Im_Spartacus wrote:
I was talking about match going fans of each club, not how many go each week. There are 20 teams, so 700,000
From what I understand, certainly the education city stadium they have just announced is slated to be reduced in size from 40,000 down to about 25,000 after the tournament and retained for the use of the university there. I expect similar with the others they are building. I don't know what their big plan is, but in a number of cases the stadiums which are left as legacies will simply be turned over to the sports clubs. (Who already have newish, but smaller stadia. Yep, they will be mostly empty, much of the time though, but they do still harbour serious hopes of getting the Olympics at some point in the future and no doubt with the facilities will bid for the Asian cup and other regional events.
For people who keep saying that people are dying on the World Cup stadium projects, that's simply not true by the way. There is only one actually being worked on at the moment, and that's a redesign of the current national stadium which only a small number of people are working on currently. The designs for the others are only just being finalised. The deaths which are reported in Qatar are down to the fact that there are over 1,000,000 labourers grafting on various projects such as the metro, the roads, the new city north of Doha, office buildings, hotels etc, all of which were being built regardless of the World Cup as the infrastructure was really creaking here a year or two back.
Safety standards clearly aren't perfect, and there is of course the issue with not being able to leave the country freely (and I do agree with some of the reasons behind that rule), but to put it into perspective, in the uk the long term workplace death rate per 100,000 workers is 0.56, it's actually lower than this believe it or not in qatar.
It's hitting the news because of the sheer number of labourers in the country, and in fact the real news story is that the majority of people aren't dying of workplace accidents, but seemingly because of heart attacks (curiously mostly affecting Nepalis) which nobody seems able to explain. But even if all these unexplained deaths were included in the workplace statistic, it would be 5 out of every 100,000.....and you can't compare that to the British figure because every one of those is doing hard physical graft, the British stats include office jobs etc.
I'm certainly no apologist for the Qatari regime, but I'd just caution folk to look a little behind the screaming tabloid headlines before you believe everything you read or see on the telly.
I understand what Zuricity is saying. If you average the attendance to be 35k across the premier league, but there are only 10 games played by the 20 teams per weekend, then the 10 x 35k is 350k. However, thats not what I wanted to reply about.
You mentioned that Qatar may well want to get the Olympics. I am sure it is way too hot to hold it there in the summer and I am sure as hell there is not enough snow there to hold the winter Olympics. So, the only choice would be to hold the Summer Olympics in the winter....sounds familiar ;-)