World Cup 2022 opening ceremony LIVE: Qatar ready to raise curtain on football’s greatest show

Qatar will kick-off the 2022 World Cup against Group A rivals Ecuador on Sunday.

It may only be the first game of the tournament but it could be crucial, given the challenge ahead for these two sides. Netherlands and African champions Senegal await, and that means defeat in this first match could well be terminal for Qatar or Ecuador.

The build-up to the tournament has been dominated by Qatar’s abuse of the migrant workers who built the stadiums and infrastructure over the past decade so that the World Cup could go ahead, on top of concerns around the safety of LGBTQ+ football fans in a conservative Islamic nation where male homosexuality is still illegal.

Both Fifa and Qatari organisers will be hoping the football can now fill the spotlight, but there is unlikely to be any let up from global scrutiny.

Here is everything you need to know as the World Cup gets under way:

Protests have broken out in London over the controversial World Cup hosts Qatar and their shocking record of human rights abuses.

The protests also cover Iran’s involvement in the tournament following a popular uprising against the Iranian republic and the rumours of mass executions.

When they kick off against Ecuador on Sunday, it is with an altogether better pedigree. Qatar have won their last five games, albeit against teams who have not qualified for the World Cup. For the first time, they won the Asian Cup in 2019. They were Gold Cup semi-finalists in 2021. As the Qatari league paused in September, they have had longer to prepare than anyone else. Some of it has been spent at a training camp in Marbella. Some of their summer involved playing friendlies against European club sides.

“Qatar go into this tournament with an organised and well-drilled squad who are familiar with the stadiums, heat and landscape of the country,” noted Neil McGuinness, who previously worked for the Qatar FA and Aspire Academy on the identification and selection of players ahead of the World Cup.

The Doha Metro is one of the engineering jewels of Qatar, a $36bn (£32bn) ultra-modern transport system, speeding people around the Gulf state’s glass-towered futurescape capital and beyond. Usually it can be used to move between restaurants in the formerly run-down Msheireb district, or five-star hotels in Doha’s well-heeled West Bay.

But for the next few weeks, tens of thousands of football fans will use it to get to each of the eight stadiums of the Qatar World Cup, from Al Janoub in the south to Al Bayt in the north.

It spans 76km (47 miles), has 37 stations, and is perhaps the single greatest symbol of how Qatar’s staggering wealth and ambition has helped to utterly transform the country in the past few years.

The incredible transformation of Qatar has been in readiness for the World Cup. No country has ever been so physically changed just to hold a football tournament.

On Sunday at Al Bayt Stadium, Gianni Infantino will be more than willing to share the spotlight with the Emir of Qatar, but it isn’t a privilege the newly re-elected Fifa president affords many. Take a story from a few weeks ago. With the World Cup 2022 so close, the Lisbon-based Web Summit wanted both Arsene Wenger and Infantino to come and do a talk. Negotiations broke down for a few reasons, but one element raises a chuckle from those with knowledge of the talks. There was a request for Infantino to have a more prominent speaking slot than Wenger.

The story does tally with a common refrain from a lot of people you speak to about Infantino.

“It’s all about him.”

There was then whatever that World Cup opening press conference was. Infantino surpassed himself as well as Sepp Blatter with a cascade of frankly astonishing statements. The Fifa president attempted a statesman’s address but essentially just showed why the game is in the state it is. You could joke it was the biggest miss to open a World Cup since Diana Ross’s penalty, except the truth is so many of the issues he blithely glossed over are so serious, from the conditions of migrant workers to LGBTQ+ concerns in Qatar.

Out of the many facts and figures circulated about Qatar’s problems, there is one realisation that should stand above everything. It is a disgrace that, in 2022, a country can host a World Cup where it has lured millions of people from the poorest countries on earth – often under false pretences – and then forced them into what many call “modern slavery”.

And yet this has just been accepted. The World Cup carries on, an end product of a structure that is at once Orwellian and Kafkaesque. A huge underclass of people work in an autocratic surveillance state, amid an interconnected network of issues that make it almost impossible to escape. “It’s all so embedded,” says Michael Page of Human Rights Watch.

Many will point to similar problems in the west but this isn’t the failure of a system. It is the system, global inequality taken to an extreme. “The bottom line is that these human rights abuses are not normal for a World Cup host,” says Minky Worden, also of Human Rights Watch.

After all the controversy, the 2022 World Cup finally gets under way in Qatar on Sunday, when the hosts face Ecuador.

Qatar coach Felix Sanchez, meanwhile, is hoping for the best when the Gulf nation make their World Cup debut in Al Khor, while there was a late injury blow for France, with Ballon d’Or winner Karim Benzema ruled out of the tournament.

Here ’s a look back at Saturday’s events at the 2022 World Cup and ahead to Sunday’s action:

Good morning and welcome to The Independent’s coverage of the 2022 Fifa World Cup. This is it.

Perhaps the most controversial of any World Cups gets underway this afternoon following years of controversy and coverage over Qatar’s human rights issues and how the country treats its migrant workforce, not to mention the laws restricting the rights of the LGBTQ+ community.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino fanned the flames of anger towards the host nation with an appallingly offensive speech yesterday which alienated most of the minority groups harmed by Qatar’s morality and as well as taking shots at the western media for their coverage of Qatar’s problems.

Yet the tournament goes on and there is football to play. An opening ceremony is scheduled for 2pm this afternoon before the action kicks off with Qatar vs Ecuador at 4pm. We’ll bring you all the news and updates throughout the day before live coverage of the opening ceremony and the first fixture of the 2022 World Cup.