GettyFIFA has confirmed the next World Cup will be held in winter.
The 2022 tournament hosted by Qatar, will take place from November 21 to December 18 due to the anti-social temperature levels experienced during summer in the Persian Gulf country.
As a result, European leagues will have to adapt as the tournament, as it stands, will clash with their seasons.
It will be the first time the World Cup takes place at this time of year, the Birmingham Mail reports.
GettyFIFA vice-president Jim Boyce discussed the possibility of a winter tournament to BBC in 2015 saying:
I think it could be a tremendous World Cup because I think players will be fresher than they have ever been. It’s going to be 28 days, it’s not a lifetime. It means [domestic leagues] starting three weeks earlier and finishing three weeks later for one year.
The World Cup, for me, is the greatest sporting event in the calendar, not only for the players but for the thousands of spectators who will be going to the world cup and I think that the conditions have got to be right for the players and for the spectators.
The Qatar World Cup has been marred in controversy following claims of bribery and deaths of migrant labourers building stadiums.
Qatar bid CEO Hassan Al-Thawadi praised FIFA for taking a ‘bold gamble’ when they voted in favour of the Arab state bagging the tournament instead of the US.
There have since been a number of unproven claims thrown at FIFA over the result of the vote, with some claiming Qatar bought their way to victory.
An investigation came to a dead end, but the head of FIFA’s Audit And Compliance Committee, Domenico Scala, made it known that any evidence of bribery found could result in the reversal of the decision to award Qatar the World Cup.
Reuters / Mohammed DabbousSepp Blatter, president of FIFA until 2015, said of the controversy:
You cannot buy a World Cup, it will go at the end where the higher political influences are. For World Cup 2022, Platini at least had the courtesy to phone me and say: ‘Now we have had a meeting with the head of state and if the head of state is asking me to support France for different reasons then I will’. He was very correct, he phoned me and said my vote will not be for the Americans.
He said if a head of state is asking you, you can still say yes or no, but in the interests of France … I knew then there would be a problem, we tried but it was too late. It was one week or 10 days before the vote. I tried to see what votes were left for the US but four votes were lost.
The bidding procedure began in January 2009. In the end, there were five bids for the 2022 World Cup: Australia, Japan, Qatar, South Korea and the United States. The following year, Russia and Qatar were announced as 2018’s and 2022’s hosts respectively.
Let’s just focus on Euro 2020 shall we?
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