Leave aside for a moment the football politics, so often an opaque affair, and the disappointment of much larger and more established soccer-playing nations, whose hopes of hosting a World Cup were dashed by the Zurich-based Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa), the sport’s governing body.
What does the success of Qatar’s bid to host the 2022 Fifa World Cup say about the nature of polities and geopolitics as the world remakes itself after a decade defined by the West’s unresolved interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and staggers to an end with European economies and the United States struggling to recover from the credit crunch?
