Sepp Blatter flashed a beaming smile on that infamous day in 2010 when he announced that the 2022 World Cup would be hosted by Qatar, hailing what he said was the glorious opening of a new footballing frontier.
Asked to justify giving the world’s biggest sporting event to a country smaller than Yorkshire, without any significant footballing heritage or infrastructure and where summer temperatures often reach 50C, the Fifa president put a brave face on it.
“We go to new lands,” Blatter said. “The Middle East and Arabic world has been waiting for a long time. So I’m a happy president when we talk about the development of football.”
Twelve years later, and 12 days before Qatar open the first winter World Cup with a
© Times Newspapers Limited 2022.