harris] This is just a game, right?
But it's not. It's really not.
It's so much more than that.
(upbeat music)
I wanna show you a story
that feels unique to our time in history.
It's a story of how the organization
that controls the sport
that humans love most was hijacked
by a tiny country
that controls the resource that humans need most.
- [Reporter] Qatar wealth from oil and natural gas.
- [Harris] Resulting in this.
A world cup held in the desert,
in a country built off fossil fuels and foreign labor
with a citizen population the size of Honolulu, Hawaii.
(clock ticking)
I wanna show you how this happened.
How Qatar, this tiny country,
beat out the US, Australia, Japan, and South Korea
by convincing 14 of the 22 most powerful men
in football to vote for them
to become the host of the 2022 World Cup.
- [FIFA official] The winner
to organize the 2022 FIFA World Cup is Qatar.
(crowd cheering)
- Okay. This is a big story and I'm excited to dive in.
But before we do, I need to thank today's sponsor.
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It's time to dive back in to this very deep,
but very important story.
Here we go.
(ominous music)
We've been deep in this.
Trying to make a web.
Trying to make a visual that will help us understand FIFA
and why this World Cup is being held where it's being held.
(slow electronic music)
I wanna show it to you.
And I've been really wrestling with how to boil this down.
And I think there's just three major things
that we need to understand
if we want to understand how Qatar bought the World Cup.
Check this out.
Okay.
There's three major things you have
to understand to make sense of this story.
They are FIFA.
You have to understand the World Cup.
And you have to understand Qatar.
All right, this is our list.
If you understand these three things independently,
you can put them together
to determine what really happened here
and how this tiny desert country ended up
with the World Cup.
So let's start with FIFA.
(slow electronic music)
FIFA was started by seven European nations in 1904.
The original goal here was to help organize matches
for association football, which is football.
It's the thing we all know.
It's the game where two teams of 11 players
try to kick a ball into a goal.
Football was no means invented here
at this time, at this place.
People have been kicking a ball
around for like a million years.
But it was here in Europe in the early 1900s
when the modern authority for football was born
and born in pretty humble beginnings.
But FIFA quickly grew
into a transnational quasi political authority
that spans the whole globe.
In fact, we have a map for that.
(slow electronic music)
So this is FIFA today.
It is massive.
It represents 211 countries or associations
that all belong to this one giant sporting organization.
The most powerful,
easily the most powerful sporting organization in the world.
And it's got these six major regions or confederations.
And it was the leaders from these regional confederations
who in 2010 sat on FIFA's executive committee,
based here in Zurich, in this bunker-like headquarters.
I was actually there just a few weeks ago actually.
I'm in Zurich.
This is where the FIFA headquarters, the FIFA museum are.
This is where the votes happened.
(slow electronic music)
(crowd clapping)
(announcer speaking foreign language)
Okay, let's get back to this.
Here we go.
The 24 most powerful men in football.
The ones who would go on to decide
who would be the host of the 2022 World Cup.
Here they are.
They're just hanging out on our diagram
sorted by their confederations.
Sapp Blatter, the president right here at the top.
Swiss guy.
I'm gonna cross it off.
I'm gonna cross it off the list.
FIFA. We didn't go over all of it.
There's obviously way more to FIFA
than what I just talked about.
The corruption, the scandals, all of it.
But for the purposes of this video,
we're just trying to answer the question
how did Qatar end up with the World Cup?
What we need to know is what we just talked about,
the executive committee,
the 24 most powerful men in football.
I'm gonna cross it off the list.
Next on our list, the World Cup.
(upbeat music)
So eventually FIFA got big enough
to where they could put on a big international tournament
and people would actually come.
They held it in Uruguay in 1930.
13 teams participated and they called it the World Cup.
It quickly became the most prestigious tournament
in football
and eventually would become
the most viewed sports event on the planet.
(announcer screaming)
Beating out even the Olympics
if you consider that 1.1 billion people,
like a decent chunk of the entire global population,
were simultaneously watching in 2018
when France beat Croatia in the World Cup final in Moscow.
1.1 billion people at the same time
all watching the same thing.
And I mean that's insane.
But it's also kind of amazing.
Like what other thing brings that many people together?
It is an amazing thing what global football has become.
And that is basically thanks to FIFA.
(mystical music)
(announcers commentating)
- Sport has the power to inspire and unite people.
- I mean you, I'm immediately like,
actually almost crying.
Like this is, this is beautiful stuff.
Look at this.
Look at this guy.
Look at this.
These moments of like amazing like performance
and then this, the reaction of these crowds.
But it must be noted that
when you have this much attention on one event,
13% of the entire global population watching at one time,
it will quickly become less about the beauty of this game
and more about, I mean, you know what I'm gonna say,
more about money.
With so much attention,
corporations pay endless money
to get their logos anywhere near this stuff.
Here or here or here.
Okay, that's not that surprising.
What blows my mind is how far governments will go
to also pay endless money
to get anywhere near the World Cup.
Not because they make money in return like the corporations.
They always end up losing tons of money.
But because there's a power
in having the entire world focused on your country
for a few weeks.
- Together, you've given the American people
an extraordinary opportunity
to welcome the world to our shores
as host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
- I mean, look at this.
Look at this.
We plotted this actually.
We found this data.
Every four years is a World Cup.
And this is how much each of these countries have spent
on their World Cup.
These are again, taxpayer money here.
This is government money being invested
into hosting the World Cup.
Throw this sucker onto a bar chart
and you get something like this.
Like it's getting out of hand.
Like every year, they spend more and more and more.
Oh, and spoiler alert,
wait till I show you this graph with Qatar in the mix.
Minds will be blown.
I can promise you that.
(electronic music)
The point is that countries are willing
to pay more and more to get the World Cup in their country.
A moment for them to put their best foot forward
on a global stage.
This is what we like to call soft power.
Okay. I am crossing the world cup off of our list.
Not because I covered every angle of it,
but because for the purposes of this story,
this is what matters.
Countries are more and more willing to pay unlimited amounts
of money to try to get this event in their country
because a billion people are gonna watch it.
It makes them look good.
Okay?
We're crossing it off.
All right, onto the last piece of our puzzle.
Qatar, a country that should be pronounced Ga-tar,
but I'm not gonna be that pretentious guy
who shows up trying to like say it
in the local pronunciation
cuz it makes me sound cultured and cool.
I am that guy.
I'm trying to not be that guy.
So for now, I'm just going
to say it like a Texas oilman says it, Qatar.
Okay?
Thanks.
(slow electronic music)
I'm gonna be really quick on this history of Qatar.
Like we're not going into the full thing, okay?
This is a very juicy history
that I could easily do a whole video about.
I'm gonna give you the sparknotes,
which is that Qatar, for most of its history,
was populated by nomadic tribes and fishing villages
whose biggest industry was pearl diving,
which is like, a pretty gnarly thing to do.
Like you like tie a rock around your ankle
and go under to find clams and then open the clams
and see if there's pearls.
It was like hard work.
The British eventually swooped in
because the industrial revolution was happening
and they smelled oil over here.
Qatar becomes a British protectorate until 1971
when they became an independent country
and Islamic constitutional monarchy,
run by one family dynasty.
So by the seventies, the British were gone.
But crucially, the oil was not.
And because of said oil,
Qatar quickly transitioned
from a poor tribal society
to a globally connected energy hub with unlimited money.
This accelerated in the seventies
when Qatar won the fossil fuel lottery
and discovered that they just happened
to be sitting on the largest known natural gas field
on the planet.
This guy.
They share a bit of it
with the territorial waters of Iran,
but most of it is theirs.
(slow electronic music)
Oh, and by the way,
all this fossil fuel and the revenue coming from it
belongs to this teeny country,
which this is a very teeny country.
Like we're talking about a country
that fits inside of the sole of the boot of Italy.
Look at this.
I mean it doesn't totally fit.
It's like, but it's tiny.
And we're talking about a few hundred thousand Qataris here.
This isn't a big population
and yet they're all getting in
on this unbelievable amount of wealth.
Like we can't fathom how rich
this teeny little thumb shaped country is.
They could not spend their money fast enough.
They didn't have enough labor to build all the stuff
that they had money for.
So they started to import labor from other countries.
95% of the people who live and work here are not Qataris.
They're expats from other places. 95%.
Meanwhile, the teeny population
that are actually Qatari citizens live very good lives.
They're some of the richest people on the planet.
Most of them work very cushy government jobs
that pay really well.
They live in a welfare state where their needs are met
because there is just unlimited money
for everyone in this country.
Okay, that's Qatar.
(upbeat music)
So this is the moment where the three pieces
of our puzzle come together.
Because in the nineties,
Qatar starts to read the tea leaves.
They start to realize that the world is gonna move away
from fossil fuels, the one thing that they have.
Their gravy train is gonna come to an end in a few decades.
It's time to prepare for the future, said Qatar,
by investing their billions and billions,
hundreds of billions of extra dollars
into anything and everything that is not fossil fuels.
Diversify.
So they start to go nuts.
Everything from real estate in Singapore and New York City
to buy the St. Petersburg Airport in Russia
to buying Miramax Films
and the Italian luxury brand Valentino.
Like, boy, should I just make an entire video
on Qatar Investment Authority?
Cuz that would be juicy.
In 2017, the BBC noted that Qatar owns more land
in the UK than the Queen does.
And as a part of this
big diversifying strategic investment effort,
Qatar focused on turning their country
into a global hub for prestigious international events.
You see where I'm going with this?
Lucky for them, there is a shortcut
to the most prestigious event in the world.
The World Cup.
(upbeat music)
Oh, and this event happens to be run by an organization
that speaks a language that they're very familiar with.
The language of money and power and influence.
And here's where we are.
(slow electronic music)
So we're back here to this web.
These gatekeepers of international football,
the people who voted on
who was gonna host the 2022 World Cup.
14 of these guys voted Qatar.
And I want to know why.
Qatar, a country that FIFA itself,
when they were evaluating all the bidders for the hosting,
decided was not super suited for this.
There's all these parameters
that countries should have to be a good host.
Qatar didn't really have a lot of 'em.
And in fact, they had the opposite.
Super hot weather.
No widespread football infrastructure.
And perhaps most strikingly,
not a huge tradition of football
or even a significant local population
to spread football to in their place.
Like they have a couple hundred thousand people.
The World Cup is supposed to bring football to new regions
and spread it throughout a country.
How are they gonna do that in a hot desert oasis
with like 300,000 people?
So let's do this.
We're done with our list.
Let's move on to the next part of this video,
which is probably the part we put the most effort into.
And I want you to stick with me here
because the point isn't to go into every single detail
of how some of this corruption went down.
No one's gonna remember every little detail.
That's not the point.
The point is to give you a sampling of the mechanics
of how influence and power works.
Not just in FIFA, but in the international system generally.
How powerful people get what they want.
We'll never know for certain because this vote was secret.
But we know Qatar got 14 of these guys.
And I think I have a pretty good idea of how
for most of them.
(slow electronic music)
We're gonna start with this guy.
This is Mohammed Bin Hammam.
He's one of the executive committee members
and he's from Qatar.
Okay. We can safely assume that he probably voted
for his own country.
But more importantly, it was him,
a big wig, international football guy
who helped pull the strings on everyone else on this web
starting with this guy.
Jack Warner.
He's an executive committee member
from Trinidad and Tobago.
Leaked emails and bank records obtained
by the Sunday Times revealed that before the vote,
Bin Hammam deposited $450,000 directly
into Warner's account.
And later even more, totalling $1.6 million.
Just like literally, like he just paid him.
Like that's, this is the simplest version.
Just like I will pay you money to give to,
so you do what I want you to.
It's just like so straightforward.
No wonder a month after the vote, in an email,
Warner called his Qatari colleague Bin Hammam, quote,
"the only brother I have in football."
Okay. One guy down. Who else?
Next, we have the three executive committee members
from the South American Confederation.
The US Department of Justice has gotten involved
with these guys.
They recently released an unsealed indictment
against all three of them,
alleging that these three were quote,
"offered and received bribes in exchange for their votes."
I mean, it's pretty unsatisfying.
We don't have the evidence that the DOJ is using
for this case, but they're building a case.
Oh, and by the way,
two of these guys just died
in like the past couple of years.
Next up, we've got these three guys
from the African Confederation.
A year before the vote,
the African Confederation was having their annual meeting
in Angola, which by the way,
was paid for by the Qatar bid team.
The people who were like trying to convince people
to vote for the World Cup.
They paid for the whole thing.
Okay.
I get it.
Trying to lobby for your team.
That's fine.
But here's where it gets shady.
While they were at this meeting,
the Qatar bid team met
with these three executive committee members.
And according to a former employee
who was in the room translating,
the Qataris offered 1.5 million dollars each
to these guys in exchange for their promise
that they would vote for Qatar.
A year later,
this employee turned whistleblower actually went back
on her statement, saying that she actually lied about it
and that there were no bribes.
Kind of fishy.
What's your incentive to lie?
But then the FBI showed up at her front door
and she admitted that she was pressured
to say that she had lied about it
and that actually the bribes happened.
I don't know, man. We don't like...
I side with the whistleblower.
You can decide how you feel.
And now her life is basically ruined.
She said in an interview that quote,
- I will always look over my shoulder
for the rest of my life.
- Oh, okay. And while we're talking about this,
one of those three guys
that apparently got 1.5 million dollars
was later filmed by undercover reporters
negotiating an $800,000 bribe in exchange for his vote.
Like smoking gun evidence.
Same thing happened to this guy,
the executive committee member from the Oceania region.
And they actually got disqualified from voting.
So these two guys didn't actually vote.
So we're now down to 22 exco members.
Let's keep going.
(slow electronic music)
Okay, so we've gone over the instances
where there was direct money given
in exchange for the promise to vote.
The next phase of the story are more subtle versions
of influence.
Less overt.
Less smoking gunnish.
Like this guy from Thailand.
He's the executive committee member from Thailand.
Four months before the vote,
Thailand and Qatar were renegotiating an energy deal.
Thailand was trying to get a better price
for their natural gas,
something Qatar has a lot of.
But for some reason, this guy,
a FIFA executive committee voting member was at the meeting.
Wait, what?
Why is this football guy in the room
while there's these big gas negotiations going on?
Yes, I'm being coy.
We know where this is going.
I mean, you gotta read these leaked emails.
They're so juicy.
You've got a FIFA guy emailing a Qatar gas guy
from Qatar Petroleum.
They're talking about the development
of their two football associations
from their different countries
and then saying that they're gonna liaise
with the CEO of the gas company
to follow up about a liquid natural gas sale.
I mean, it's just so clear what's going on here.
Favorable terms of the deal in exchange for,
"Hey dude, make sure to vote for our country."
(slow electronic music)
Oh, and who was this meeting
between the gas guy and the FIFA guy arranged by?
You guessed it.
This guy, Mohammed Bin Hammmam,
the executive committee member from Qatar
who's pulling all these strings.
Oh, by the way, just a little side note here.
Going through these leaked emails,
I couldn't help but notice that the FIFA guy's email
was sour_piggy@ redacted. (chuckles)
Sour piggy?
Sour piggy.
Sour piggy's doing a lot of corruption.
Okay. (chuckles)
- [Cameraman] I'm cutting, dude.
- Oh shit. Okay. Okay.
Okay. And then there's a few just like,
sort of circumstantial ones
that give you a flavor of how this works.
Like this guy who sold his family's land
to Qatar a year after the vote for 27 million pounds,
which was like way over asking price.
And this executive committee member
whose son was given a job at a private Qatari hospital
shortly after the World Cup vote.
Both of these guys, of course,
like everyone else on this list,
denies any connection, that this was influenced.
But now we're at the most significant moment in all of this.
The thing that really tipped the scales for the vote.
And it has to do with this confederation.
The most powerful, the European Confederation.
Specifically this guy, Michel Platini.
A former French football player turned FIFA guy.
He was the president of this confederation,
which inevitably meant
that he has sway over these other dudes.
Just one week before the vote, like crunch time,
Platini got an invitation that he couldn't refuse.
A luncheon with the French president at his palace.
Platini later said that before this meeting,
he was planning on voting for the US
to host the World Cup in 2022.
But he goes to this luncheon and who else is there?
No big deal.
Just these two guys, the most powerful dudes in Qatar.
One of them, the prime minister of Qatar
and the other, the current Emir of Qatar
from like the old dynasty family.
It's important to remember the context here.
Like what's happening.
This is 2010.
The world has just been rattled
by a global financial meltdown
and the president of France, Sarkozy,
is stressed and he's in the room
with the leaders of Qatar
who are not nearly in the same financial trouble.
See the section before about unlimited amounts
of money thanks to fossil fuels.
And it's clear that these Qataris want something.
Something that the Frenchmen in the room can deliver them.
A vote for their country to host the World Cup.
Something they really want.
According to sources close to this meeting,
Sarkozy flat out told Platini to vote for Qatar.
Why?
Well, we'll never know.
But it's clear that he wanted a few things from Qatar.
In this same meeting,
Sarkozy told the Qatari that he wanted Qatar
to buy the French football team Paris Saint-Germain,
which happens to be Sarkozy's favorite football team.
And at the time was in financial ruin.
After this meeting, a few important things happened.
Number one, Qatar did end up buying that football team
for 60 million pounds just like Sarkozy wanted.
They turned it around and soon it became a star studded team
with merch that's worn
by the world's most popular celebrities.
And then we suddenly see an uptick
in big trade deals between Qatar and France.
Qatar Airways buys 50 giant planes from Airbus,
the giant French airplane maker.
I mean, if you look at what one of these planes cost
in 2010, times it by 50,
we're looking at 18 billion dollars.
A massive deal.
And in the end, Platini in this room
with his president telling him to do what the Qatari want.
We need them right now.
And it worked.
Michel Platini flipped his vote from the USA to Qatar.
He admitted it later.
That's not even speculation.
The president of the executive committee, Sapp Blatter,
was pissed about this
and later said that this was the defining moment
for Qatar winning.
- They have influenced Michel Platini
at that time to vote for Qatar.
- Because remember, Platini then went back
to his European Confederation
with eight executive committee members, eight votes,
and he almost certainly influenced others to join him.
One book I read claims that he took four votes with him.
But we'll never know.
And then on a cold day in December of 2010,
the day of the vote came.
(dramatic music)
- [Announcer] The 2022 FIFA World Cup.
- [Harris] So on that faithful day in the winter of 2010
in Zurich, all the guests arrive because it was voting day.
- Every-
- Clearly, I think we had absolutely fantastic bid.
- Well, we got a great bid, so we just gotta go in there
and give it everything that we've got.
- These 22 men cast their votes in multiple rounds
until a majority victor emerged.
At least 11 of them voted from Qatar since round one.
And finally, 14 votes were delivered to Qatar,
a majority and almost double what the USA got.
(dramatic music)
So yeah, that's how it went down.
That's how it went down.
Like, look, we'll never know exactly what happened.
A lot of this stuff we know because it leaked out
and we were able to put it all together.
But the fact is every one of these men has been involved
in some corruption investigation.
I mean, it's no surprise that this stuff happened
and probably so much more.
FIFA is corrupt to the core.
Qatar didn't make this happen.
Qatar just saw an organization that spoke their language,
the language of unlimited money,
and they used that to get what they wanted.
To prepare for the future, to diversify,
to get the world to look at them.
- [Announcer] It is the biggest event in the world.
- So no, this isn't just a game.
The reason why all of this matters is
because football can be a beautiful thing.
No matter what language someone speaks
or their politics or their God or whatever,
they have this universal language, this game.
A global culture full of screaming and cheering
and crying and pride and identity.
It's ridiculous, yet so beautiful, so uniquely human.
And in a very real way, football is a mirror to the world.
What's acceptable here in this most revered sport
is what's acceptable everywhere.
So by using money and influence to get the bid
for the World Cup,
Qatar showed us just how power works in our world.
They showed us who really matters and who doesn't
and validated an old idea
that the rules of fair play don't really matter
if you have enough money.
(slow melancholy music)
Hey, thanks for watching
and for sticking around till the end of the video.
This is just the first of two videos we made
on this topic.
The next video publishes soon
and it's kind of the next chapter of the story.
What happens after Qatar gets hold of the World Cup
and they have to build all this infrastructure.
And it's a very long, intense journey
that I go on to report that story
and I kind of tell the story of that reporting experience.
So that will be out soon.
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We do these deep dives.
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I will see you very soon in the continuation of this story.
See you.