A pile of rubbish can be seen piling up in the fan village (Picture: Shekharbhatia)
What does £170 get you in Qatar for the World Cup? A pile of rubbish and rubble by a shipping container, apparently.
On the eve of FIFA’s showpiece tournament, a large official fan village expected to house 60,000 football fans still resembles a building site.
The Rawdat Al Jahhaniya accommodation base, with the Ahmad bin Ali stadium dominating the view, is reportedly littered with industrial machines and torn turf.
Fans have said on social media the around £170-a-night site, which opened Friday, isn’t quite the place they imagined.
According to the Qatar World Cup’s accommodation portal, the village has a cinema screen and tennis court — neither of which fans say are there yet.
A ‘fitness centre/gym’ is actually just a few pieces of outdoor exercise equipment, according to photos and footage.
Some people have described the fan village as unfinished (Picture: Shekharbhatia)
Fan photos show the blank, grey lodgings (a choice between a double or a twin ensuite room) decorated with small box lamps. Each cabin has coffee and tea-making facilities, two bottles of water daily and a fridge.
There’s a portable Starbucks van parked in the village and a large tented dining hall serving food like pizzas and burgers.
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Outside, black bin bags and cardboard boxes can be seen dumped in the back of the site which is easily accessible to those staying there.
A Welsh fan told MailOnline: ‘I probably would’ve paid double the money to come and see my country play.
‘But really? Is this what they’re going to put us in. Metal containers with no air, very little light and like a shoebox?
‘There is no room to move or to store your luggage. A tiny table can just about hold a bowl of cornflakes.’
One person staying said he could barely walk around his room (Picture: Shekharbhatia)
Milad Mahmooditar, 32, from Tehran, said that as a six-foot man, his bed is too small for him to sleep in.
But it’s not only the bed he struggles to fit in.
‘The bathroom isn’t much of a bathroom and you can hardly move without falling over the small table or kicking the bed,’ he said.
Mahmooditar claimed the air-conditioning unit to get through the high heat ‘makes so much noise that you cannot sleep’.
‘I have paid around $200 for each night and I know that for $100 I can get a five-star hotel with full board,’ he said.
‘This is not the way to treat visitors to any country. We have paid so much money to get here. I am sorry about this and I am angry.’
The shipping container-style lodgings are ‘casual’ according to the tournament’s organisers (Picture: Shekharbhatia)
Beds are pretty hard to come by in the World Cup, with just 130,000 rooms for the 1.5 million visitors expected to pour into the tiny Gulf nation.
Officials have been building apartment complexes to house more fans even as many of the choices get gobbled up by players and sponsors.
While the option to say in the fan villages was described by the Qatar 2022 accommodation portal as ‘a variety of casual camping and cabin-style accommodation for the avid fan’.
But it doesn’t seem World Cup fans are that thrilled by this. On social media, people remarked that the Rawdat Al Jahhaniya fan village looks like a ‘quarantine camp’.
Others even joked that the conditions were comparable to the doomed Bahamas-based Frye Festival.
One user commented: ‘It took five yrs but they finally got the FYRE festival villas complete.’
But for those staying in the village for days and even weeks to come, it can be hard to find the funny side.
A pile of rubbish can be seen in the back of the site (Picture: Shekharbhatia)
‘Maybe it’s okay for the Qatari people who are rich and live in luxury houses for,’ Mahmooditar added.
‘Me, this is not okay.’
Metro.co.uk reached out to the Qatar World Cup organisers, the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy, for comment.
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‘It took five years but they finally got the Fyre Festival villas complete.’