The Summer World Cup that never was... Japan 2022
'We should have been watching the World Cup right now'
'We should be watching the World Cup right now’ was probably the most spoken sentence among football fans this summer.
Qatar 2022 has numerous moral issues associated with it; ones I will not go into here but if you want to read more about it then Phillip Buckingham’s piece for The Athletic on why it is controversial is a great explainer. However from a sporting perspective, one of the more pressing issues is the heat.
Qatar in June-July has an average daily temperature of 40 degrees celsius - the only cooking teams would be doing in those conditions would be literal. And though the stadiums are air-conditioned (it’s weird, I’ve experienced it first hand in the Khalifa International Stadium but that’s a piece for another day), the decision was taken for everyone’s health to move the competition to the winter.
So that’s why there was no football this summer… but what if things went a little differently during the now infamous voting in 2010.
The five potential options were Qatar, who of course won the voting process, the United States, who will now be hosting a joint World Cup in 2026 with Canada and Mexico, South Korea, Japan and Australia.
Despite being considered a favourite early on in the bidding process, Australia only received a single vote (after spending £30m of taxpayers’ money on the bid).
South Korea reached the third round of voting but reading through the bids the one that caught my eye the most was Japan. Due to their joint hosting in 2002, if either country had won they would have become only the sixth country to host the competition more than once.
But while talking about this subject with Carl Anka and Musa Okwonga I thought- what would a Japan World Cup this summer have looked like?
Japan in Group A
Well this is pretty obvious, but Japan would go into Group A alongside Ecuador, Senegal and the Netherlands (if the draw happened the same way).
Japan would likely have a better chance of qualifying out of Group A than they do currently out of Group E, as barring a massive capitulation, Spain and Germany will qualify.
This would obviously effect the feeling of the tournament - the home nation getting further lends to better vibes all round.
The Location
One of the plus points of Qatar (and some might consider this a negative given how the travel between stadiums usually allows the chance for fans to discover the culture of a country) is that every single stadium is within 75km (46 miles) of each other.
This means at max it takes an hour to travel between the farthest stadiums, with the shortest distance being 5km (3.1 miles), only a five-minute drive.
Fatma Al-Nuami, executive communications director for the Qatar supreme committee stated to BBC Sport:
"Fans can look forward to a unique experience. A tournament that will show the best of Arab and Qatari hospitality and open the doors to an entire region.
"A compact World Cup, bringing them all together in one place, with the possibility of watching two games in a day."
With Japan, it would have been a completely different situation. If you were at the competition, you would have had to travel from Tokyo with its two 50,000 seater stadiums, to Yokohama, who’s Nissan Stadium has a capacity of 70,000.
The Nissan Stadium is both the home of the national team but also recently hosted the 2019 Rugby World Cup final and the final of the 2021 Olympics, where Brazil defeated Spain 2-1.
Add that Saitama, Fukuroi, Osaka, Toyota, Oita, Niigata, Kashima, Kobe and Sapporo all had one stadium each as part of the bid brought the total number to 12 separate venues.
Fun-fact Osaka is known as the Manchester of Japan due to it’s booming textile industry and it is also a place I really want to visit in the future.
Whereas Qatar seems to be cleanly constructed with the fan in mind, Japan would have been established around the country’s existing infrastructure and culture. Travellers would get a different experience depending on which stadium they went to rather than the one-noteness that Qatar will bring.
Spreading out the travelling fans also makes it easier to accommodate them; Qatar already reported a shortage in hotel spaces as early as December 2021.
Japan is famed for it’s infrastructure when it comes to travel. Modern and well maintained, fans would have beem able to travel by road, rail, sea and air to get to their destination.
Also when they got the chance, fans would have used their famous bullet-trains (so famous they are now in a movie starring Brad Pitt), which are able to go up to 320km per hour.
So it would be likely that Japan would be able to handle the high volume of fans travelling around the country.
But hosting it in Japan wouldn’t be all upsides.
How the country handled the 2020 Olympics (which became 2021) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a lot of controversies. Spectators were banned from the majority of events and the world’s greatest spectacle was left with nobody watching (bar you know the very important stakeholders). Olympian Katherine Grainger said:
“Instinctively, those of us who have been there and enjoyed those incredible crowds, especially at London 2012 and those home crowd experiences, feel a deep sense of loss for all the athletes who will now go and experience empty stadiums.”
Although football did carry on during lockdown, spending an entire season behind closed doors, it seems unthinkable that *the* World Cup would suffer the same fate. But with Japan just starting to open up their borders once again it might have been too soon.
Athletes however did not need to be vaccinated, so that would have stopped one massive logistical issue that seems to be plaguing pre-season tours this summer.
Football in Japan
One of the most important thing for any World Cup is the reflection it has on football within the country.
As part of the World Cup project in Qatar, the country has constructed the Aspire Academy in order to help the development of young players, however there is yet to be a breakout star who moves abroad and becomes the flagship player for the country to get behind during the compeititon.
This is reflected in the league as it is still seen as a retirement home that pays well for many of Europe's aging stars. James Rodriguez has been the latest high profile name to make the move.
The J-League is a bit further along in it’s development (maybe due to the fact they’ve already had the boost of one World Cup). They do still have their aging stars; Andres Iniesta has been teaching the people of Kobe the beautiful game for a few seasons now, but they are not the main draws of the league.
Japan have had their star exports like Hidetoshi Nakata, Shinsuke Nakamura, Kensuke Honda and Shinji Kagawa, but in recent years that had dried up bar maybe Takumi Minamino and Takefusa Kubo (if he eventually comes good).
Until Ange Postecoglou.
After managing in the J-League for three seasons, much like Arsene Wenger over 20 years prior, he made his way to Europe taking the Celtic job after the departure of Neil Lennon.
But unlike Wenger, Postecoglou brought with him four stars from the J League: Kyogo Furuhashi, Reo Hatata, Yosuke Ideguchi and then Daizen Maeda this summer. Furuhashi was an instant success and he, alongside Maeda especially, will be hoping to earn their place in the World Cup squad.
So the important question is what is the legacy for these two leagues after the World Cup? Qatar have more to gain but there is less certainty around whether the competition will have a longstanding impact on the sport within the country.
The average attendances reflect this. Despite the celebrations in the streets when Qatar won the World Cup bid, this has not translated into interest in the domestic game.
According to website Football Critic in the 2019/20 season, Al Sadd and Al Rayyan both played in the 15,000 capacity Jassim Bin Hamad stadium but only managed average attendances of 1,472 and 708 fans respectively.
However Japan also have room for improvement, with an average capacity filled of 43.1% across the entire J League in 2022 according to Transfrmarket. The highest percentage was for Shimuzu S-Pulse who managed to achieve 74.8% of their 20,299 capacity, but the highest average attendance was for Urawa Red Diamonds with 21,926 (in a 63,700 capacity stadium).
In terms of getting people interested in the sport both countries could do a lot better, but it seems that in Japan there would be a better opportunity to grow the sport from it’s existing fan-base and leave a long term legacy after the World Cup has ended.
For those of us watching at home
Not everyone would have been lucky enough to go to Japan (if we were allowed to go at all), so instead we would have to watch it on our TVs, laptops or phones.
Warm summers mean BBQs and beers (or the beverage of your choice); the record temperatures would have likely made it a little uncomfortable but at least Saudi Arabia vs Poland would have been a nice distraction from the heat.
You could get together with your friends to support In-ger-land while ‘It’s Coming Home’ rang out from every household. But wait a minute, would that actually have been the case?
Japan has one timezone, nine hours ahead of GMT, meaning games in the UK would err on the early side (sorry if you’re America but you’re getting our NBA hours with times that vary between 1am and 7:30am).
Based on the schedules available for the 2002 World Cup, times varied between 7:30am and 12:30am (the middle section of games played around 10am were usually played in South Korea). The latter would fit the idealised scenario I mentioned in the beginning of this section but the former would likely be more muted.
It may be coincidence or due to the Euro-centric view of football that the last World Cup that had mainly morning fixtures was in fact Japan-South Korea in 2002, with Germany, South Africa, Brazil and Russia all having fixtures that varied throughout the entire day and this will continue with Qatar.
The 7:30am games are also not ideal for families. Parents who would want their kids to watch the football would have to either have to turn up late to school or miss the important final moments of each game to take them there. Schools could have moved classes back to allow kids to watch England games, but that could vary from institution to institution.
But a bowl of cereal, a coffee and Serbia vs Cameroon for someone like me… what could be better?
In terms of the actual viewing experience, Japan have always been at the forefront of technology and they were behind the 8K cameras that were used during the 2018 World Cup.
Eight games including one semi-final and the final were covered using the system provided by Japanese company NHK. The footage was only available in select locations but by the time the 2022 World Cup rolled around you would assume they would have pumped a lot of money into perfecting the technology if they were hosting.
NHK senior manager, NHK Broadcast Engineering Department for the News Technical Center, Outside Engineering Division, Tetsuya Inuki stated in an interview with Sports Video Group:
“8K was developed to re-create the feeling of being at the event and being more immersive. That is what we are aiming for.”
This is the technology that is grounded in reality however, but in their bid they wanted to create things closer to science fiction.
The Technology
To say the Japanese were ambitious when it came to the technology that they wanted to bring to the 2022 World Cup in their bid would be an understatement.
Like Qatar, a lot of their power would have been generated from renewable sources such as solar power, but Japan also suggested handheld devices that would be powered by people’s footsteps as well.
Another piece of technology was straight out of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a universal translator that you could attach to your ear like the Babel Fish.
It may seem unlikely but as early as 2017, Insider reported that a Japanese company called Logbar were set to release a handheld translator called ‘ili’ that could instantly translate between English, Mandarin and Japanese with view to adding more languages over time.
Checking listings of the device now, only Spanish has since been added, but this project was created by a startup, not the Japanese Government.
The second major development however, may have been a little too unrealistic.
With the major caveat added of ‘if the technology is available at the time’, Japan wanted to be able to record matches and transmit them in 3D (remember when 3D was a thing).
But they also took 3D a little too literally. Japan wanted to create a system which would allow games to be broadcast as holograms in other stadiums recreating the match experience.
With a lot of the technology having greater applications past the World Cup, Suminori Gokoh, director of the 2022 bid committee, stated:
"We think that now it's time to give something back to the world, and our starting point is to deliver the joy of football not only to the hosting country but all over the world.”
CNN looked into Japan’s claims about the 3D technology, with one expert stating that the technology was feasible however their plans were speculative.
Professor John Watson also threw doubt on the idea, especially when applied to the medium of football. He told CNN:
"There has to be head tracking, so if you move your head the images has to move with you and you're not going to keep your head in position during a football match -- you're going to jump up and down, particularly if your home team scores.
"There's also an obstacle with nausea, some people looking at these autostereoscopic displays can become disorientated, there are human factors like that which have to be taken into account."
Given that we are now in 2022 and the closest thing we’ve gotten is some dead celebrities brought back to stand stationary on a stage, it seems that their doubts were well founded.
But from a purely nerdy point of view, it would have been really cool if it had happened.
So would it have been better to hold the World Cup in Japan?
From a purely moral standpoint, it is obvious the answer is yes. The alleged issues with how the bidding was won and also how the infrastructure was constructed in Qatar cast too long a shadow.
From a logistical standpoint however, there might have been some issues with holding the competition in Japan, especially given the unexpected problems created due to the pandemic.
It also seems that although Japan 2022 would have been the most technologically advanced World Cup, they may have fell short of some of their promises from 2010.
In terms of the other bids, Australia would have also brought it’s own logistical issues, given how long flights are between cities on the east and west coast. Furthermore the torrential rain (which we have seen in some of the Premier League pre-season friendlies this summer) would have caused some problems.
So South Korea might have been the perfect option, given it has the technological edge that Japan brings with less of the downsides.
But that will be little comfort for those of us who will have to wrap up warm in a blanket with a hot drink and the heating on, watching England lose to Iran as our early Christmas present.