Qatar accused of trying to sabotage rival World Cup bids

Members of Fifa’s ruling council want the football body’s ethics committee to demand the evidence behind allegations the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid ran a secret campaign to sabotage their rivals for the tournament.

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that it had been passed documents by a whistleblower who worked with the Qatar bid.

It reported claims that the bid team used a PR agency and former CIA operatives to disseminate fake propaganda about its main competitors, the United States and Australia, in a flagrant breach of the rules set down for bidding countries by football’s world governing body.

Qatar beat rival bids from the US, Australia, South Korea and Japan eight years ago to win the right to host the competition.

The alleged smears against rival bidders reportedly involved recruiting prominent figures to criticise the bids in their own countries, thus giving the impression they lacked support at home.

The latest allegations are not expected to lead to Qatar being stripped of the World Cup but they have placed renewed focus on the lengths the wealthy Gulf state may have gone to in its efforts to secure the competition.

According to The Sunday Times, the smear campaign included paying a professor £6900 ($13,300) to write a damning report on the economic cost of a World Cup in the US. Journalists, bloggers and high-profile figures were recruited in each country to build up concerns over the respective bids, the paper reported.

Fifa rules say that bidders must “refrain from making any written or oral statements of any kind, whether adverse or otherwise, about the bids or candidatures of any other member association which has expressed an interest in hosting the competition”.

Qatar said it rejected all the claims made by the newspaper.

One of the leaked emails sent to Qatar’s deputy bid leader Ali alThawadi shows the Gulf state was aware of a plot to spread “poison” against its chief rivals.

The leaked documents also revealed that a group of American PE teachers had been recruited to ask Congressmen to oppose a US World Cup on the grounds the money would be better spent on high school sports, the paper claimed.

Qatar was previously investigated by Fifa over allegations of corruption surrounding the World Cup bid but was cleared in 2014 following a twoyear inquiry led by American lawyer Michael Garcia. He said that “for the most part, the bidding process was fair and thorough”, despite certain “questionable conduct”.