On November 21, the quadrennial football feast World Cup began. With the strong momentum of FIFA, Qatar, the host country of the 2022 World Cup, has also become popular all the way, and hot memes such as "dumpling skin", "toot toot and tut da", "upset ball game" and "king plays goalkeeper" were played by netizens, and this once unnoticeable Middle Eastern country suddenly became the focus of the world's attention.
The little prince of Qatar who exploded
The king of football, Beckenbauer, said: "It is not football that rolls on the green field, but gold". As a top sporting event, FIFA has never lacked capital for favor. In an interview in early October, the CEO of the cartel's World Cup organizing committee said Qatar would reap about $17 billion in revenue. $17 billion sounds tempting, but what's even more amazing is that Qatar invested $229 billion in real money for the World Cup. The difference between these two figures makes one wonder, did Qatar gain or lose.
To understand this problem, we need to know where all this money is being spent. The cost input of the World Cup host country mainly includes venues, infrastructure, accommodation facilities, security, etc., of which the largest expenditure is venue + infrastructure. Generally speaking, the host country's investment in the venue is the largest, basically between 4 billion and 10 billion. But this time, Qatar attaches the most importance to infrastructure.
Qatar has spent more than $10 billion on new venues and $210 billion on large-scale infrastructure such as transportation and hospitality facilities, including new rail lines, a new international airport and port, state-of-the-art highways, new hotels, urban cooling systems, and more. So the question arises again, why did Qatar spend so much money on infrastructure for a World Cup?
In fact, as early as 2016, Qatar officially announced that it would spend 130 billion yuan on infrastructure projects. The media called the 2022 Qatar World Cup the most expensive World Cup, but in fact, Qatar used the resounding name of the World Cup to play a deeply rooted advertisement for its country. In 2008, their king laid out a national vision: to make Qatar a sustainable and advanced country by 2030.
Qatar offshore oil fields
Everyone knows that Qatar, a desert country, can develop and become rich, relying on oil and natural gas. Qatar, a small country of 3 million people, has the world's largest natural gas fields. This is a blessing and a curse. Oil will make a country rich, but it will never be a protective shield for long-term national security. And it is precisely because Qatar is thinking of danger in times of peace and wants to get rid of its genes of relying on oil and gas to survive, that it is so eager to throw money at the country's economic transformation. Hosting the World Cup is the perfect opportunity for Qatar to open up its visibility and seek national transformation.
Modern Qatari city
If you think about Dubai next door, you can understand that the same desert country once had nothing, and made a windfall fortune purely on oil. In 2021, 1/4 of Dubai's national GDP of US$640 billion came from the consumer market, followed by tourism, manufacturing and finance, with oil accounting for only 3%. Today, Dubai has moved away from oil as a single source of national economy into a developed economy with a robust chassis. With such an excellent example ahead, Qatar will not let its country and people sit silly with the oil fields.
Holding the World Cup not only won the reputation of the most expensive World Cup, but also took into account the development and future of the entire country, which is really killing two birds with one stone. Qatar, which has a long-term vision, has spent this wave of 229 billion yuan unjustly.