Criticism on the decision to name Qatar as host for the 2022 World Cup Finals will continue, but the decision to move the tournament to winter removes the last great uncertainty around the world’s most popular sporting occasion.

Fifa has investigated and dismissed allegations of corruption and has shifted the event from June to November and December to avoid Qatar’s high temperatures and humidity during the summer months.

The damage has been done to Fifa’s reputation, but Qatar will have been fortified by what it has undergone in the past four years. It has been the target of an unrelentingly negative campaign that encompassed its climate, politics and culture, the way women and homosexuals are treated, conditions on Qatari building sites and the charge that Qatar is too small and in the wrong location to host the World Cup.

It held firm to the case it made for the Middle East to host a global sporting event for the first time and never tempered its argument that it had the money and the technology to make it succeed whatever the season.

Work on what Qatar needs to host the event and accommodate hundreds of thousands of visitors during the tournament carried on regardless. The annual MEED Qatar Projects conference held in early March in Doha heard about progress across all areas of Qatar’s economy.

These projects plus a host of power, water and real estate projects have created the Middle East’s most concentrated construction boom. According to MEED Projects, no less than 825 contracts with a combined value of $100bn have been placed in Qatar since it won the World Cup mandate.

Contractors report adequate supplies of cement, steel, gabbro and asphalt. Even soaring demand for construction labour has been managed: visas for about 140,000 foreign workers have been issued in the first two months of 2015.

What comes next will be even more demanding, with estimates that a total of $110bn worth of further contracts are due to be awarded between 2016 and 2020.  

Contractors have expressed concern about the possibility of shortages of material. Worries about labour needs continue to be substantial. It is estimated that Qatar already has up to 1 million foreign construction workers and that this number could at least double as construction activity peaks in 2017-19.

How Qatar deals with migrant workers has been the subject of persistent criticism. The UK daily The Guardian reported in December that Nepalese migrants building the infrastructure to host the 2022 World Cup have died at a rate of one every two days in 2014.

The issue was raised by Fifa president Sepp Blatter during a visit to Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha on 15 March.

“It is encouraging to hear the Emir’s personal commitment to workers’ welfare and to get a sense of the improvements planned for all workers in Qatar,” Blatter said after the meeting. 

“As various human rights groups have recently noted, progress has been made already, especially with regard to the standards introduced by the Supreme Committee [Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy] relating to 2022 construction sites, but more must be done in Qatar to ensure uniformly fair working conditions for all.”

The Qatar Foundation for Education, Science & Community Development has been leading the campaign for better conditions for construction conditions.

In 2013, it launched the Migrant Workers Welfare Charter and a code setting out minimum requirements with respect to the recruitment, living, working conditions and the general treatment of workers engaged in construction and other projects.

These are incorporated into agreements between Qatar Foundation and its contractors. These standards are demanded from companies working on World Cup projects.

Earlier this month, Daruna, a Qatari company building accommodation for construction and other workers, signed a memorandum of understanding for the first in what is planned to be series of model communities for migrant workers.

Ensuring all migrant labour accommodation reaches the right standard will be testing, but not impossible, Qatari officials say.

The next big challenge will be building enough accommodation for visitors. Qatar is committed to having 60,000 hotel rooms available for the tournament, but the needs do not stop there.

The completion of construction in turn will create a new set of challenges. These include recruiting about 100,000 people to manage and run the 2022 tournament, plus at least the same number of facility managers, operators and technicians for Qatar’s metro and new roads, sewers, power and water plants and hotels.

Qatar’s World Cup headaches won’t all be cured by Fifa’s announcement this week. It is less than a quarter of the way through building what will be needed in 2022. And then there are the needs beyond the World Cup, defined in Qatar’s 2030 strategy.

Football and its billions of followers are fickle. They’ve tested Doha’s patience and reputation almost to destruction. It is likely that European football clubs will demand millions of dollars in compensation for the disruption caused by holding the tournament in the winter.

But there is at least one certainty. Football is coming to Doha in November 2022.