Tickets to attend matches, hotel rooms booked, flights paid for, a “Fanbox” containing a match shirt, a cap, white and red sunglasses, a national flag. A system of supporters built around the Qatar national team at the World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States, assembled through packages that combined travel, stadium access and the simple staging of presence inside the stands. According to testimonies collected by The Telegraph, the Doha football federation would have paid people to support the national team, around a thousand individuals in total, present across the first-stage matches: a draw with Switzerland on debut, defeats against Canada and Bosnia, and a finish at the bottom of the group. Supporters trained inside American stadiums, many of them with no prior experience of live football.
The “Qatari Fans Delegation Program” had been announced before the tournament as a structured scheme covering Qatar Airways flights, hotel stays and local transport for supporters travelling to the USA, described in official language as a guarantee of “a seamless fan experience” and “a vibrant atmosphere” designed to accompany the team’s performances. Students based in the US and Canada were also included in the programme, before the perimeter expanded further, bringing in people with only partial or indirect links to the Gulf region, including self-declared fans from Riyadh present in the same groups under the same financial arrangement. No comment came from either federation, Doha’s or the Saudi one, in response to The Telegraph investigation.
In Seattle, at the Hyatt Regency, the day before Qatar’s final group match against Bosnia and Herzegovina, five hundred people gathered for a briefing session, none of whom, according to the report, had previously attended a stadium event. Instructions were given on how to move, how to behave before and after the match, inside and outside the ground, followed by a coordinated walk towards the stadium and a pre-arranged form of collective support once inside. In one section of the stadium a figure acted as reference point, setting the rhythm for chants and applause through gestures that structured the response of the group. The practice itself had already been the subject of reporting during the World Cup hosted in Qatar three and a half years earlier, when similar investigations were published by The Telegraph and met with repeated denials from Doha.