Nasser Al Khater, CEO, FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 LLC • Interview
FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 LLC combines the vast knowledge and tactical planning experience Qatar has gained since winning the bid and FIFA’s extensive tournament delivery expertise to ensure an optimum World Cup experience for all in 2022.
What would you assess the operations of FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 LLC since its establishment?
The FIFA World Cup is the world’s biggest sporting event with many critical intricacies between governments, sporting federations, and private organizations, so integration and optimization are key to ensuring a successful delivery of the event—which is what the joint venture (JV) was established to do. It is a new tournament delivery model where the local organizing committee and FIFA work hand-in-hand, rather than separately as in past tournaments, to avoid inefficiencies and ensure effective tournament planning and operations. It combines the vast knowledge and tactical planning experience Qatar has gained locally since winning the bid in 2010 and FIFA’s extensive tournament delivery expertise to ensure an optimum World Cup experience for fans, players, and officials in 2022. It’s been two years since the JV was launched, and since then, we witnessed various milestones on our journey to delivering the first FIFA World Cup in the Middle East and the Arab world. On this front, the JV has been essential in helping us prepare for 2022 as it enabled teams to seamlessly integrate with one another for a smooth and successful delivering of various test events and major tournament milestones.
Why is Qatar the perfect location to bring The World Cup to the Arabian Peninsula?
Hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2022 presents a unique opportunity to break down barriers and build bridges of understanding between the East and the West, dispelling misconceptions carried by many around the world. This is central to our vision of what the FIFA World
Cup will do not just for Qatar, but the entire region. Qatar is the perfect location to bring the World Cup to the Middle East for a number of reasons. Its central location means the tournament is more accessible to a higher number of fans, and the tournament can be viewed at convenient times for more than 3 billion people around the world. Qatar’s size will also enable us to deliver a unique hosting concept—the most compact FIFA World Cup since the tournament’s inaugural edition in 1930. Beyond the advantages this offers teams when it comes to maximizing resting and training periods and minimizing travel, it also means the entire country will be one large football festival. The country is also the perfect meeting point between modernity and tradition, which means it will be a fantastic host to the 1.5 million fans and visitors from across the globe we expect during the tournament. Accordingly, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar will not just be a celebration of football, but a celebration of everyone’s common humanity, offering the chance to bridge cultures and enhance mutual understanding.
2022 FIFA World Cup will be the first carbon-neutral event of its type in history. What role do you play in this?
Qatar is committed to delivering the most sustainable sporting event in history in 2022, one that drives both human and environmental development in the country. One aspect of the plan is to deliver a carbon-neutral tournament. Water conservation, waste management, carbon management, renewable energy, environmental protection, urban connectivity, biodiversity, and urban ecology are just a few of the means being used in order to achieve this goal. From an operational perspective, the tournament’s planning and the movement of fans and players also has to reflect this key consideration. Its compact nature will completely eliminate the need for air travel during the World Cup, as seen in past editions of the tournament. Fans will primarily use the state-of-the-art metro and sustainable bus network as their main means of transport, leaving a public transport network in place post2022. We also launched in early 2020 the first-ever joint sustainability strategy with FIFA that covers issues related to the preparation, staging, and legacy activities of the tournament to describe how they will support the delivery of Vision 2030 and National Development Strategy 2018-2022, as well as 11 of the UN SDGs. No other strategy has aligned to the UN SDGs or a national vision.