1 Fake Qatar fans
It is one of the strangest minor stories of the strangest of World Cups. Shortly before the opening game, Qatar versus Ecuador, a group of men in uniform Qatari team-coloured T-shirts emerged en masse into a vacant area behind the goal and started making noise, doing choreographed dances and leaping about with apparently genuine excitement, something they kept up through the game irrespective of what was happening on the pitch.
At first it looked like an expert parody, perhaps an arch pastiche on fan culture. But the story of the bolt-on ultras was also authentically Qatari, in a land where everything is traded as a commodity from human labour to staged human joy.
It turned out this group of around 1,500 young (male) Lebanese, Egyptian and Algerian football supporters had been offered free flights, accommodation, match tickets and a daily allowance to pretend to support Qatar. They came in mid-October to write and rehearse their songs and dances. And now here they were, synthesising excitement at a game where half the spectators left before the end.
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On the face of it this looks like an open-and-shut outrage against the idea of authentic fan culture. But as ever there are sides. First, these were genuine football fans of Middle Eastern clubs, delighted to be doing something they never could have afforded otherwise. The faux-Qataris were proud to support a team “from the region” and saw a kind of pan-Arab solidarity in the show of support. “We share the same language. We share the same culture, we are fingers from the same hand,” one of them said, and it sounded fair enough. Fake real fans doing something real-fake, to create something oddly real. Welcome to Qatar 2022.
2 Green Carpet
The green carpet was laid out around dingy concrete stadium walkways, with the intention of simulating a pastoral sporting parade for photo opportunities. Managers and players were required to walk down the green carpet, thereby creating a staged “sports‑style” scene, like the pictures of footballers and cricketers before fast shutter speeds where players would stand frozen in action poses while a Brylcreemed man called Snapper Wilkins clanked a massive flash bulb in their faces.
And grass is a tricky thing in Qatar generally. You must have grass. Grass is football. But grass is also not meant to be here. Pitches are watered and tended constantly at vast carbon cost. The landscaped Al Bidda park has lavish lawns manicured by a team of turf stylists, but this stuff has no life in it, no insects or worms, nothing but sand and glue. Twenty miles outside Doha, rising up out of the desert, Al Bayt Stadium has a wonderful rolling lawn around its southern end, a needless human engineering miracle, an Astroturfing scheme for the sake of an Astroturfing scheme. We have all walked the green carpet at this World Cup.
3 Beckham
David Beckham’s image is constantly present in Qatar, as though he is now the national mascot, or perhaps a thrusting junior emir. But for all his visibility he remains mute and distant, a flattened image. It suits him. In many ways promoting a World Cup he initially expressed deep (generic) suspicions over is the perfect Beckham moment, an act that has reduced him to his essence, an empty corporate power image, a flattened face for hire.
Every man has his price, and Beckham’s soul is at least reassuringly expensive. And this image is great because in it Beckham has finally become a logo. He is now a chin, a hairline, a sculpted beard, a baseline of pixelated symmetry. The other great thing about this new, improved Beckham is he could also be any nationality, a deracinated corporate swoosh.
Privately Beckham is said to be furious about the backlash for abandoning his previous set of principles in order to promote Qatar. He would prefer people used the word “engagement” instead, which is a more comforting word. His argument is, apparently, that nobody complained when he played for Paris Saint-Germain, a wonderful piece of dead‑end logic, and another convincing argument for remaining an icon, a logo, a jawline, or anything else that doesn’t involve expressing thoughts.
Andy Warhol would probably have done this to Beckham, unlocked the raw power of his inner inanity. Qatar has done it beautifully.
4 Fake Venice shopping centre
The motorised gondolas at the Villaggio Mall, a Qatari classic. This is a place that loves a bit of urban mimesis. Doha and its surrounds also have a fake Place Vendôme, a fake Champs-Élysées, even a fake Hackney in the guise of Stadium 974, with its billionaire-hipster aesthetic, the pretence of being built out of glossily reclaimed shipping containers.
It isn’t hard to see why. Doha is built on a plateau of desert scrub. There are no features. So why not borrow some. The fake Venice shopping centre is almost old brand-new Doha by now. It has painted ceilings and piped soothing music. It has a weirdly draining quality. It is also based on a fitting model. Venice is one of those cities that flourished and was then left behind, preserved in its splendour as a snapshot in time. Qatar’s entire nation-building project is about cashing in its own moment of peak wealth, making it permanent, fixed, carbon-proofed. And like Venice, Qatar is also now at the mercy of climate change. So, a nice twin doom-laden energy there. Oh well. Have a motorised gondola ride to nowhere.
5 Photo frame at Lusail
The lit posing frame at Lusail, a staged moment at a stage-set World Cup. Step inside the square and bathe in the light of Lusail, the world’s most startling future-city. Lusail is still more a concept than an actual city, conceived as an ark in the desert for the super-rich, and venue also for the World Cup final. Walking around this place is exhausting, an assault on the senses via constant piped music, scrolling lights, massive video screens. But it is also beautiful, so new, so empty, a hypothetical city for a hypothetical people, and the final level at this World Cup of painted backdrops.
6 Goal actualisations
Goal actualisations: why? In whose fevered imagination did it seem like a good idea to replay, in weird, faceless cartoon form on vast scrolling screens, the action that your live audience has just seen in the flesh? This is a Lionel Messi goal actualisation. In all there have been more than 800 goal actualisations during the football actualisation at the Qatar World Cup tournament actualisation. A Gianni Infantino actualisation has already sat centre stage at the Virtual Stadium and hailed this World Cup as the greatest actualisation of all time. Probably Qatar is just ahead of time as usual. Actualisation feels like the future. So clean, so natural, no armbands, no ragged human edges.
7 Pre-match show
What do you need for a World Cup? You need light, noise, an iconography of World Cup-dom. You need to block out the sky with drones and fire and empty colour. Qatar’s pre-match displays have been uniform and relentless, like watching a robot express excitement on an endless loop. There is nothing new about this. All tournaments do it. Qatar’s achievement has been to synthesise the loudest tournament excitement of all time, and to do it over the top of often silent stadiums. Here some volunteers shake a flag while the inflatable World Cop appears to explode into flames and history’s most brain-manglingly loud PA screams in boilerplate excitement. Never has kick-off felt like such a relief in any sporting event. Finally some peace and quiet. Perhaps Qatar can now pack all of this generic white noise away and simply wheel it out again for the inevitable Olympics.
