This book is intended for a diverse audience including football fans from various parts of the world visiting Qatar for the first time. It is estimated that at least one million people will visit Qatar during the FIFA World Cup(tm) 2022. We planned this book to be informative, insightful and holistic. The book covers highly relevant subjects to football, from sport infrastructure, elite athletes' performance, the sport's role in health, media, and climate, to sport enthusiast experience.

THE STORY THAT BROUGHT DOWN FIFA'S SEPP BLATTER. 'With every page of this book, we see just why FIFA desperately needs a complete overhaul' - Sun When FIFA awarded the tiny desert state of Qatar the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, the news was greeted with disbelief and allegations of corruption. How had a country with almost no football infrastructure or tradition, a high terror risk and searing summer temperatures of 50C beaten more established countries with stronger bids? The story behind the Qatari success soon developed into one of the greatest sporting scandals of our time. And when the Sunday Times Insight team received a cache of hundreds of millions of documents from a whistleblower, the contents of the FIFA Files became a global sensation, unearthing the corruption that lay at the heart of the bidding process. Now in this remarkable new book by the Sunday Times journalists at the centre of the investigation, Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert, comes the most comprehensive account yet of what happened and who was involved. Above all, it explains why, despite all the evidence, FIFA continues to support Qatar - even to the extent of publishing an edited and abbreviated report into the process that was immediately denounced by its original author. Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, The Ugly Game is undoubtedly the biggest sporting story of our times. 'Never before has bribe-giving been documented in such graphic detail' - Independent

This volume offers a panoramic and interdisciplinary view of the growing field of Sports Mega-Event studies. Contributions explore leveraging strategies and the legacies from previous sports megas (London, Seoul, Sydney, Vancouver) and recent and future 'emerging' states and their hosting strategies (India, China, Qatar, Russia, Brazil).

This innovative new text examines sport's relationship with politics and argues that sport has always been political, even as far back as antiquity. However, in the last 30 years there has been an unprecedented politicization of sport through increasing government intervention. Jonathan Grix takes a comprehensive and engaging look at sport politics by examining state involvement in initiatives from sports mega-events through to grass-roots and community sport activities. Providing an accessible introduction to this growing area of study, the text examines a number of approaches to the topic – including theories from Political Science, Sociology and International Relations – and adopts a critical framework throughout. In doing so the text discusses the relationship between social capital and sport, how governments use sport for non-sporting objectives and the role of governance in sport policy. Real-world examples demonstrate just how entwined sport and politics are: from ardent soccer fans effectively 'locked-in' by ever-increasing ticket prices, to taxpayer's money funding ever more extravagant international sports mega-events, to the moral and political implications of doping.

The first complete history of the FIFA World Cup with a preview of the 2022 event in Qatar. Every four years, the world’s best national soccer teams compete for the FIFA World Cup. Billions of people tune in from around the world to experience the remarkable events unfolding live, both on and off the field. From Diego Maradona’s first goal against England at the 1986 World Cup to Nelson Mandela’s surprise appearance at the 2010 final in South Africa, these unforgettable World Cup moments have helped to create a global phenomenon. In The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet's Biggest Sporting Event, veteran soccer reporter Clemente A. Lisi chronicles the tournament from 1930 to today, including a preview of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Lisi provides vivid accounts of individual games, details the innovations that impacted the sport across the decades, and offers biographical sketches of greats such as Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi. In addition, Lisi includes needed, objective coverage of off-field controversies such as the FIFA corruption case, making this book the only complete and impartial history of the tournament. Featuring personal interviews and behind-the-scenes stories from the author’s many years attending and covering the World Cup, as well as stunning color photography, The FIFA World Cup is the definitive history of this global event.

This book offers an in‐depth analysis of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. The first World Cup to be held in the Middle East, this was a unique sporting mega‐event, and this book explores its wider significance across political, socio‐cultural, economic, organisational and historical dimensions. Featuring the work of an international team of researchers, this book includes local and regional perspectives on the Qatar World Cup as well as views from beyond the Middle East. It covers the development phase, including the bidding process, as well as the tournament itself, exploring key contemporary issues in sport and event studies such as sports diplomacy and the geopolitics of sport, post‐colonial narratives, event legacies and community development, media framing, inclusive access, sport policy and governance, and mega‐events and human rights. Making sense of the world’s biggest sports event in an era in which sport has become a source of soft power for states around the world, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the politics of sport, sport business and management, sport for development, event studies or the relationships between sport and wider society.

"In December 2010, the small Gulf state of Qatar won its bid to host the 2022 World Cup--a first for an Arab country. Over the next decade the country will undertake massive new construction to support the quadrennial world championship soccer games. Underpinning this push is a vast army of migrant workers, who comprise a staggering 94 percent of Qatar's workforce--1.2 million of its 1.7 million residents--the highest percentage of migrants to citizens in the world. Qatar's World Cup selection means that worker recruitment will reach new heights: media have reported that over a million additional workers may be needed to carry out World Cup-related construction. Yet the deeply problematic working conditions of migrant workers throughout the country mean that realizing Qatar's World Cup vision may depend on their abuse and exploitation unless adequate measures are taken to address the human rights problems widespread in the construction industry in Qatar. This report documents pervasive employer exploitation and abuse of workers in Qatar's construction industry, made possible by an inadequate legal and regulatory framework that grants employers extensive control over workers and prohibits migrant workers from exercising their rights to free association and collective bargaining. It also addresses the government's failure to enforce those laws that at least on paper are designed to protect worker rights. It examines why violations of workers' rights go largely undetected, and looks at the barriers that workers face in reporting complaints or seeking redress. The report includes recommendations to the government on legal reforms and implementation mechanisms, and to the relevant private sector actors on public commitments that could alleviate such abuses moving forward."--P. [4] of cover.