GCC blockade poses no risk to Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup, says Al Thawadi

There have been a lot of rumours circulating on the internet that the four month-old illegal blockade of Qatar would eventually lead to the country being stripped of the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

However Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, bluntly rejected all those rumours and reiterated that the Middle East and Arab world’s first World Cup was under no threat.

“We’ve come under criticism and attack over the years, but we’ve always faced our critics,” he said, according to Al Jazeera.

He said that logistical obstacles are being overcome and building work continuing with only minimal cost increases.

“Our projects are going ahead as scheduled. This (blockade) is no risk in relation to the hosting of the World Cup,” he said.

“Every project has contingency plans and we’ve had contingency plans in place from the very start,” Gulf Times quoted him as saying.

“Once the blockade came into play we contacted the main contractors, put in place alternative supply chains and sourced alternative materials from alternate suppliers. I’m very happy to say our project scale is on time and there’s no significant impact on our projects,” he added.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in August, Thawadi had called the World Cup ‘the perfect tool to genuinely fight and stop the supply of terrorists’ to armed groups.

“The World Cup is the quintessential opportunity, the quintessential platform for the region,” he had said.

“The World Cup has the ability to be an economic engine, or at least contribute to an economic engine through a sports-integrated economy. It has the opportunity to support the skills development and … human capacity development for the youth of the region,” he said.

Picture courtesy: FIFA.com