The wisdom of staging the 2022 World Cup in Qatar was thrust back into the spotlight over the past 10 days with separate decisions by the U.S. men’s national soccer team and a U.S. player on assignment with a Dutch club to cancel their plans to practice there.
Since the controversial awarding of the sport’s spectacle to the tiny Persian Gulf country nine years ago, FIFA has faced unbroken criticism for the tainted vote; for selecting a nation with a checkered human-rights record; and for picking a part of the world where triple-digit summer heat prompted an unprecedented shift of the competition to winter months.