Grapes have never tasted so sour.

Giving the World Cup to Qatar is not just a defeat for Australia. It is a betrayal of the most important people in football: the fans and their passion, joy, a global celebration in the stands and on the streets, a chance for people to come together.

The World Cup in America would have been a disappointment. But we could at least understand the logic: stadiums already built, bigger population, higher ticket sales, easier for fans to travel there, more revenue from television rights, a football growth area. In short, a commercial decision building on the success of the 1994 World Cup. Conservative yet financially understandable.

Yet the Qatari bid is a different issue altogether. They have proposed some amazing futuristic stadiums. Even if they build them and find a way to control the heat so the players don't collapse, what about the fans? Who is going to go there and watch their World Cup? Who is going to spend their hard-earned money to fly to the desert state, walk around in searing heat and traipse back to their antiseptic hotels afterwards, desperate for some air-conditioning?

The magnetic appeal of the FIFA World Cup lies in the tide of celebration, the coming-together of the world. The football is only part of it. Just as the Olympics imbued Sydney with a wonderful sense of happiness for two weeks, the World Cup turns that feeling up to 11 for a month. Everyone is on a high as they put normal life on hold and experience a kinship that usually lies dormant.

The football may be played in Qatar but the celebration will be absent. The real test will be when the games are not on.

FIFA's decision to award the World Cup to Qatar demonstrates that it does not care about the fans who have given the game its passion and meaning. It is a victory for lobbying over love, for influence over equity, for politics over passion.

In a world where television rights have come to shape whether a sporting event will be successful, the World Cup has been one of the rare exceptions: a hothouse that depends on the passion of large numbers of fans making a pilgrimage every four years.

Anyone who went to Germany in 2006 or South Africa this year knows that this is a absolute core of why they go. If they went to the game, they exalted in the aftermath with friends out on the street, dressed in silly clothes. If the game was in a different city, they went to the bars anyway and celebrated remotely.

For Qatar 2022, football fans will ask themselves a different question: "Searing heat, dust, sand, strict dress codes, alcohol issues...What's in it for me?"

For Australians, the ugly answer is 20 years of bitter disappointment. Twelve years to absorb the fact that the people who run the game don't care. Plus another eight before it can return to Asia.

Here in Australia, the bid was divisive - but then all pitches of this size involve compromise. Yet Sydney 2000 demonstrated that we know how to stage a big event, and that Australians have a genuine love of sport, and that people will come here to share that passion.

These qualities would have made the World Cup here a fabulous experience in 2022. Instead, we now have to taste the grapes that are twice as bitter: not just from losing our own bid but from knowing that the voting process led to the worst of all possible outcomes.