It was on 2 December 2010, when the boys of the global footballing community were still quaintly playing FIFA 11 on PlayStation 3, that the venue was announced for the football World Cup of 2022. Among the crowds in the great hall of the Fifa headquarters in Zurich on that Thursday were David Beckham, Bill Clinton, Roman Abramovich, Sebastian Coe and Boris Johnson.

What a moment of disappointment it was for us. Not only had England got just a paltry two votes in its bid to host the 2018 World Cup, losing out to Russia, but we learned that the 2022 one was going to be held in a tiny, single-city desert state whose football team had never got near to qualifying, and whose summer temperatures were 50°C. My now 28-year-old son remembers where he was when he heard the news (at his desk at school), the traumatic moment seared into his memory. Qatar. How could they?

Speaking not as a football fanatic myself, but as a mother of football fanatics, I must say, though, that it has been a pleasure for 12 long years to listen to the rants about this around the supper table. All families need something they love to hate, something to unite around wishing failure on, and the prospect of the Qatar World Cup of 2022 has fulfilled this role to perfection.

Our 12-year raging fire of fury has rained down upon every aspect of it: the backhanders that must have enabled the decision; the hare-brained promise that they could install air-conditioning systems in the eight brand-new stadiums; the horror of migrant workers dying from heatstroke on the building sites; the Fifa president Sepp Blatter later blithely admitting, of the decision to hold it there, that ‘Of course it was a mistake – one makes lots of mistakes in life’; the inevitable falling-through of the air-conditioning scheme, leading to the decision to hold the tournament in winter, thus interrupting the domestic season for six weeks and thereby depriving millions of their local tribal winter entertainment.

And now it’s almost upon us. The first match (Qatar vs Ecuador) is on 20 November. This is our last chance to revel in loathing the thing. What on earth are we going to take pleasure in wishing failure on for the next decade, I wonder, once it’s over? I think we’ll have to unite around wishing failure on the opening of Phase 1 of HS2 in 2033, another vanity project, if it isn’t scrapped.

There’s a nagging worry, of course, that the World Cup will turn out to be a surprise success. Didn’t we pour scorn on the eye-watering expense of the London Olympics during the seven-year run-up to them, and didn’t we change our tune when they turned out to be marvellous? This might happen with Qatar. Desperately hoping for empty stadiums, I’m rather alarmed to see that tickets are in fact selling quite well. But will the stadiums really be full on the day? Even Ecuador vs Senegal, even Morocco vs Croatia, held in a country whose population is a third of the size of London’s? Won’t they be half-empty? My family assures me that in purely footballing terms, this World Cup might be really good, because it’s ‘very open’ in terms of who might win.

Let’s take a final gloating pleasure in not going to it, and in revelling in the sub-optimal holiday prospects for those who do. Flights start at £900 return, and if you search for accommodation (still available), you’ll see it’s at least £350 a night wherever you stay, even if it’s in a tent in the tented city on the outskirts, inspired by the tented city at Mecca. No thank you to that.

No thank you, also, to staying on one of the cruise liners moored there for the duration, which are being used as hotels for World Cup attendees. So you’d come back from a match in a soulless new stadium plonked in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by dual carriageways, to your luxury prison of a cabin on board a stationary beer-palace, stuck with the same old co-residents you met yesterday. ‘Spoil your tastebuds across 13 dining venues,’ the cruise-ship literature says, to entice us to do this, but I think the novelty would wear off.

No thank you, also, to plumping for accommodation in Dubai, as is strongly recommended as an alternative. For this, you will pay £2,472 per person for an eight-day trip, which includes ‘commuting’ 234 miles by plane to Doha for two matches – hour-long flights departing at 3.05 a.m.

In an older country with an array of long-established cities, such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany or indeed Britain, the atmosphere during such a tournament would be vibrant – strangers meeting each other in local bars, Sheffield Wednesday fans making friends with Juventus supporters over a drink or on a train between cities. But in Qatar, the only feasible way to ‘do’ the World Cup is on an all-exclusive package in a compound. Leave that compound and try to find a drink anywhere else, and you’ll be paying £15 for a pint, if you can even find one in a country where alcohol is available only to ‘adult, non-Muslim customers in restricted areas’. Oh yes, and many hotels haven’t shelled out for television subscriptions for the event, so guests will need to pay to watch on their laptops the matches they aren’t physically at.

For daytime entertainment, there are shopping malls on offer, religious police keeping a beady eye out for any illicit hand-holding, especially between same-sex couples. Or you can go for a camel ride in the desert. But the Qatari desert does not offer the romantic terrain of Sahara geography lessons, with pink-hued dunes and nomadic Bedouins. It’s beige, as flat as a pancake, and you’re never far from a motorway or an oil well.

Having poured 12 years’ worth of hatred on the tournament, it will be a strange experience to be glued to Spain vs Germany on the sofa on Advent Sunday. I admit I’m rather looking forward to it.

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