One of the great aspects of the World Cup — at least from a U.S. perspective — is that it typically falls in the summer with very little competition from an otherwise crowded American sports landscape.
That won’t be the case with this World Cup.
FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to Qatar in 2010 after what was exposed as a corrupt process. And while that corruption and Qatar’s human rights violations drew most of the pressure on FIFA to strip Qatar of this World Cup, another major issue was so obvious from the start:
The summers are dangerously hot in Qatar.
The average summer highs in Qatar are around 108 degrees Fahrenheit. You simply cannot play soccer outside in those conditions.
Qatar initially promised things like innovative climate-control systems and retractable-roof stadiums to calm those concerns. But when it became obvious that Qatar couldn’t deliver on many of those features, FIFA opted to move the tournament to the winter where temperatures are a tolerable 75 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit on average.
That, of course, meant that top club leagues would have to work an extended pause into their schedules, which wasn’t ideal for anyone.
On top of that, national teams basically just have to cross their fingers and hope key players make it through the first four months of the season without getting injured for Qatar. We’ve already seen that have a major impact as France will be without Paul Pogba and N’Golo Kante. England will be without Reece James and possibly Ben Chilwell. The U.S. is also hoping Weston McKennie will be healthy enough for Qatar after sustaining an injury with Juventus.
So, yeah, the winter World Cup didn’t even need to start to have issues. Everyone saw this coming, but not enough was done to force FIFA into choosing a new host. And for that, we get a winter World Cup.
