World Cup will not be staged in Qatar summer: FA Chairman
Thursday, 10 October 2013 00:00
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REUTERS: Less than a week after FIFA set up a task force to look into when the 2022 World Cup finals in Qatar can be held, English FA Chairman Greg Dyke said it will never take place in the searing heat of the Middle East summer.
Dyke has no jurisdiction on when the World Cup will be held as the FA do not have a seat on FIFA’s Executive Committee.
But he told delegates at the Leaders in Football that “anyone who has ever been to Qatar in the summer knows you cannot hold a football tournament there then.
“Even if you have air-conditioned stadiums, what about the fans? At big tournaments you can queue for an hour to get in. To queue for an hour in Qatar in the summer is very dangerous,” he said.
“The one thing that is certain now is that the tournament will not be held in Qatar in the summer. And we should all welcome that.
“Now the discussion starts about when it should be held assuming it stays in Qatar and I think we can probably assume it will.”
Dyke also spoke of the FIFA report that analysed all the bids for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups and concluded that it was not safe to host the finals in Qatar in the summer, where temperatures can reach 50C (125F).
Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the former chairman of the Chile FA who also chaired FIFA’s Evaluation Group into the bids, ranked Qatar as fourth out of the five bids for the 2022 finals and said in an interview before the conference that in his opinion FIFA ignored his group’s findings.
He was set to expand on that when he addressed delegates later, but Dyke said it was well known his report had been ignored by the FIFA Executive Committee.
