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Qatar won the right to host football’s biggest tournament back in 2010. They remain on course to welcome world football’s best and brightest.
The World Cup will be a massive undertaking for the peninsula, with vast development and redevelopment of stadiums and infrastructure required between now and 2022.
The 2022 World Cup will be the first-ever to not take place in June and July.
This is because of Qatar’s hot summers, with the average high in June, July, and August hitting a sweltering 42°C.
As a result, the 2022 tournament will begin on November 21 and be more compressed than normal, finishing less than a month later on December 18.
Even at that time of year, it is still very warm: the average high in November is 30°C and it only dips as far as 25°C in December.
As a result of the switch, several leagues will be impacted, with European football rescheduling to accommodate the tournament.
English football, for example, will be unable to play during the traditional Christmas period with many of the league’s top stars in Qatar for the World Cup.
A November-December tournament will also impact the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations, which would have normally taken place the following January.
The end of the year was decided on because of the weather between May and September as well as the desire to avoid clashes with the Winter Olympics (February) and Ramadan (April).
What is the World Cup 2022 fixture schedule?
| Tournament stage | Date(s) |
|---|---|
| Group stage | November 21 – December 2 |
| Last 16 | December 3, 4, 5, 6 |
| Quarter-finals | December 9 & 10 |
| Semi-finals | December 13 & 14 |
| Third-place play-off | December 17 |
| Final | December 18 |
World Cup 2022 will begin on November 21, 2022 and finish on December 18, 2022.
Group stage fixtures will run from Monday November 21 until Friday December 2. The last-16 stage will commence immediately afterwards with two games a day on December 3, 4, 5 and 6.
There will be two rest days on December 7 and 8 before the quarter-finals are played on December 9 and 10.
A further two rest days will be observed on December 11 and 12, with the semi-finals being played on December 13 and 14.
The third-place play-off will then take place on December 17, with the final being played on December 18.
Kick-off times
Group stage matches will kick off at 10am, 1pm, 4pm and 7pm GMT (5am, 8am, 11am and 2pm ET).
The simultaneous kick-off times for the final round of group games and all knockout games will be 3pm and 7pm GMT (10am and 2pm ET).
The World Cup 2022 final will kick off at 3pm GMT (10am ET) and is set to be played at the Lusail Stadium.
What stadiums will be used for the 2022 World Cup?
Among the many questions being asked about the 2022 tournament is how exactly a country of 2.5 million, approximately one sixth the size of Ireland, is going to welcome the world.
This will be the last World Cup with 32 teams so Qatar will not, at least, have to deal with an expanded field.
But the country’s government – an extremely wealthy monarchy – still expects to spend between $8 to $10 billion on the World Cup, and that is substantially less than the budget initially touted.
The original plan was to have 12 stadiums ready to host games but the number has been reduced to eight.
The showpiece venue will be the Lusail Iconic Stadium, which will host the final and has the largest proposed capacity by far at over 80,000.
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<p>The eight stadiums that will be used are:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Al Bayt Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Al Janoub Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Al Rayyan Stadium </strong></li>
<li><strong>Al Thumama Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Education City Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Khalifa International Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Lusail Stadium</strong></li>
<li><strong>Ras Abu Aboud Stadium</strong></li>
</ul>
<p>It is hoped that all stadiums will be completed in 2020. Yasser al-Mulla from the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, told reporters in January 2018 that “all the stadiums will be completed two years before the tournament starts.”</p>
<p>One advantage of bringing the World Cup to such a small country, of course, is that travel times will be miniscule compared to the tournaments in Brazil and Russia.</p>
<p>The greatest distance between two stadiums will be approximately 130 kilometres, a drive of approximately an hour and a half.</p>
<h2><strong>When will the draw for World Cup 2022 be made?</strong></h2>
<p>Normally, the draw for the World Cup finals takes place in early December the year before the tournament.</p>
<p>Because of the change of schedule for Qatar, though, the draw for the 2022 finals will take place in April of that year, approximately six months before kick-off.</p>
<h2><strong>When does World Cup 2022 qualification start?</strong></h2>
<p>The first World Cup 2022 qualification schedule to get under way was the AFC section, which began in June 2019. The CAF section started in September 2019.</p>
<p>Public health concerns related to the global coronavirus pandemic meant that a number of cycles had their schedules interrupted, but qualification will resume in August, September, and October 2020.</p>
<p>UEFA qualification will not begin until 2021.</p>
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Qatar will qualify automatically as hosts, but they participate in the early rounds of Asian qualifying anyway because it also acts as a route into the Asian Cup.
Whether they then continue into the final stage, should they progress that far, is yet to be decided.
SOURCE/GOAL.COM
