Editorial

Qatar Is Booking World Cup Fans In Shipping Containers For Over $200 Per Night

(Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)

Andrew Powell Sports and Entertainment Blogger
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It turns out Qatar has this “fan village” set up for World Cup fans where you can book a hotel room, but here’s the problem: It’s not a hotel room that you’ll be staying in, it’s a shipping container.

Photos from AFP have surfaced that show this apparent “fan village” that is meant to fit 60,000 fans with 30,000 rooms, erm, shipping containers (for more than $200 per night by the way) that aren’t even to the standards of a basic dorm room in some rinky-dink college in Tennessee.

Corrupt soccer officials got paid, and World Cup fans got played.

It’s not even that shipping containers are a problem, hell, shipping containers are a cheap way to live, but it’s not necessarily the best thing to cramp 60,000 crazy soccer fans from all walks of life, cultures and languages in the hot Middle Eastern desert with the World Cup at stakes out of all things in rooms that have zero evidence whatsoever of cooling.

Oh, you get a blind on the only window on the shipping container. Cool.

Equipped in the room other than your one blind and one window: Two small beds, a little bathroom and a miniature refrigerator, and then you get some table that you won’t use and a nightstand that will come in handy for charging your phone. Now that’s high livin’!

Here’s the thing: To be fair to Qatar, the logic isn’t bad. It’s like what we previously went over: Shipping containers are a good way to save money. But we’re doing this for the World Cup? We’re doing this in the desert?

Let’s just be clear here: If you’re in such a bad financial state and/or don’t have the right infrastructure where you’re being forced to use shipping containers rather than hotel rooms, then you probably don’t deserve to host a World Cup. And it’s not even just the shipping containers that are the problem either, the whole “village” is a disaster, also being equipped with small dining rooms with a few little portable air conditioners — that are meant to hold hundreds, by the way.

But hey, at least Qatar is giving fans a few designated areas where soccer fans can drink alcohol.

What a disaster, though. And you know it’s going to get even worse as we get closer to the actual soccer games starting, and then you can just imagine how much worse the stories will get when we’re in the middle of the World Cup. It’s going to be bad, but also thoroughbred entertainment to spectate and write about. You can just smell the content. (RELATED: Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter Claims Nicolas Sarkozy Pressured Officials To Choose Qatar For World Cup)

And all of this because soccer executives wanted to get paid, and now the World Cup is stuck in a situation where sports bloggers like myself will take advantage to talk absolute trash.

Hey, maybe this isn’t so bad after all.