I don’t like the idea of a World Cup in Qatar any more than … well, any more than about 99 percent of the globe’s soccer fans, as far as I can tell.

This apparent shift to a winter event is a tourniquet that stops the bleeding on one wound opened by FIFA’s controversial choice; at least we won’t remember the 2022 World Cup as the one where some poor player actually bursts into flames on the field.

But it certainly doesn’t diminish how slimy this all feels. It won’t mitigate concern for worker conditions around the stadium construction sites. It won’t help how out of place this all feels, like a great steak dinner you had to eat with your hands while driving.

No, the idea of Qatar as host dents everyone’s factor of eager anticipation, and that’s a shame.

On the other hand, I’m having a hard time taking seriously some of the hyperbolic overreach when it comes to effects and impact on lands and leagues beyond. You may not like the choice, but let’s not get carried away with any claims of system-wide duress and post-traumatic stress. It’s a one-time event, after all.

Will it impact how European leagues approach the 2022-23 season? Of course it will. But it’s just one season. We aren’t exactly scrubbing history here, now are we? If you have roasted chicken or a nicely smoked brisket one year for Thanksgiving, you aren’t exactly eviscerating generations of turkey-centered tradition. No, you are changing the menu once, then happily returning to the safety of former sameness.

Today I saw a story bemoaning how a final staged late in the calendar year would scuttle the UK’s Boxing Day tradition. Yes, that would shift a bunch of families’ usual post-Christmas arrangements (again, for just one year). But as inconveniences go, we aren’t talking about huddling in the underground while menacing planes buzz overhead, are we?

Chances are, supporters abroad wouldn’t remember 2022 as the year they stole Boxing Day delight; rather, they would remember 2022 as the year everyone watched the World Cup final a couple of days before Christmas.

Here in the United States, I am listening to fears of how a fall-winter World Cup might hammer interest or viewership. Really?

I love that World Cup gets such a high percentage of the sports media spotlight in the summer. Without competition from college or pro football, or even from NBA or NHL, the happenings in Brazil dominated the sporty side of American cultural conversation last summer. That serendipity of the U.S. sports calendar has definitely assisted in creating quadrennial buzz over World Cup soccer.

You’ll see it happen again in 2018 when the World Cup plays out in Russia. And you’ll see it again in 2026, with viewership numbers steadily ticking upward.

A record 26.5 million people in the United States watched Germany triumph in last summer’s World Cup final. That was up about 2 million from the 2010 World Cup final. The average viewership for all 64 World Cup matches was up 39 percent over 2010 on ESPN and ABC, with a similar increase reported on Spanish-language Univision.

In all likelihood, viewership in 2018 will set new records; each year sees more of the U.S. population reaching TV-watching age who have been exposed to the game for years, who see it as part of their sporting landscape. Meanwhile, the numbers are steadily dwindling who view soccer as a foreign oddity (or the affronted subset who always saw soccer as a metaphor for a scary, changing world.)

By 2022, there will be more soccer fans born and raised here, and the country’s immigrant population will have grown steadily. However you look at it, it’s almost impossible to argue that that fewer soccer fans will live in our country in 2022, and that will be reflected in domestic interest and viewership of that year’s World Cup.

That steady ascension in domestic acceptance and popularity may take a small hit, but it certainly won’t be permanently derailed because one World Cup moved from summer to fall. Heck, the game’s steady rise might not suffer one little bit.

So much of the World Cup plays out during the week (i.e., not on the weekends when most American football games are happening). The United States-Ghana World Cup match that had us all falling over backward in anticipation? That was on a Monday. Who doesn’t remember Tim Howard’s show-stopping performance against Belgium in the elimination round? That happened on a Tuesday.

Brazil’s unforgettable semifinal capitulation against unstoppable Germany also happened on a Tuesday; World Cup semifinals are traditionally mid-week affairs.

Competition from college or NFL football on the weekends will likely impact the final ratings, but certainly not by staggering degrees. We live in a wonderfully diverse country; believe it or not, there are plenty of people who aren’t in love with American football. Or, at the very least, there are steadily growing numbers of casual sports fans who will opt for a big World Cup match over, say, the Pac-12 conference championship game (so long as they don’t have a dog in that particular gridiron fight).

As for a World Cup one-time shift’s effect on Major League Soccer, the country’s most popular and most visible professional soccer property: Yes, the league would need to shuffle its calendar. Most likely outcome would be a season that starts about a month earlier (this year’s first kick is March 6) and includes a few more weeknight matches, with everything crammed into an eight-month window rather than the current nine months.

Mark that down under “minor, temporary inconvenience” rather than “epochal, radical makeover.”  I assure you, everyone would get over it.

I’m sure FOX Sports, the American TV rights-holder for World Cup 2022 feels a little differently about all this, faced with difficult choices about which games (and which sport) to feature. For the rest of us, a winter World Cup would feel odd – but we’d still watch. And it would still be memorable, even if for some of the wrong reasons.

Editor’s note: Steve Davis writes a weekly column for World Soccer Talk. He shares his thoughts and opinions on US and MLS soccer topics every Wednesday, as well as news reports throughout the week. You can follow Steve on Twitter at @stevedavis90. Plus, read Steve’s other columns on World Soccer Talk.