FIFA president Sepp Blatter has backed plans for a winter World Cup in Qatar.

RELATED ARTICLES: Qatar to invest $200bn into construction by 2022 | Patent holder for Qatar stadium cooling technology issues copyright warning | Qatar will control heat during World Cup

Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president, has said that he plans to ask world football’s governing body’s executive committee to consider moving the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to the winter in order to avoid the high summer temperatures.

Despite health concerns included in an official report before the vote, the FIFA executive committee opted for the tiny Gulf country’s bid in 2010. Since then, Blatter has consistently refused to explicitly state that he backs Qatar hosting football’s most prestigious tournament, given it can have temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius during the summer.

“If this World Cup is to become a party for the people, you can’t play football in the summer,” Blatter said. “You can cool down the stadiums but you can’t cool down the whole country.”

In May of this year, Blatter told a French newspaper that it would not be ‘rational and reasonable’ to stage the first World Cup in the Middle East during the summer months.

However, moving the tournament to the winter or to any other point of the calendar would severely disrupt the schedule of the European football leagues, who would have to change things around for at least one season.

“There is still enough time,” Blatter insisted, “I will bring this up to the executive committee.”

Although Qatar has proposed a number of radical solutions to the heat, including air conditioned stadiums and pitches in their bid for the tournament, the cooling technology only resolves the problem within the venues.

“We have to protect our partners, our commercial partners, our TV partners. We have to be tough on this,” said Blatter, who spoke during a two-day conference on sports, media and economy set up by German great Franz Beckenbauer in Austria.

The head of the local organizing committee, Hassan Al-Thawadi, said Qatar bid for a tournament in the summer but left the option open of a possible switch to another time of the year.

“It there is a wish from the football community to move the World Cup to the winter, we are open for it,” said Al-Thawadi, who spoke to the conference through a live video connection.