Michel Platini was expecting a private audience with the president of France when he arrived for lunch on a cold day in November 2010. Instead, as Platini, a legendary French player who in retirement had risen to become one of the most powerful men in soccer, stepped into a lavish salon inside the president’s official residence, he noticed immediately that the man he had come to see, Nicolas Sarkozy, was absent.
Instead, Platini was directed toward a small group chatting across the room, and to a conversation that would alter the course of his career, stain his reputation, and forever change the sport to which he had dedicated his life.
Platini smiled as he was formally introduced to the lunch’s guests of honor: Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, the prime minister of Qatar, and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who would, within a few years, replace his father as the country’s absolute ruler. The Qataris had come to Paris to discuss a plan that bordered on the fantastical: Their tiny, impossibly wealthy Gulf state wanted to host the World Cup.
Platini, a vice president of FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, had long been cool to the idea. A year earlier, he had told friends that he believed allowing Qatar — a country without any meaningful soccer tradition, one lacking basic infrastructure like stadiums — to stage the biggest sporting event in the world would prove disastrous for FIFA. Only two months previously, he had confided to a rival United States bid that he wanted the 2022 tournament to go “anywhere but Qatar.” » | Tariq Panja * and Rory Smith | Saturday, 19 November 2022
* Tariq Panja was present in 2010 when Qatar was picked to host the 2022 World Cup. This article is drawn from hundreds of interviews he and Rory Smith have conducted on its victory and the consequences for soccer.
