The likely reason behind the decision was that Qatar also showed their commitment to infrastructure spending with around $42.9 billion due for completion by kick off in 2016.
Qatar is the winning bidder for the rights to host of FIFA World Cup in 2022, beating Australia, Japan, USA and the Korea Republic. Russia was also chosen as the winner to host the 2018 World Cup beating out England, Spain/Portugal and Netherlands/Belgium.
The official FIFA.com website has still not updated to reflect the change and any of the top few results for Qatar shown in Google appear to be straining under the weight of traffic. It is interesting that their Official Twitter bid account only has 3,165 followers at the time of writing this blog post, but their Official Facebook fanpage has 532,430 fans. So if the vote came down to winning hearts and minds it’s obvious that Facebook has proved Qatar is the right choice as they are well ahead of the other countries in supporters with a population base of only 1,400,000 people.
- USA Bid Facebook Fans – 73,680
- Australia Bid Facebook Fans – 233,487
- South Korea Bid Facebook Fans – 4
- Japan Bid Facebook Fans – 322
Qatar is the first global sporting event to be held in the middle east much like when Brazil was awarded the 2016 Summer Olympic Games to be held in Rio, they were the first Olympic games to be held in South America. The middle east region is home to more than 435 million people and it did offer the best time zones to guarantee most countries around the world great broadcasting times which will keep sponsors happy.
Qatar also excelled with their commitment to use eco-friendly technologies including solar power for their 9 new stadiums they are building at a cost of around $4 billion dollars. The most amazing stadium is Al-Rayyan Stadium that features an external video wall that can show sponsored messages, live games, replays and more. The likely reason behind the decision was that Qatar also showed their commitment to infrastructure spending with around $42.9 billion due for completion by kick off in 2016. This includes a high-speed rail network and a new airport and much more.
The Qatar 2022 Stadiums are:
- Al-Rayyan Stadium
- Doha Port Stadium
- Al-Gharafa Stadium
- Al-Shamal Stadium
- Umm Slal Stadium
- Al-Khor Stadium
- Sports City Stadium
- Al-Wakrah Stadium
- Qatar University Stadium
For images of the Qatar 2022 stadiums head over to FootBall Marketing, and check the YouTube clip below for a video of Qatar’s first 5 stadiums.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-z2jtUS9-Y]