[QatzelOk]

Whether appearing in press conferences, on billboards, or hosting a 30-minute travel spot for the country’s tourism board, Qatar is eking out all the value it can from the reported tens of millions paid to Mr. Beckham to be a cultural ambassador.

His contract is just a rounding error, however, when it comes to the billions spent in getting Qatar ready for the tournament, which kicks off with a match between the hosts and Ecuador this Sunday. As well as the official budget of around $10-billion, Qatar has pumped a further $290-billion into infrastructure projects in the past decade, building new roads, shopping malls and subway stations.

Although the kingdom (emirate) claims to have spent money on "infrastructure" that would have been built anyways, I live in a city that also "justified" outrageous infrastructure expenses during both a World Exposition (Expo 67) and an Olympic Games (1976 summer), the latter of which almost bankrupted both Montreal and the province of Québec. The debt of the olympic games lead the Canadian government to introduce lotteries (to recoup more than taxes would allow) and forced municipalities to cut things like amateur sports programs, and needed mass transit expansions. For 20 years!

So this is 300 billion dollars being spent by a Middle East dictator on a spectacle. And the "world community" supports this. Perhaps many high profile members of "the world community" are getting some of the funds? Likewise, the elite of Qatar society are able to employ their non-citizen workforce.

Construction also employs almost half Qatar's labour force, which helped boost the population by around 67% since 2011.

For one tenth this amount (25 billion), another Arab speaking dictator built the Great Man-Made River project, which discovered (and was in the process of distributing) enough potable water to irrigate most of North Africa for the next 5 centuries!


Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani
$300 billion on a soccer tournament
Big Smile + firm western support

...


Muamar Ghaddafi
$25 billion to bring water to North Africa
Killed by the West, his country still being destroyed by the west

...

You are what you support.