The 2022, FIFA World Cup in Qatar unleashed an avalanche of Islamophobic discourses in the Western Press, which witnessed the deployment of pernicious and enduring orientalist tropes. Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism, as well as Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs, are relevant to discussing World Cup press coverage and the constant construction of the Arab and Muslim imagined geography and the framing of otherness. Indeed, an Islamophobic social imaginary was activated in the lead-up, throughout and even at the conclusion of the World Cup. The lines between East and West were so craftly constructed with negative imagery, insidious cartoons and racist talking-heads repeating an Orientalist script that could fit an 18th and 19th century discussions if minor rhetorical edits are introduced. The paper will seek to interrogate Western media coverage of the World Cup and how the deployment of discourses that framed Qatar as a sight of "savages", "barbarians", "terrorist", "rich irresponsible Shaykhs" and "exceptionally anti-LGBTQ" belonging outside the category of the human or global civil society. Media and elites in the west built upon these frames, magnified and essentialized each one of them to produce negative reactions and disdain for the country and in the process toward Arabs and Muslims as a group.