Choosing Qatar To Host the 2022 World Cup Shows FIFA Needs an Overhaul

Today in Zurich, the world found out that Russia and Qatar each will host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

The announcement for this combo to host these two World Cups is, to say the least, a surprise for many football fans.

Going into the final vote, it was widely expected to see the combined bid of Spain and Portugal win the 2018 World Cup, while the United States and Qatar were going to battle to host the 2022 World Cup.

However, that was not to be as even the failure of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to arrive and then call FIFA a corrupt organization wasn't enough to deny Russia the 2018 World Cup.

Meanwhile, Qatar were able to dazzle FIFA executives enough with their bid to win the World Cup.

However, Qatar's successful bid has many major problems that it must confront.

In FIFA's bid evaluation report, it was shown that Qatar was a medium risk in eight of the 17 categories for legal evaluation and operational risk.

Plus, it had a high risk for team facilities. Last time I checked, the World Cup is a festival that is created surrounding football.

So if the football that will be played at the 2022 World Cup is weak, odds are that the tournament will be remembered as one of the worst ever in terms of play.

It also doesn't help to have nations such as Haiti, Libya and Armenia all have a higher FIFA World Ranking than Qatar, who are currently ranked 113th in the world.

Qatar also have a massive problem by putting all of their stadiums within such a close distance with each other.

By having so many close stadiums, we will see over congestion in Doha during this World Cup due to the fact that Qatar will not be large enough to hold so many people.

And that could quite easily lead to a disastrous situation in the terms of either a terrorist attack or a pandemic.

Qatar has also never hosted an event bigger than the 2006 Doha Asian Games, which makes one wonder if they can host the world's biggest sporting event?

Even though it is 12 years away, FIFA will also need to wonder how will relations between the West the Middle East be leading into the 2022 World Cup.

Despite an improvement in relations during the last several years, a lot can happen in 12 years, which makes this decision by FIFA even more confusing.

With a 12-year window, it makes perfect sense to choose the safest host, which could have either been the United States or Australia.

Even without these decisions, the events that have happened in the last several months should clearly indicate that FIFA needs to have a massive overhaul.

This all started with supposed gifts given from the Australian committee to FIFA executive members last July.

Then, England's Sunday Times did an investigative report that eliminated Nigerian Amos Adamu and Oceania's Reynald Temarii from the final vote after it was found that both members were willing to sell their World Cup votes to the highest bidder.

To close everything out, BBC's series Panorama did a documentary exposing several FIFA members and their ways of corruption during the beginning of the week.

No wonder that both England and Australia were the first sides eliminated in their respective votes for the World Cup after their embarrassment to FIFA.

But there are still more problems that FIFA has been afraid of.

For starters, Qatar's bid committee was able to buy the World Cup through the large amount of petrol money that it has accumulated over the last couple of years.

Along with that, Qatar's bid was widely backed by native Qatari Mohammad Bin Hammam, who is a FIFA executive committee member.

It has been widely believed that Bin Hammam is going to run against Sepp Blatter for the FIFA Presidency next year, and Blatter (who widely supported the bid) will probably not have to face Bin Hammam for FIFA's Presidency.

However, this can all be fixed by having someone attempt to become the new president of FIFA during next year's election.

Sepp Blatter is a conservative football President whose time as President of FIFA should now be up.

Blatter has remained reluctant to implement in goal line technology and refuses to say that FIFA is corrupt.

After having these two policies of Blatter get crushed embarrassingly over the last several months, Blatter needs to step down to avoid any more embarrassment to hit football.

Hopefully from this decision today, FIFA will now take a major step forward and remove corruption in its sport by having a replacement to Sepp Blatter.

By doing this, football will make sense again and can move into the 21st Century, just like Qatar's World Cup bid will do.