The New Game at the World Cup: “Hide The Beer”

Qatar, a theocratic Islamic monarchy, has strict rules broadly prohibiting alcohol. Qatar is also hosting some kind of international sporting competition, with teams from such places as the England, the Netherlands, and Germany in attendance. (It’s some kind of field hockey participants play with their feet, I understand.) Group E alone features Belgium, Czechia, and Wales. In contrast to Islamic views on booze, fans of these teams are pretty famous for their love of lightly-alcoholic malt beverages. Well:

“Since 1985, Budweiser has been the beer official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup, paying (in recent years) around $75 million every four years for the title. But this year the relationship between the World Cup and Budweiser could be at risk due to a last-minute request from officials in Qatar, where the month-long tournament is set to start this Sunday, November 20. The beer tents at the eight World Cup stadiums must be moved from inside the venue to outside, and fans will not be allowed to take beer into the stadium—taking away a huge amount of visibility for Budweiser and removing access for fans.”

This is far from the only challenge in allowing a repressive theocracy to host a World Cup, and certainly not the most important. But it’s another dot in the pointillist illustration of the ways in which the Muslim portion of the world differs from the rest. In the pre-Cup years, alcohol was strictly limited to certain venues catering to international travelers (somehow many of these nations prohibit sales to “Muslims,” though I have no idea how they enforce such a law). Drinking in public is really not cool, and those caught doing so can be locked up or even flogged. Though they had 12 years to figure this out, it seems like the Qataris did so only yesterday, and the solution was to play hide-the-beer. Committed beer-hounds can buy a beer, but they’ll have to do it off-camera.

This isn’t the first time a host city had to rethink its alcohol laws. In 2002, Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Games, and had to make some tough decisions. The kludge the city had used for decades was not allowing pubs/restaurants to sell wine or liquor (4% beer was legal), but allowing patrons to bring their own and pay the establishment a “corkage fee” to open it at the table.

I went to high school for two and a half years there in the 80s, and I remember how this dance played out. Walking into a restaurant with a paper bag was like a klaxon identifying heathens entering a building. It extended even to coffee. Coffee shops had to function as a private club, so anyone wandering in had to formally sign up as a member. All of this was designed not just to raise the bar for non-Mormons consuming beverages of which Mormon leaders disapproved, but to mark the consumers in a public and legal way that felt creepy and invasive. Well, obviously private coffee clubs and corkage fees were not going to work when the Italians and French hit town, so they reformed their laws substantially, basically removing the social cost for consumption.

Qatar may have studied this precedent. Those reforms outlasted the Olympics, and forever changed the character of what was once Vatican City for the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Though still the spiritual center of Mormonism, Salt Lake now has a majority of political liberals and only 22% call themselves conservative. Statewide, 55% of residents are Mormon, but just 30% in Salt Lake. All of these trends started before the Olympics, but the event supercharged them and transformed the city.

Moving the beer tents out of the way is more than a bit of kabuki. In many ways, the visuals of people buying and drinking beer might be far more dangerous to a repressive regime than the drinking itself. Hiding drinking away behind closed doors is a great way to keep interest low. Even in the US, we did this following Prohibition. In Oregon, bars weren’t allowed to have eye-level windows, not because they cared about the godless drinkers inside, but because they didn’t want people on the street witnessing what fun those inside were having. It kept interest low. That’s why the Bud tents are getting chucked outside.

This whole Qatar experiment seems pretty dangerous to me, though the kingdom’s attitude toward LGBTQ athletes and fans (among other groups), is far more problematic. But sometimes, the way people treat lesser freedoms is worth watching. And how people react to those lesser freedoms can have tremendous effects: Iranian laws about what women can wear has exploded into a popular uprising. It’s odd to think of Budweiser as a focal point for international discussions of national sovereignty, religious law, and personal freedoms, but here we are.