Totally agree but nowhere near as wank as them getting the gig in the first place.... Corruption UEFA would be proud of....!
I know this is an unpopular opinion but I actually don't care about them getting it. The bribery thing is a complete non issue as literally everyone who won has bribed FIFA, and that's been confirmed back to 1998 WC at least. Christ, the Qatar fiasco actually lead to the old guard at FIFA being kicked out, and everything being made public, so we're actually in a better situation on that front then we were before.
Secondly the whole, It's Qatar, they're a horrible country....well so are Russia, so was Colombia in the 80's, South Africa ins't exactly rosy...the USA isn't a bastion of equality or human rights either. Being an unpopular, sketchy-on-human-rights country is almost a pre-requisite.
@SWP's back might be able to speak more to this, but the global spotlight on Qatar seems to have lead to some progression on that front anyway and they seem like they're going to let tourists get away with whatever they'd normally get away with in a world cup host country.
And as for it being in the winter...even that I don't hate. There's a lot of countries who could never host a summer world cup, it would be interesting to see every 4th one in the winter and open up a lot of the equatorial countries. North Africa, India, South East Asia - frankly the USA because all the games in Florida and Texas were played at temperatures over 35 degrees back then. Unless we always want it in the same half a dozen countries, occasionally opening it up to parts of the world where a winter world cup makes more sense makes sense. It's a global game after all, and as there's 500,000,000 arabs in the world, having a world cup in and arabic country seems fair after 90 years.
I'm not going to go, but Qatar's a pretty easy place to get to, which is a big positive, and it's a tiny country, so unlike Russia, people aren't going to be following teams across 2 continents.
The one thing I will concede is I'm not sure how the atmosphere is going to be when there's basically no host country fans, but it could still be great, with all of the fans from all the teams piled in together.
I'll be glad when it's over, I think it'll be much better than a lot of people expected.
