In Doha, calm and peace is relative. This is a city of a dozen hums: the incessant grumble of traffic, which doesn’t seem to abate in day or night; the endless tooting of car horns, which can signify anything from “I’m behind you” to “I’ve just had a thought”; the constant building work; the air conditioning buzz that greets your entrance through every door; the rumble of the metro several floors below your head as it lies on the pillow; the call to prayer that rolls across the city five times a day.
Al Bidda Park is its haven. In the maelstrom of a World Cup – particularly this World Cup, effectively housed within one city – the pace is relentless. Every press conference, training ground and match is available; guilt, imposter syndrome and FOMO combine to become a powerful fuel. Taking the chance to sit, read, work and walk in a green space is an act of self-sanctuary.
Al Bidda is, like so much of Doha’s new build, entirely over the top: 1.8 million square metres of grass and paths that stretches from Al Rayyan Road in the south to Qatar’s national theatre in the north and follows the curve of the Corniche waterfront. It was the home of Doha’s historical heart, dating back to the 1680s, then used as a housing area for pearl divers. Things have moved on since.
If Willy Wonka designed a city park, he would use Al Bidda as his blueprint. Its renovation, beginning in 2014, took over three years. It has five-a-side football pitches, courts for volleyball, tennis, basketball and padel. It has eight adventure playgrounds, four outside gymnasiums and two running tracks with sprung floors. It has barbecue areas cut into man-made grass banks that look like hobbit houses. It has cycle paths and gazebos, a pet boutique and a dog agility yard. And it is all built on top of an underground car park that can fit up to 6,000 vehicles (although I never see a single car enter it).
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It is all, really, too perfect. The first image of Qatar as you drive in from the airport to the city is of a Sim City save. The vast space of the desert and the vast wealth of those who govern it creates limitless opportunity for construction. The newness of everything gives it a Stepford Wives element that Al Bidda Park positively bursts with. No blade of grass appears out of place, no leaf unswept. This affectation is only enhanced by the view of the West Bay skyline that appears through and above the ghaf and acacia trees. It offers the impression of a computer screensaver, near enough to be real but out of reach like F Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg.
On 14 consecutive days I spend time in Al Bidda. Sometimes just an hour to sit and read. Sometimes to do several hours of work. Sometimes to walk – I create one official looping route and two more when I fancy change. I crave routine and that itch needs scratching, even more when I’m thousands miles from a home that is preparing for Christmas while I sit under a cloudless sky. I know this park now.
Al Bidda’s perfection, a green oasis placed onto a sandy, dusty canvas, is maintained by one of the three elements: water. Across every flower bed, miles of hosepipes have been laid and pricked with holes so that, when the centralised watering system is turned on, everywhere is replenished. The grassland is done via a more manual process, but is kept green throughout summers where average temperatures reach 35 degrees. That temperature is rising year on year to the point that experts believe Qatar may be inhospitable by 2070.
The greatest climate change issue facing Qatar 2022 was the necessary desalination of water for use in agriculture and consumption, including watering the turf in each of the stadiums and training grounds and, obviously, the grass in Al Bidda park. Desalination uses fossil fuels and is a polluter to marine life. According to a report by Reuters, the stadiums and training grounds alone required an extra 10,000 litres of desalinated water per day.
That offers persuasive evidence that claims of carbon neutrality at this tournament are, like everything in Doha, built on sand. Qatar’s environmental record is not good: the Global Footprint Network ranks the country first in the world for per capita usage. The accusation from multiple environmental charities is that the actual cost to the climate crisis may be four or six times greater than conceded. Its net-zero promise was nothing but greenwashing.
If water feeds the land, people work it. The manual processes, just like everything else that takes serious reserves of effort in Doha, is carried out by a cavalcade of migrant workers. There are 300 at any one time in Al Bidda, at a very rough and very conservative estimate. They stay under shade when opportunity allows, but it rarely allows here. In the baking heat of the constant sun, you have to remind yourself that these are Doha’s coolest days of the year.
There are men in brown overalls who prune the plants and kneel to do the weeding, piling up the offending items in large heaps that are then thrown into the back of a truck. There are men in blue overalls who form a handyman army: fixing fountains, attending to the barbecues, sweeping paths, cleaning toilet blocks (which would be more in-keeping with an upmarket hotel). There are marshals, wearing smart black trousers and hi-vis bibs who arrive on match days just before midday. There are security guards, because the running joke is that you cannot walk for 20 metres in Doha without seeing a security guard. They all intersperse with tournament volunteers to create a mass workforce.
There is no way to say this without sounding unacceptably patronising but: everyone is heart-achingly friendly. In a country that is deeply conservative and private, Doha’s migrant workers are the emphatic exception that become the rule because of their numbers. They laugh at me as I do laps of the park but wish me well. They ask me, repeatedly, if I need anything or would like a bottle of water from their cool box. To do a lap of Al Bidda is to say “Good morning” at least 50 times.
I have favourites, because that is how human nature works: Mukisa, a Ugandan who takes photos of the names of the books I read on his phone; the two Keralan men who did not know each other in India but work together in the coffee booth, a seamlessly efficient operation. The Bangladeshi man (name withheld on request) with whom I share the same joke: “Where are you going sir?” “Just walking” “Every day just walking!”
These people, and many hundreds of thousands of people like them, have made this World Cup – figuratively and literally. Not Qatar’s Supreme Committee, who will believe that their money made it happen and are, evidently, partly right. Not Fifa, who will insist that they brought the show to town but allowed the circus to accompany it. These migrant workers have powered the 2022 World Cup and they have been mistreated, forced into a system that amounts to modern slavery. For all that the usual memories of a tournament have been generated within the eight stadiums that they built, we must never forget that because to forget is to implicitly forgive.
Not every migrant worker in Doha is outwardly unhappy with their lot. We must not railroad our views over theirs and we must reflect their feelings, because if we don’t we do no better than the state that dehumanised them into a unit of work. Many of the people I meet in Al Bidda point out that they are earning more money in Qatar than they are getting back home.
They send as much of their wage as they can to provide for children, care for elders and give a little more disposable income to partners, but more than any of that they provide for the unknown future, the days after Doha. This World Cup has provided them with opportunity, they say, and are astonished at any criticism. Momentarily, repeatedly, this causes an internal moral conflict.
There are three answers to this that flicker on an unshakeable loop. The first is that the people I meet – if they are telling me their true feelings – are the lucky ones. Hassan Al-Thawadi, the secretary-general of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, let slip a figure of “400-500 deaths” of migrant workers midway through the tournament; independent estimates put the total at least 10 times higher. We know of passports being confiscated and applications to leave work rejected. This is a system of deliberately broken promises.
It is also evident that many migrant workers have been scared to reveal the extent of those issues due to a culture of fear. After England’s players met workers ahead of their opening group game, we were permitted to interview one of the group. A translator was provided, but not needed for each answer was the same: “I have a good life here and Qatar is a great country.” It became deeply uncomfortable to hear the same answer, whatever the question.
Even if many migrant workers are accepting of their situation, that cannot act as the definitive judge of the system. It may provide some solace – to them and, lamentably, to me as a western visitor – but it does not alter the presence of a working environment equivalent to modern slavery: long hours, little to no holiday, low pay, tough conditions. Those who could have helped, haven’t. Qatar could afford to pay them properly. Fifa could afford to create a remedy fund for the exploited. Neither did.
Speaking to supporters of many different nations during this tournament, a large percentage conceded that they had either not been made aware or had not considered how this vast World Cup land was built in a decade. Most agreed that Nasser Al-Khater, the chief executive of World Cup Qatar 2022, describing death as a natural part of life in the aftermath of a Filipino worker in a forklift accident, was disappointing, but few seemed outraged. Qatar’s rulers banked on these people not being cared about. They gambled successfully.
But the state is not the same as the people; shout that from the rooftops. Qatar is not all Emirs and Supreme Committee members and VVIPs. It is not Al Bidda park, that manufactured shelter from reality. It is Al Jazeera Street, where workers from a score of nations sell goods to, and cook food for, other migrant workers. It is the vast WhatsApp groups between people of the same nationality, offering tips and advice. It is everyone I meet in Al Bidda and with whom I – because I am soppy and out of subconscious guilt – now consider myself to be friends on some level. It is the tiny minority of people who I spoke to and the vast majority I didn’t.
The abiding image of Al Bidda, the one that will stick fast in the mind when I am far away, is of a World Cup volunteer holding a large cardboard hand with a pointing finger. It directs the gaze to… another World Cup volunteer holding a large cardboard hand with a pointing finger. And so the pattern continues, until the sixth or seventh volunteer directs your gaze to a metro station or crossing that was obvious in the first place.
This would strike as a vaguely ridiculous overegging of the pudding if there were vast crowds. There are no crowds. There is nobody walking past these volunteers and yet there they must stay, just in case someone passes through or someone comes to check that they remain in situ. One of the viral sensations of this tournament is the phrase “Metro – this way!” because it is shouted on repeat by these volunteers, particularly in the stations near to World Cup stadiums.
Al Bidda is not just quiet; it is aggressively empty, like those photographs you see every year of city centres on Christmas morning. It is apocalypse movie empty. It is dystopically empty. You can walk for 20 minutes in this expanse of green and paths and see nobody but employees making sure it looks its best for nobody. Occasionally, a golf buggy whirs past – their drivers are tasked with ferrying guests from the metro station to the other side of the park as quickly as possibly. Do they count as visitors?
Quietness is a virtue of ambition: you want it when you don’t have it; when you have it, you often don’t want it. After a while, the place you came to for serenity takes on a different tinge. The two bike hire businesses never open their doors. Buses pass up and down the coastal road on one edge of the park with no passengers. Most of the booths that promise food and drink stay closed (the official website lists several as “opening soon!!!” but if not now then when?). The dog boutique is not used (I don’t think I even saw a dog in Doha). I never see the padel or volleyball courts used and see four people in two weeks use the gym equipment. All those hours spent working to create perfection, and for what? An oasis only appears if someone is there to see it.
Fifa and Qatar’s Supreme Committee predicted that 1.2 million tourists would arrive in Qatar for this tournament. There is no reason to doubt those figures yet. But given that this is a one city World Cup, that city has not felt busy. Attendances at matches have been talked up by Fifa, but empty seats and television cameras have often caught each other’s eye. The exorbitant accommodation costs forced many to stay in the out-of-town tented villages or cabin cities. Others have flown in and out of neighbouring countries. I have barely seen a single tourist in Al Bidda.
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The answer, as with most of Doha and its surroundings, is that this phenomenal and phenomenally empty place is here because they wanted it to be here. The Silver Pearl hotel with its half-ring shape, the 30-metre shark that hangs above Lusail Boulevard, the Pearl-Qatar, a manmade island of uber-opulence; these are not necessities. Qatar did it because they could, they did it because they had people to build it for them and they did it so that they could say that they had done it. They spent more than three years creating a perfect park not so it could be enjoyed to its full potential, but so that they could keep it perfect and revel in its perfection.
Before 2022, the most expensive World Cup in terms of investment in infrastructure was Brazil in 2014 at $15bn. This one reportedly cost more than 14 times as much. The latest estimate on the economic gain is just $17bn. This was a fantastical loss-leader, a sportswashing attempt on the grandest scale in history, the plaything of the billionaire city-builders and dream-sellers.
If there is any legacy of this World Cup, it is that there is no legacy. “Now is All” is the official Qatar World Cup slogan. It was a subliminal message to move on from the past, to forget about the controversies and to focus on the football. It was also a message to forget about the future: what happens to the migrant workers now? Will you really continue to improve LGBTQ rights? That is why it was so important to talk up the issues before and during the tournament: when the circus leaves town the noise leaves with it.
I will miss Al Bidda park: its people, its routine, its antidote to the mania of World Cup life. But for all the time I spent in it, I can’t say that I liked it. In one of those interminable PR emails you receive before and during a tournament, there was a line about it. With a fan park placed at one end, and the anticipation of a month-long party atmosphere, Al Bidda was described as “The soul of the tournament”. I make them right. Just not how they imagined it.
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