Fifa World Cup: Goalmouth Scramble – Ranking Qatar’s single-serving stadiums

NZME’s world-renowned football blog Goalmouth Scramble is back. Our rotating stable of football writers will offer daily hot takes on all the action from the World Cup in Qatar. Today, Damien Venuto looks at the
age of the single-serving stadium.

Qatar spent an estimated $348 billion over 12 years preparing for this World Cup, making it the most expensive edition in history.

That figure, which comes in at around $115,000 per Qatari citizen, is 15 times more than even Russia spent on its World Cup in 2018.

That money has gone into preparing the infrastructure to host the event — most notably building the stadiums in which the games could be played.

The cost of building that infrastructure goes well beyond the spreadsheets being observed by the number crunchers. They’ve also taken a massive toll on the workforce, with estimates suggesting more than 6000 (many of them migrants) lost their lives.

This has all left an incredibly uncomfortable air hanging over the event.

The thing that makes this all the more outrageous is some of these stadiums won’t even be used for football in the future because there simply aren’t enough people to fill them.

We have now well and truly entered the age of the single-serving stadium. To borrow from Fight Marla’s singer, these stadiums truly are the glass slipper (or condom) of 2022. The world will have slipped into them for one event, danced the time away and will ultimately throw them away (or “repurposed” if you trust the PR).

5. Al Janoub Stadium

Qatar didn’t hold back in designing stadiums for this tournament — and that shows in the sleek lines of the Al Janoub stadium.

Located in one of Qatar’s oldest continuously inhabited regions, the 44,000-seat stadium reflects the wind-filled sails of the traditional dhow boats that were long used in fishing and pearl harvesting off the coast of the southern city of Al Wakrah. This stadium definitely merits inclusion in this list, even if only for the controversy it sparked among those who felt that the late British-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid had sneaked in a representation of female genitalia through the design.

The Athletic reports that the architect dismissed these allegations as embarrassing and ridiculous — regardless it makes for a great backstory. The stadium will in future be used as the official home ground of the Al-Wakrah Sports Club, but it’s unlikely they’ll be hitting that 44,000 capacity after the World Cup — even with the help of some inflated numbers.

4. Al-Thumama Stadium

Amid all the corruption scandals and questions that have plagued this event, one of the strongest arguments for hosting the World Cup in Qatar was in awarding the event to an Arab nation for the first time. Qatar has grabbed that opportunity with both hands, using the stadium design to celebrate aspects of the region’s culture.

The circular Al-Thumama has been shaped to reflect the gahfiya, the traditional woven cap adorned by men and boys all across the Arab world.

Like many of the other stadiums on this list — the 44,000 capacity will be surplus to requirements once this tournament is over and will ultimately be reduced to around 20,000.

Filling even that number of seats could prove a challenge in the future.

3. Lusail Stadium

With seats for a staggering 89,000 (both real and imagined) fans, Lusail Stadium will host the final.

Whichever way that game goes, this structure already has a place in World Cup folklore as the venue of one of the greatest upsets ever seen when Saudi Arabia defeated pre-tournament favourites Argentina.

Like many other stadiums on this list, this one will also see its capacity reduced significantly in the aftermath of this tournament. In fact, football might not even be a priority for this stadium in the future. The Qatari authorities have indicated plans for the stadium to be transformed into a community space of schools, shops, cafes, sporting facilities and health clinics. I guess if you have that much space, you can do quite a bit with it.

If a stadium of this stature had been built in any other country, community groups would have bemoaned the enormous waste of money on something that would only be used for four weeks. In Qatar, it will just be written off as entertainment costs.

2. Al Bayt Stadium

It sits about 50km north of Doha and to get there you have to drive through the desert. Once you arrive, you’re treated to an aesthetic borrowed from the tents of the Bedouin nomadic people of the region.

It truly is a marvellous piece of architecture.

If any stadium has the potential to linger in the memory as representative of the first Arabic World Cup, it’s this one. It seats 69,000 and will play host to one of the semifinal matches.

Like many stadiums on this list, its future is, however, unclear. Once the football party is over, the stadium will be scaled down to around 32,000 seats. But given the tiny population of Al Khor, it is unlikely to ever again have the atmosphere that the Senegalese fans introduced during their round-of-16 match against England.

1. Stadium 974

There is perhaps no more fitting representation of the Qatar World Cup — or perhaps even ostentatious displays of capitalism — than a single-serving stadium.

Built from 974 shipping containers, this stadium will be entirely disassembled once the World Cup ends.

The plan is for the shipping containers and the structure to be reused in underdeveloped areas at some point in the future. When this is all meant to happen is unclear at this stage, but it at least offers an alternative to another unused permanent superstructure slowly rusting away in the desert.

The nostalgics among us will no doubt mourn the fleeting nature of this approach. Those who would like to point at a building and say “this is where the Brazilians danced their way to the quarter-finals” may well have to go another route to find something tangible to hold onto. Perhaps NFTs and the metaverse are our only hope at this point.