After 3 days in Abu Dhabi, Munaf and I were off to Doha, Qatar for the World Cup. As previously mentioned, we secured tickets about 3 weeks before the start through the friend of my brother’s friend who worked for US Soccer and he hooked us up. Big time. The next challenge we had to work through was finding a place to stay in Doha on short notice. The options were very limited other than sleeping in a tent in the desert without AC, which sounded awful. Through some internet sleuthing, we found out that they were bringing in a 3rd cruise ship to house World Cup attendees which was not well advertised and we were able to secure a room on the ship. This was the first time I’d ever been on a cruise ship and it pretty much aligned with my expectations. Not to hate on people who enjoy cruise. I understand the appeal of it, but it does not align with the way I like to travel at all. I like to be fully in control of where I’m going and able to pivot the trip at a moments notice, as I have thoroughly documented throughout this blog. Being trapped on a ship in a tiny room with a bathroom the size of a phone booth and $12 beers is nightmare fuel in my humble opinion 😉. Anyway, this cruise ship wasn’t taking us anywhere, it was just a place for us to sleep, which worked out just fine.
We flew to Doha early on the day of the USA-England game. Flying directly from Abu Dhabi to Doha was outrageously expensive, so we elected to fly to Muscat and then on to Doha from there. We booked the tickets through Kiwi, which will just cobble flights from multiple different airlines together in order to find you the best rate. Typically, it works out fine, but this can cause some issues, especially if you have to check a bag. The problem for us was that my bag was definitely over the weight limit and we only had an hour to connect in Muscat. So basically if they made me check my bag, that would require me to go pick it up and recheck it with our next airline, which would have resulted in me missing my flight. The 2nd airline we were flying on also didn’t even operate in Abu Dhabi, so we did not have boarding passes for that flight and had to get them in Muscat. First things first, we had to get through the Abu Dhabi airport without them weighing my bag. We successfully dodged all the scales in the airport and found a ticket counter in Muscat that could issue our boarding passes. I’ve been in several stressful flight situations on this trip but that one was the worst. We had to make our connection or we were pretty much screwed on getting to the US-England game. And after all the hoops we’d jumped through to get those tickets, that was not an option.
We got into Doha and got checked in on the ship and headed out to find an elusive beer in Qatar. If you watched any of the media coverage you’d think that was an impossible task, but honestly it wasn’t that bad. They did not sell beers at the games, but it wasn’t hard to find them around the city before the game. The game was held at the largest stadium in Doha, which was a really cool stadium built to look like a giant tent. Our seats were amazing, we were in the lower bowl at mid field about 15 rows up. And the atmosphere was electric. Walking into the stadium there was lots of chanting and yelling back and forth between the US and England fans. My favorite USA chant was- “IT’S CALLED SOCCER.” The US was also coming off a disappointing draw to Wales and so the English fans were very confident, you could say too confident 😉. The US outplayed them that game but unfortunately we were not able to get the ball into the goal and ended up drawing them. To be frank, a draw was a win for us in that game as most people expected us to lose. England has a great team and was certainly the favorite to advance out of the group.
We spent the next few days checking out Doha, which is a beautiful city. We spent a night at the fan zone watching the Mexico vs Argentina game, where the fans were going wild and Messi scored a goal to win the game. We also checked out the National Museum of Qatar, which was very interesting. I knew basically nothing about the history of Qatar prior to this trip. Fun fact, they used to make all their money off of harvesting and trading pearls until they discovered oil in 1940, which made them an extremely wealthy country. We also wandered around the Souq Waqif, which is the old market area. They also had a falcon souq, where we inquired about buying a falcon. Falcons are a big deal in Qatar and were traditionally used for hunting rabbits and small game. Munaf was leaving in like a week and I would be solo again, so I thought it would be pretty dope to have a support falcon to keep me company. It wasn’t in the cards though, apparently falcons cost like $25k on the cheap end (the expensive ones cost more than I paid for my house). That was not something I budgeted for going into this trip 😂. We also wandered around the Doha Corniche area, which is a street that runs along the water with an incredible view of the Doha skyline. They had also set up lots of viewing areas and fan zones along the street here which made for some good people watching. We met a ton of people from all over the world as well and had a great time watching the game with other countries fans each night.
Our last day in Doha, we attended the US-Iran game, which was amazing. You couldn’t script it any better. Huge political rivalry where the winner advances to the next round. Iran’s government actually refers to our country as the Great Satan, so that’s fun. The Iranian fans were really great though, there was lots of screaming back and forth between the groups as we entered the stadium and the atmosphere was electric inside the stadium. To be frank, the Iran fans were way louder than the US fans. But, they kind of cheated, they all had vuvuzelas and were blowing them full blast. I may be the loudest man in the world, but I’m no match for 20,000 vuvuzelas. As the match went on, the vuvuzelas got confiscated (they have been banned since the South Africa world cup) and it became more of a fair fight. Then we scored a goal and the momentum shifted significantly. Unfortunately, in the process of scoring our goal we lost our best player (Christian Pulisic) for the game. Didn’t matter, we hung on to win the game and advance to the next round to take on the Netherlands! After the game we headed straight to the airport to catch a 4 am flight to Dubai. The next day was a pretty grueling travel day, but it was worth it.
Overall, our Qatar experience was really amazing. Doha is a world class city and put on one hell of a show. The amount of infrastructure they built for this 6 week event was mind blowing. Besides the beautiful stadiums, they also built a really nice metro system that probably won’t get much use moving forward, given that the city only has a population of 2 million people. Overall though, they knew that going in and were really looking for this to serve as major PR for their country and the Middle East as a whole. That really kind of backfired in a lot of aspects as the Western media was extremely negative about the whole thing, which really pissed me off.
Let’s talk a little more about that. First off, should they have played a World Cup in Qatar? Well no, probably not. Playing a World Cup in a desert that has no history of soccer and required them to move the tournament to the winter for the first time ever wasn’t a very smart move. But, that is FIFA’s fault. FIFA is the most corrupt organization on Earth, who is well known for taking bribes and making terrible decision to line their executives pockets as opposed to doing things in the best interest of the game. There was also a lot of talk about the workers who died building the stadiums and gay rights. Again, I agree that that Qatar has some major problems here, but I struggle with the way it was portrayed by the media. Lest we forget, the last World Cup was held in Russia and the previous Olympics were in China, where was all the talk about human rights and gay rights during those events? To me, it really showed the anti-Muslim bias of the media, which is not ok. Oh and you want to talk about the immigrant workers who died building the stadiums? Again, definitely not ok, but the media chose to focus on the very small percentage of people who died as opposed to the vast majority of the migrant workers who came to Qatar and made absolutely life changing money, with wages that were far above what they could make in their home country and were extremely grateful for the opportunity. You want to talk about migrant worker deaths? Look up how many migrant workers died building the Panama Canal (I’ll save you the time, it was over 30,000). Let’s not forget that much of the western world was built through slavery and ruthless colonization. Granted it was a couple hundred years ago, but every country matures at a different rate and I found the whole thing to be extremely hypocritical and I think it really came down to religion, and anti-Islam sentiment, which is bullshit. Ok, rant over, but I wanted to get that out in the universe. Qatar is an amazing country and we had so much fun during our time there.
After we spent a few days in Dubai (see my last blog) I flew back to Qatar for the US vs Netherlands game. I decided that I was going to stay in the Middle East until the US lost and keep commuting back for games until they lost or won the whole damn thing, because well, you only live once 😂. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be, the US looked good in the first half but those damn Dutch really turned it on in the 2nd half and won handily. With that being said, watch out for team USA in 2026. We had one of the youngest teams in the tournament and really held our own. Plus we’ll be playing at home.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! ITTTSSSS CALLLLLLEDDDDD SOCCCCCEERRRRRRRR!!!
