Category: Qatar

The Gold line at 10 to eight on Thursday night in Doha. A crowded metro train is heading west towards the Khalifa International Stadium for Japan v Spain. A quick stock take of the carriage reveals the following: one Filipino woman from Hong Kong in a Spain shirt and baseball cap; two Japanese women in face masks talking to two Nepalese friends (one of whom flew to Qatar just for the game), both wearing Japan kits; three Korean-Americans searching for tickets; a family of Mexicans (a sombrero gives it away) rooting for Spain; three rowdy Saudi Arabia supporters; and above the door a calling card from the Argentinians who are never far away – a Panini sticker of Diego Maradona from USA 94.

It was an unlikely combination, but not an unusual one in the city these past few weeks and here’s the argument: the Doha Metro is the place to be at this World Cup. If you want to spend time talking to people from across the world, if you want to learn about their hopes and fears (mainly football-related), if you want to laugh, to sing and be reminded how much human beings have in common, then take the train. Or march up and down the escalators, or congregate in the concourses. Really, honestly, it’s where it’s at.

South Korea fans

There are a number of reasons why, starting with a substantial feat of engineering. The Doha Metro has three lines: the Gold or Historic line, which runs east to west through the older parts of the city; the Red or Coast line, which heads north to south linking the heart of Doha with the new development of Lusail, about 40km away; and finally, the Green or Education line, which takes in Qatar University, the National Library and, well, the Mall of Qatar.

It serves 37 stations along 75km of track and, 12 years ago, not a single bit of it existed. A venture involving Qatari planners, German rail operators, Japanese train manufacturers, American engineering and construction, French IT systems and British insurers, the project cost about $36bn and was delivered in nine years from the time the first tunnel boring machine activated its thrust system. It opened in 2019, in time for the Club World Cup, and around 60 more stations are planned to be added by 2026.

The experience of riding the trains is just as impressive. As an experience it is unfailingly pleasant. Driverless trains glide between stations with nary a bump. They arrive every three minutes (maybe five at 2am) and give you enough time to get on without rushing. “Event team members” on the platforms prevent overcrowding.

Quick Guide

Qatar: beyond the football

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This is a World Cup like no other. For the last 12 years the Guardian has been reporting on the issues surrounding Qatar 2022, from corruption and human rights abuses to the treatment of migrant workers and discriminatory laws. The best of our journalism is gathered on our dedicated Qatar: Beyond the Football home page for those who want to go deeper into the issues beyond the pitch.

Guardian reporting goes far beyond what happens on the pitch. Support our investigative journalism today.

Photograph: Caspar Benson

For the duration of the tournament, travel on the metro has been free to anyone with a Hayya card, the visa-turned-ID card obligatory for visitors. The gold-class carriage, a pretty pointless first-class section (you’re rarely on the train for more than 20 minutes), has also been democratised for the month. The gold-class lounges, however – tiny waiting rooms at the station where rich customers can sit in a stiff-backed chair – remain subscriber-only.

If all this sounds a bit train-spottery, it was certainly of interest to Hassan, a man in charge of a group of Morocco fans heading to the Canada game on Thursday. He, like anybody else who would talk on the subject, was a big fan of the metro but he had his complaints.

“The carriages are too small, you have to break the group in two,” he said.

“And the signage is confusing – you don’t know which direction you’re going in sometimes or which side the door is going to open. It is important that you agree a place to meet before you travel, otherwise you might get lost.”

Croatians working out how to get to Ahmad Bin Ali Stadium on the green line at Msheireb metro station before heading to their game against Belgium; Squeezing Brazil fans onto a train on the Gold line at Msheireb station before their World Cup match with Switzerland at Stadium 974.

All relevant information, but Hassan, who travelled with a 40-strong gang from Casablanca, was also indulging in the more important activity of in-train banter. His Moroccans had been joined in the carriage by two Canada fans, one wearing the desirable (and sold-out) furry headdress that mixes Arab tradition with the smiling features of the World Cup mascot La’eeb. The other wore a Canada baseball cap with a Ghana paper party hat on top.

Hassan was straight into them: “Canada? Go home!” he said. “Don’t you know it’s Christmas time? It’s time you went back for your presents!”

When the Red line train arrived at Oqba Ibn Nafie station, the Canada fans got their own back, (below) waving an enormous maple leaf flag in the faces of the Moroccans as they passed down the escalator, singing a chorus of “Olé Olé Olé”.

One Moroccan fan, Osama, also from Casablanca, insisted on giving an interview. He did not have much to say, describing the metro as “very well organised”, but he was certainly memorable. Skinny as a rake and wearing rose-tinted John Lennon spectacles, he also had a pair of inflatable moose antlers on his head, given to him by a Canadian.

At this point it is perhaps important to pause. On 28 February 2016, a construction worker from the Philippines, Juanito B Pardillo, died while working on the metro project. In April of that year the Building and Wood Workers’ International union said that his family were still waiting for an official explanation of what happened, though media reports suggested Pardillo had been helping to excavate a tunnel while it was raining when it collapsed, something that went against safety rules. Four other workers were injured. They were part of an estimated 18,000 workers working for a construction contractor on the project at the time.

For most users of the metro, however, any contact with migrant workers is likely to be with a Kenyan. They are the men who, exclusively it seems according to the foibles of the subcontracting process, fulfil the role of directing tourists in and out of the stations. Working long days, monitoring crowds that manifest only at certain times, it’s a tough gig, but these “customer service executives” have taken a mundane job and made it into something more.

It started with Abubakr Abbass, the 23-year-old whose job it was to direct crowds at the busy Souq Waqif station. Instead of issuing instructions in the time-honoured officious manner, he turned his directions into a chant: “Metro? This way! Metro? This way!” In a city full of people looking for a communal experience, it caught on.

Crowds would start the chant as they arrived at stations or stepped off trains. Abbass became a hit on TikTok and was a guest on the pitch during the England v USA group-stage match. Other young Kenyans then took the idea on, creating dance routines (complete with pointy finger foam hands) and writing longer songs. “Dear customer. Where are you going?” went one example. “You can go for the metro, or the tram, you can go this way, this way, this way.” Some who heard that version reported it being still stuck in their heads days later.

Mobility marshalls at Education City metro station.

What the Kenyans tapped into was something that can be lacking in the official spaces of the Fifa World Cup in Qatar 2022: a sense of humour. And that they were able to practise it in and around the metro was perhaps not a coincidence.

Not only is the train network one of the few places free to use in Doha, it’s also a space where you can stand still and just be. Even better, you might be able to sit down on a comfortable chair (rather than, say, the tarmac of the official Fifa fan park). It’s a space that is occupied by the public, where people all over the world gather in unexpected combinations.

I have watched matches there, discussed politics, compared prices and sought tips. I have sung and I have danced and most of all I have laughed. The metro has been an actual pleasure.

It has been overlooked so far in the middle of so many other urgent issues, but the state of Qatar is currently facing a ticklish existential question. Here is another standard-issue jaw-dropping fact about this place. Climate scientists have estimated that by the year 2070 Qatar will no longer be fit for human habitation. Wait. What?

Lodged between two seas, deprived of greenery or waterways, Qatar is warming at an alarming rate. At the same time Qatar produces more carbon per citizen, for export and domestic use, than any nation on earth. Here is a place that is basically sitting on a pile of gold, while simultaneously gnawing its own legs off. The end of the world? It’s on the check-list. The Supreme Committee is aware of your interest.

The answer, it seems, is to build new worlds. Welcome to Lusail, Lego-city of the gods, venue for Qatar’s World Cup final three weeks from now, and surely one of the strangest places on earth.

Quick Guide

Qatar: beyond the football

Show

This is a World Cup like no other. For the last 12 years the Guardian has been reporting on the issues surrounding Qatar 2022, from corruption and human rights abuses to the treatment of migrant workers and discriminatory laws. The best of our journalism is gathered on our dedicated Qatar: Beyond the Football home page for those who want to go deeper into the issues beyond the pitch.

Guardian reporting goes far beyond what happens on the pitch. Support our investigative journalism today.

Walking around Doha there is a general sense of pastiche, of parody-castles conjured out of the air. Andy Warhol would love this place, would probably say something pithy about it, like all the realest things are fake-real, or real-fake. And Warhol would love Lusail most of all, a plastic city built for a hypothetical populace, $45bn (£37bn) in the making, a kind of super-Croydon, as designed by the god of fire.

This is a planned city, built wholesale from scratch, and coloured with a mimetic sense of humour. Lusail has a replica Place Vendôme. Lusail has a fake Beverly Hills (still under construction). There’s a fake Champs-Élysées, and a fake Rimini further down the way just past Entertainment Island, south of Entertainment City (opening date TBC).

Look at it for long enough and Lusail also explains a couple things. First, why Qatar actually has the World Cup in the first place. And more to the point, why Qatar, for all its mind-boggling dictator-state modernity, should not be seen as a distinct and separate world. This is not an alternate universe. Come to sunny Lusail and find something that seems, in many ways, highly familiar. First, though, the future shock.

Walking into town past the Iconic Stadium, venue for the World Cup final, you wind down Lusail Boulevard, pipeline to the heart of the city. In a World Cup week it is peopled by a trickle of awed tourists, a mix of Saudis, locals and football-shirted huddles, with a vague sense of some frontier adventure in train, astronauts discovering the Eiffel Tower on an alien beach.

The Boulevard is an amazing thing, a vast, gleaming causeway of perfect surfaces, electrified with sound and light, modelled on the Champs-Élysées, but the Champs-Élysées as reimagined by the members of Kraftwerk in a peyote trance.

Here is a vast gloss-finish colonnade. Here are looming mirrored edifices on both sides. Giant golden pepper grinder towers rise at its end point, because, well, why not? Shiny motorised wild-west carriages wait for someone who wants to ride in a shiny motorised wild-west carriage. Here is an enormous pristine Chuck E Cheese, seductively lit but also empty and sealed, the only sign of life in an orderly row of rat traps.

It is a perfect city-scape, albeit one that after about 50 metres becomes pretty much unbearable, an overload of the senses. The piped music is inescapable. Vast scrolling screens carry Stalinist-scale Neymar watch adverts. And as you struggle on, lost in this urban TikTok world, something else keeps happening. Gusts of cold air surge from the pavement gulleys, freezing your ankles. Of course, of course. The municipal authority of Lusail is forcibly cooling the streets. This is how we, humanity, will fight climate change. Crank the dial. Let’s air-condition the world.

Late on Saturday morning a blaze will break out in one of the towers of Lusail, sending a cloud of black smoke above the skyline. The future, it seems, is on fire. But don’t look up. Enjoy the high-spec present. As they say on the Qatar 2022 Supreme Delivery Committee: Now Is All.

And later that evening, speeding along the marbleised esplanade towards the lights of Winter Wonderland, a machine voice can be heard emerging from some hidden grill. “Please go back. You are out of the approved zone. Please stay in the approved zone.” It is a fair point well made. We are some way from the approved zone out here. Supercharged by Qatar’s’s despot-ball World Cup, a new world is being built. But for who?

The official version of Lusail is more prosaic and more reasonable. Qatar first announced the plans for this place in 2005, billing it as “a sustainable lifestyle and community … a haven that is set to attract the world in the coming years”. It is now close to being finished, arching all the way around what was once an empty bay, from The Iconic at one end down to the marina, the esplanade, the man-made islands, the distant Parisian domes.

Lusail is a place foreigners can buy (very expensive) Qatari real estate, most commonly on a 99-year lease. It will eventually host 450,000 people, 250,00 of them its privileged residents, the other 200,000 service people and workers. Lusail is building 36 new schools, a giraffe zoo, water parks and promenades, much of it designed around a mimesis of the old world, a post-modern Milton Keynes of the hyper-rich.

It is also beautiful, of course, and crammed with grandiose creative design. In the distance the outline of a vast metal whale shark sculpture floats above the boulevard, lashed on thin steel ropes. The giant shark in the sky is there to indicate (of course), Qatar’s total commitment to preserving wildlife and ecology. It hovers, dream-like, lovely, menacing.

And at the end of the boulevard are other walkways, other genres. At the end of the boulevard is, in fact, a surprisingly good Elvis impersonator, flanked by a peppy band and serenading a small crowd of street sweepers and tourists about the perils of stepping on his blue suede shoes. “Mmmmthangyverrymuch,” Elvis says, then launches into a lavish, deliciously melodic version of It’s Now Or Never, those fat sweet minor chords filling the empty air.

Further down there is a kind of ziggurat made from huge Rubik cubes and ringed by giant white swing pods. The heat by the water is soft, every surface bathed in red-blue light. Across the bay a mountainous roller coaster is being built. Crisp new football flags stand erect. A sculpted World Cup sign spells I Heart Qatar. Senses flushed, swooning a little, you feel the tug of the sweet, sweet, sports-washing.

Across the deserted bay Lusail Proper looms. There are cars here and people on the walkways, although most seem to be present to serve the people who don’t yet exist. Bugsy Malone-style open-top stretch limos idle. Five basking policemen whistle at a lone jaywalker. The lampposts evolve into curlicued ironwork. And entering the Vendôme through vast sliding doors beneath golden fake stone buttresses, a transition takes place.

Inside this is just another entrance point to the global luxury shopping-verse. The halls are patrolled by squadrons of security men. The dancing fountains at its centre are ringed by fancy eateries. As the sun dips the lights fill this place with gold. It is frankly incroyable, habibi. A large sign on one wall reads There Can Only Be Beautiful Things to Look Forward To. An encouraging thought. But is it true?

Because this thing is also unnerving. There is wealth and life here, but also the sense of a sealed world, an arc in the desert on a planet of eight billion people. Lusail’s public literature keeps using the word “sustainable”, which is an interesting notion. And now I am become Death: builder of vast and decorative shopping malls.

And yes, death does keep coming up around here. At Yacht Club tram station on the bay a sign reads “Football is a culture of peace and respect of human rights”. Next to it is a 24-hour hotline number to Qatar’s National Human Rights Committee. It is tempting go give it a call. “Hello? Is that the NHRC? I’d like to report the unexplored deaths of up to 6,500 migrant workers… Er… Hello…?”

Qatar’s World Cup development is an engineering miracle. But this is also a guilty miracle. As night creeps in along the lighted seafront, the loudest noises are the clanks and bangs from inside a darkened skeleton skyscraper. Is it falling down? No. This is the sound of people working, hammering this place of panels and precast blocs together, and with plenty of human waste along the way. The migrant workers haunt this place, ghosts at the feast, shadows on the edge of your vision at Qatar’s gleaming stadiums.

Very few things have ever been built on this scale and at this speed without human suffering. The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, would like us to ponder three thousand years (is this right?) of European colonialism before even considering unionised rights and working safety standards for people building a needless vanity project right here and right now.

It is a nonsensical line from a despot’s glove puppet. Infantino spent his opening speech at this World Cup lambasting the power hungry elites in service of his own power hungry elite. His every public utterance is like having both ears violently syringed with a solution of walnut oil, amour propre and corporate lies.

And yet, and yet, and yet, there is of course a kernel truth in Infantino’s line of half-thought. There is a strong feeling at this World Cup, taking in the corruption at its source, the repressive laws of its host nation, the absurdity of its basic existence, of simply shouting and pointing at something opaque. And just as Lusail may be startling , as it is intended to be, the othering of Qatar is to be resisted. In fact, look closely and there is a kind of clarity in its more extreme notes.

For one thing it is hard not to be wowed by this new build city, to like it. Someone has to make something new. Why not this? And new things are always strange. There is also the fact the frantic development of Lusail and indeed this World Cup is born out of security threats. This play-place for the global rich is also a form of ballast against regional power grabs. Qatar was until recently a very small spot on the map, keeper of the world’s third largest energy reserves.

Football, sport, investment, the building of Lusail. This is all about connecting to the world, not so much to be liked, as to be respected, to be a player. Fifa is now on site. Qatar has ultimate visibility.

And beyond that Qatar is not, when you look more widely, some kind of rogue state peopled by a different kind of human being. In fact, the best way to look at it is perhaps as a very literal-minded and efficient expression of the forces at work across every other modern state. Qatar just does it wilder, harder and without apology. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of supremely wealthy overlords, of the surveillance state, of an underclass of workers, of increasingly repressive laws, of the global carbon addiction. Do any of these sound familiar? In many ways Qatar is like your furiously able and efficient younger colleague; who has essentially looked at this, learnt the mannerisms, and said, yeah, we can do that.

So Qatar builds its Venice and its Paris on the fly, crams a hundred years of growth into a decade, without the cultural flora and fauna to hide its workings. Here it is doing the same thing with the World Cup. OK, we can have one of those. It’s going to be massive. Just like yours. This is the message of Lusail, and of the vast and echoey Iconic Stadium, a kind of warning from the future. Welcome to Winter Wonderland.

At the end of the bay the lights melt into the sea. Enormous shiny cars crawl along the double lane highway and turn back. This part of town is not empty. There is an industry of the World Cup here, some early settlers, native joggers, tourists luxuriating in the dreamy glaze of this waterfront Narnia. As the land ends past the Wonderland the scooter motor clicks off, extended beyond its range. Please go back. You are out of the zone.