FIFA President Gianni Infantino said the 2022 World Cup will bring people together for a month and help dispel some of the misconceptions that still exist about the Middle East. Speaking via video at the sixth edition of the Future Investment Initiative (FII6) in Riyadh, he described the progress of women’s football in Saudi Arabia as “absolutely fantastic” and said FIFA would continue its quest to make football truly global.
“The 2022 FIFA World Cup already has a huge impact on the Middle East,” he said, adding that the tournament, which starts on November 20 and ends on December 18, will give millions of people the chance to enjoy discovering new parts of the world. world.
“It is also an opportunity to present Qatar and the entire Gulf region to the world in a different light and break some of the existing prejudices once and for all,” he said. “It will certainly help to achieve better understanding between people of different cultures and backgrounds, I’m sure of that.”
Gianni Infantino said that FIFA received a record 23 million applications for tickets to the World Cup and that 3 million tickets had been sold.
“We will have two million people from all over the world to show the world that humanity can live together in peace,” he said.
He praised the progress of women’s football in Saudi Arabia, where the women’s national team played its first matches this year and also hosted a national women’s league for the first time.
After the World Cup, he said FIFA would continue its efforts to make football truly global. “Football is not the exclusive property of the few, it is a global sport and we must ensure its development throughout the world,” he said.
“We need to organize more competitions, more events around the world … maybe in some parts of the world there is too much football, in others there is not enough top football.”
FII is an international investment and innovation forum that attracts several thousand decision-makers, investors and academics from around the world. The theme of this year’s conference was “Investing in Humanity: Creating a New Global Order.”
