Qatar Unlikely to Benefit as Host of 2022 Soccer World Cup, Citigroup Says
Qatar, awarded the right to host the 2022 soccer World Cup last year, won’t see an economic benefit from hosting the event, Citigroup Inc. (C)’s chief economist for the Middle East said.
“You do risk having hotel rooms sitting idle for a long time,” Farouk Soussa said at a conference in Doha, Qatar, today. “I would not say, from a cost-benefit analysis, the World Cup is going to be net beneficial to Qatar.”
Qatar will need to increase the number of hotel rooms tenfold to reach the 90,000 pledged, he said. Existing hotel occupancy rates hover at about 60 percent in the emirate, he said. The country, with a population of about 1.6 million people, will be the smallest to host the tournament since Uruguay in 1930.
Qatar beat the U.S., Australia, South Korea and Japan to win the 2022 World Cup at a ceremony hosted in Zurich in December. The country will invest about $88 billion in infrastructure for the World Cup, Qatar National Bank’s Assistant General Manager and Head of Project Finance Enrico Grino said today.
As part of its bid, Qatar pledged to build nine new stadiums and refurbish three others, each of which will utilize solar-powered cooling technology in a country where summer temperatures rise as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
The emirate’s bid also included building accommodation for visitors, rail and metro links as well as a bridge to nearby Bahrain. The new stadiums will be partly dismantled and shipped to developing countries when the event is over to help mitigate the problem of unneeded infrastructures.
Most economic benefits from expenditures for the World Cup won’t come until after 2016, the state-run General Secretariat for Development Planning said in a March 28 report.
Qatar, the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, projects its economy to expand by 20 percent this year in nominal terms. The country will have the world’s fastest growing gross domestic, according to International Monetary Fund projections.
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Tuttle in Doha at rtuttle@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Voss on sev@bloomberg.net
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