The 2022 FIFA World Cup is scheduled to be the 22nd edition of the FIFA World Cup the quadrennial international men’s football championship contested by the national teams of the member associations of FIFA. It is scheduled to take place in Qatar in 2022. This will be the first World Cup ever to be held in the Arab world and the first in a Muslim-majority country This will be the first World Cup held entirely in geographical Asia since the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan (the 2018 competition in Russia featured one geographically Asian venue, Yekaterinburg). In addition the tournament will be the last to involve 32 teams, with an increase to 48 teams scheduled for the 2026 tournament. However, FIFA President Gianni Infantino indicated that this change may come earlier for the 2022 World Cup. The reigning World Cup champions are France.
Why?
The bidding procedure to host the 2018 and 2022 world cups began in January 2009, and national associations had until 2 February 2009 to register their interest. Initially, eleven bids were made for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, but Mexico later withdrew from proceedings, and Indonesia’s bid was rejected by FIFA in February 2010 after the Indonesian Football Association failed to submit a letter of Indonesian government guarantee to support the bid. Indonesian officials had not ruled out a bid for the 2026 WORLD CUP, until Qatar took the 2022 cup. During the bidding process, all non-UEFA nations gradually withdrew their 2018 bids, thus guaranteeing that a UEFA nation would host the 2018 cup and thereby making UEFA nations ineligible for the 2022 bid.
In the end, there were five bids for the 2022 FIFA World Cup: Australia, Japan, Qatar, South Korea and the United States. The twenty-two member FIFA EC convened in Zurich on 2 December 2010 to vote to select the hosts of both tournaments. Two FIFA executive committee members were suspended before the vote in relation to allegations of corruption regarding their votes.
The decision to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, which was graded as having “high operational risk”,
generated criticism from media commentators. It has been criticized as many to be part of the FIFA corruption scandals.