There's an undercurrent among these international organization of tournaments as development. Very often if you go into marginal places they build roads and airports and improve base infrastructure in order to hold the event that might not otherwise be built.

In Qatar they wanted to build out a tourism industry from scratch. They didn't have the hotels or attractions or the airport required. The best their tourism board could come up with is "if your flight has a layover, come see our historic spice market". So, yeah they needed it.

The point was overcoming those problems and creating reasons to visit Qatar other than being a sailor in the US 5th Fleet. A lot of nations have successfully done something like that, after all. They just didn't rely quite so heavily on slave labor or tried to impose morality laws on tourists.