Saudi Arabia has been announced as the host nation for the 2034 Men's World Cup, with FIFA rubber-stamping the confirmation of the 2030 and 2034 editions of the tournament on Dec. 11.
A joint bid involving Morocco, Portugal and Spain, combined with one game each in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to mark the centenary of the first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930, will be confirmed by FIFA for 2030 due to being the only bid for that competition's hosting rights.
As the only candidate to stage the 2034 Men's World Cup, Saudi Arabia will become the second Middle East nation to host the tournament after Qatar in 2022. And just as Qatar 2022 was shrouded in controversy from the moment the tiny Arabian Gulf state was confirmed as host in December 2010, the decision to take football's biggest event to Saudi Arabia has also raised questions.
Even though the 2034 Men's World Cup is still a decade away, there are plenty of issues surrounding Saudi Arabia 2034, including human rights, such as the treatment of women and the LGBTQIA+ community, the requirement to build stadiums and infrastructure, the potential climate, depending on the tournament would be played, and the overall experience.
Why was Saudi Arabia the only bid for 2034?
When the bidding process for 2030 and 2034 was announced in Oct 2023, the FIFA Council adopted a so-called "principle of confederation rotation" to ensure that five of its six confederations -- Europe (UEFA), South America (CONMEBOL), Asia (AFC), Africa (CAF) and Oceania (OFC) -- would be considered as potential hosts. Concacaf, the North and Central American confederation, was omitted due to the 2026 Men's World Cup being staged in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
With Qatar hosting in 2022, Asia would ordinarily have had to wait until 2042 to host another World Cup under the terms of confederation rotation, but the decision to stage the 2030 tournament across three confederations (UEFA, CAF and CONMEBOL) suddenly pushed Oceania and Asia to the front of the line in 2034.
With Australia leaving the OFC for the AFC in 2006, no Oceania nation is capable of hosting a Men's World Cup: New Zealand lacks the stadiums to do so. Australia explored a joint bid with New Zealand, but Football Australia announced it would not proceed with that proposal in Oct. 2023. A joint bid with Indonesia was also considered before the Indonesians opted to back Saudi Arabia. The Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) considered a 10-nation bid involving nations such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Laos, but that also failed to develop as Indonesia threw its support behind the Saudi bid.
Despite Chinese president Xi Jinping having previously targeted the hosting of a men's World Cup, China did not enter the bidding process, leaving Saudi Arabia as the only 2034 bidder by the end of October 2023.
Having announced the bid selection process in October 2023, FIFA only gave potential hosts 26 days to formulate a bid proposal, but when addressing the 47 AFC members during an online conference that month, Infantino called for Asia "to be united for the 2034 World Cup," prompting senior figures from Asian FAs to swiftly back the Saudi bid.
"Japan has a plan to host the FIFA World Cup by 2050, but now it's time for Asia to get united and make a single bid [for 2034]," Japanese federation official Tsuneyasu Miyamoto said, while Indonesian Football Federation president Erick Thohir said, "Indonesia supports Saudi Arabia's bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034. Indonesia continues to prepare for its bid to host the FIFA World Cup after 2034, as well as other FIFA competitions."
On Tuesday, the Norwegian FA (NFF) said it will not vote for either the 2030 or 2034 bids as a means of registering its formal criticism over the process.
"Tomorrow's vote is not about who gets the 2030 and 2034 World Cups: that has already been decided," NFF president Lise Klaveness said in a statement. "The Congress is primarily about providing feedback on FIFA's allocation process. The board's assessment is that the process does not align with the principles of a sound and predictable governance system.
"By abstaining from acclamation, we are sending a deliberate signal that we cannot support FIFA's approach."
Will it be a winter or summer World Cup?
The exact dates of the 2034 Men's World Cup are still be confirmed, and the Saudi bid did not commit to any specific timetable for hosting the tournament, but there was a key detail within FIFA's evaluation report: "local climatic conditions" would favour games being played between "October and April."
The Muslim festival of Ramadan (observed between Nov. 11-Dec. 10, 2034) is another factor cited by FIFA as impacting on the dates of the tournament, with the evaluation report, which cited the scheduling of a Saudi Arabia World Cup as a an "elevated risk," saying it is "important to consider religious events in determining the timeline for the competition. Ramadan ... and the yearly Hajj pilgrimage, when more than 1.5 million pilgrims travel to Saudi Arabia from around the world, would have to be taken into account."
Qatar 2022 was the first World Cup to be staged in the Northern Hemisphere winter, being held across November and December 2022 to avoid summer temperatures In excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and neighbouring Saudi Arabia is also highly unlikely to be able to stage a summer tournament due to daily temperatures in June, July and August exceeding 100 degrees (38 Celsius) and conditions in the desert as high as 130 degrees (55 Celsius). By switching to November and December, Qatar avoided heat issues, and the addition of air-conditioning in stadiums proved to be unnecessary with temperatures averaging between 70-80 degrees Fahrenheit (24-27 Celsius) for the majority of games.
So with the climate and Ramadan to consider, the 2034 World Cup could yet be held in the early months of 2034 or in October -- two outcomes that would force club competitions across the world to be paused in order to accommodate the World Cup, as in 2022, when club seasons were extended, with earlier starts and later finishes, to work around the winter event.
This is likely to be less of an issue in 2034, firstly because the existing global match calendar only runs until the 2030 Men's World Cup -- 2034 will be addressed when the calendar is next updated by FIFA, following consultation with "relevant stakeholders" -- and secondly, because despite the fears of disruption in 2022, the tournament was a success and all leagues and club competitions were played without a hitch.
One senior European football executive told ESPN that a winter World Cup in 2034 will not be the issue it was in 2022 because "having juggled the calendar once, it has proved to be possible." That said, news on Tuesday suggested it will need to be addressed through proper channels, with sources telling ESPN that "concrete agreement" would be needed from leagues and players before the calendar was disrupted.
Saudi Arabia is promising spectacular new stadiums, but can it deliver them?
Qatar took stadium building to a new level for the 2022 World Cup, with innovations such as seat-level air-conditioning, unique architecture -- Al Bayt Stadium was built in the image of a Bedouin tent and Al Janoub Stadium's design aimed to resemble the sail of traditional Dhow boats used by local pearl divers. Stadium 974 (named because it was built using 974 recycled shipping containers) was meant to be a temporary venue that would be deconstructed, with parts of the stadium sent to Africa and South America to help refurbish existing stadiums. Yet it has so far remained untouched and will host fixtures in this month's FIFA Intercontinental Cup.
Saudi Arabia is promising to go way beyond Qatar's efforts, with their bid submission pledging to build 11 new stadiums as part of even more ambitious plans to transform the country's infrastructure.
The most eye-catching proposal is the plan for a stadium built into a cliff edge in Neom, a yet-to-be-constructed so-called "Future City," which will host 45,000 fans. The stadium will be built within The Line, a linear smart city built 350 metres over the ground. "It will provide an unprecedented and exceptional experience for fans scheduled to attend tournament matches," the Saudi bid book said of the stadium. "Additionally, the stadium will be run entirely on renewable energy, generated primarily from wind and solar sources, marking a historic shift in stadium design, globally."
The Neom plan is part of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030, a huge investment and construction project driven by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which is designed to rapidly diversify Saudi Arabia economically, socially and culturally. This involves moving away from a reliance on oil -- non-oil revenue exceeded 50% of GDP in 2023 for the first time since commercial oil production in the 1930s -- by developing other sectors including tourism, infrastructure and renewable energy projects. Societal and cultural reforms include more rights for women.
"We're not doing this to make a headline -- we're doing this for our people," Hammad Albalawi, CEO of the Saudi Arabia 2034 bid, told Sky Sports in September. "We are a young nation seizing this opportunity and making the best out of it. We are investing to make sure that Saudis live longer and happier lives, and that's something that we're very proud of.
"This has everything to do with meeting our sporting objectives, welcoming fans and becoming the best versions of ourselves," he said. "We are doing this for the growth of our people."
Simon Chadwick, professor of Sport and Geopolitical Economy at Skema Business School in Paris, believes that the 2034 World Cup is simply another element of Saudi Arabia attempting to host major events rather than a focal point of Vision 2030.
"I think the words that I would use to characterize what is happening in Saudi Arabia now is ubiquity in the sense that everything is happening everywhere all the time," Chadwick told ESPN. "So I don't think that the World Cup is necessarily fundamental to, or crucial to, the achievement of 2030 Vision. That's because you need to keep in mind that at the same time, the eSports World Cup is taking place and it's going to be taking place over the next decade. In Saudi Arabia, you have, for instance, the Asian Games. Asian Winter Games going to take place there in 2029. You've got World Expo taking place in 2030. So it is almost as though the World Cup is just another event alongside lots of other events. There are also fashion shows and cultural events.
"I think that for Saudi Arabia's self-image, the FIFA World Cup is probably the crowning glory of all mega-events. But I don't necessarily think it's deeply fundamental to the transformations that are now taking place in the country."
