Does the World Cup depend on Neom, though? Loathe as I am to pass up a chance to clown on their insane, obviously-not-happening plans, the World Cup just needs 12-15 stadiums. And they already have more stadiums and more football infrastructure than Qatar did. It won't be fancy, but it's doable?
It's a good question. The plan definitely includes the stadium for the final built atop part of Neom, several hundred meters up. So at least that bit of the plan needs to be completed, along with all the attendant hotels, facilities, power, water and transport. Beyond that, there's ten other new...
...stadia planned. So delivering all of that must be considered problematic. Could they radically descope it and make do with upgrading existing infrastructure? I don't know. Depends on the quality of existing stadia, but you'd still need to address transport, accommodation etc.
So, I'm not sure it would be an easy fix, as stadia themselves are only one part of the problem. And then there's the question of how and when MBS will admit his huge infrastructure project, which are central to his plan for the nation, are undeliverable.
Yeah, this is a whole other thing. The prestige and loss of face are hard to parse. I guess the Winter Games coming first will be instructive to see how they handle the World Cup, to see if they do try to host a small portion of it on site to claim "it worked!"
I don't think those things are as hard to solve as Trojena though. And World Cup plans are often wildly over-optimistic. Remember, the accepted Qatar bid was for a summer World Cup. Japan's 2002 bid promised holographic matches in unused stadiums. Those things quietly get shelved... (cont)
I think it's definitely a bad look for them to descope the project, not disagreeing with you there. But it's not Qatar, it's a decently-large country with a few large stadiums already. Solving this doesn't involve, idk, defying the laws of physics, it just involves a lot of regular construction.
Agree with all that. It would be very interesting to know what the rough date is by which someone needs to have reviewed all the progress and switched to the back-up plan.