It was notthe sort of pre-tournament publicity that the organisers would have hoped for. On November 20th Qatar’s footballers will take on Ecuador in the first match of the 2022 World Cup, the biggest event in the global sporting calendar. Yet just 13 days before, Sepp Blatter, a former president ofFIFA, world football’s governing body, told a Swiss newspaper that, in his opinion, awarding the World Cup to Qatar had been a “mistake”.
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “Changing the game”
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