Command centre ready to manage Qatar World Cup operations

With 100 days until the start of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, details of the Aspire control and command centre, which will monitor operations during the tournament, have been revealed.

Operational since last November, the Aspire control and command centre will monitor all stadiums at once, keeping an eye on the anticipated one million plus visitors attending the four-yearly tournament during the duration of their stays.

Qatar has spent billions of dollars on building seven new stadiums and refurbishing an eighth for the first World Cup in an Arab country. It has seized on the uniquely short distance between them - barely 70 kilometres separate the two most distant venues - to set up the elaborate virtual network.

Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy say the control centre, bristling with alarms and sensors, will set a benchmark for global sporting events which must manage fans and guard against terrorism and natural disasters.

In order to monitor fans, small groups of police from each of the 32 competing nations will shadow their fans while more than 3,000 Turkish police will reinforce local security forces.

In addition, supporters went through a filtering system when applying for tickets with names on hooligan and fraud blacklists being barred.

Fans will be followed on Doha streets by omnipresent CCTV cameras armed with facial recognition technology. Qatar University experts have developed drone surveillance systems that, they say, will give the most accurate estimates of numbers on the streets.

In the Aspire centre, engineers will watch for air conditioning breakdowns and jams at the ticket gates while an interior ministry command centre that will monitor all streets, buses and metro trains.

Police will move into the centre on match days and will play a key role when there are up to four games a day, with tens of tens of thousands of fans leaving one stadium and entering another.

Supreme Committee Command Centre Director, Hamad Ahmed al-Mohannadi advised "whatever happens, there is a response in place.

"As long as there is no property damage and no one injured, we will just be watching," he added.

"Anything related to property damage or someone being injured we will have to report it and deal with it."

Abdulrahiman calls the organisers' ground control "the eyes, ears and awareness of all stadiums at the same time."

He advises that if there is an incident in one stadium, his team, all in dark suits in front of screens, can "control it, put other stadiums at different alert levels, and take the precautionary measures, all simultaneously", noting “one may be evacuated and at another we can secure the perimeter and stop people going inside.

"We have eyes on the ground, we can view all of the 15,000 cameras across the eight stadiums."

The monitors can show how many people are in any stadium at any one time and all nearby metro trains and buses, with Abdulrahiman stating “you can push content onto the video screens in the corridors for any scenario when you want to communicate with the fans.”

Announcements can be made in one or all eight stadiums at the same time while any alarm in a stadium immediately flashes up on the screens and the number crunching starts straight away.

The monitors can also call on virtual models of each stadium to find the best way to reach each room or piece of equipment explaining that that the centre also serves to control electromechanical and building control systems, manage stadium security operations and follow up on all information and communication systems and infrastructure for these facilities, in addition to following up on all periodic maintenance operations for these facilities and following up on performance indicators.

Supreme Committee Director of Security (Facilities Operation Department), Abdullah Mubarak al-Mohannadi, underlined that the official announcement of the centre's opening confirms its readiness to work directly in all operational operations of the World Cup stadiums, including security systems in sports facilities such as control, entry and public safety systems.

Images: The Aspire Command and Control Centre for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. Credit: Qatar 2022.