Play the Gay Away

When will sponsors realise they can’t win at the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar?

Every four years, squads of highly paid professionals gather together to unite the world, hammer their opposition and prove to everyone that their team is number one. These teams are marketing departments, and their tournament will have kicked off many years before players arrive in Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in early November.

The World Cup is sports marketing’s Valhalla — a broadcast utopia of passionate global viewers, high stakes, even bigger media spends and lofty brand aspirations. Like the ball-chasing megastars on the field, history is littered with the corpses of brands who didn’t get their World Cup right, lying prostrate at the feet of the gods, or worse — they missed it entirely.

Except this year, the tables have turned. Qatar was not a popular choice to host the event, and the list of reasons why gets longer by the day.

First, it’s scorchio over there. Qatar is a peninsula country in the Middle East made up of arid desert and a long Persian Gulf beach.

Effectively, it’s an incredibly wealthy sand dune.

It’s so hot in summer (average temperatures plateau around 41 degrees in August) that the entire tournament had to be shifted to winter. Even so, stadiums still had to have air con units integrated into their foundations so they could blow cool air towards players on the pitch.