How to Win the World Cup

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How has the 2022 World Cup ended up in Qatar? Few would have guessed in 2010 that this tiny Gulf State would win the chance to stage football’s biggest competition. It had seemed an unlikely bidder, and didn’t have a single suitable stadium. Then there was the temperature, often around 40 degrees in the summer months: dangerous conditions for playing a football tournament. Fast forward to 2022 and seven new stadiums with huge new infrastructure have been built at vast expense. The opening game is just days away from being played, unusually, in the milder weather of November.

It’s a story that The Guardian’s David Conn has been following since the beginning. He is the author of The Fall of the House of Fifa and one of the world’s leading investigative journalists on corruption in football. Conn goes back to the beginning: how was the bid won in the first place? He traces the story from an infamous lunch at the Elysee Palace right up to the present day, investigating the human rights issues raised over the past dozen years, as well as probing at a question that is often left curiously unexamined: what is it that Qatar actually wants out of all this? And what does this tell us about how sport and power work in the modern age?

Produced by Ant Adeane from Tonic Productions for BBC Radio 4.

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