Out of the many facts and figures circulated about Qatar’s problems, there is one realisation that should stand above everything. It is a disgrace that, in 2022, a country can host a World Cup where it has lured millions of people from the poorest countries on earth – often under false pretences – and then forced them into what many call “modern slavery”.
And yet this has just been accepted. The World Cup carries on, an end product of a structure that is at once Orwellian and Kafkaesque. A huge underclass of people work in an autocratic surveillance state, amid an interconnected network of issues that make it almost impossible to escape. “It’s all so embedded,” says Michael Page of Human Rights Watch.
Many will point to similar problems in the west but this isn’t the failure of a system. It is the system, global inequality taken to an extreme. “The bottom line is that these human rights abuses are not normal for a World Cup host,” says Minky Worden, also of Human Rights Watch.
Qatar 2022 has so many concerns it has a strong claim to be the most problematic football competition ever, maybe surpassing Argentina 1978. It is so bad that, when human rights groups went to federations with various individual points, they were told to come up with common causes.
That led to the call for Fifa to match prize money with compensation for migrant workers, but there hasn’t yet been movement on that. One simple appeal to humanity hasn’t yet moved the game. That makes it all the more relevant to actually spell out everything the world is walking into. You can jump to any of the following sections, below:
When Qatar shocked the planet by winning the World Cup bid in December 2010, it was “probably the Gulf state about which the least was known”, according to FairSquare’s Nick McGeehan. That has drastically changed.
Qatar went for the competition to drive an economic diversification programme for a world after fossil fuels, and key to that is presenting the country as a business centre without complicated questions on human rights. It is the most elementary example of “sportswashing”.
“It was done in 1936,” Page says, “but it’s now supercharged.” It’s also far more sophisticated than simple image improvement. It is really about buying off or integrating into western infrastructure so moral scrutiny becomes impossible. Qatar has similarly invested billions into EU countries, completely subduing the usual political criticism. It is how this World Cup can somehow be held without significant reform.
“As we’ve seen with Saudi Arabia, nations with deep pockets and poor human rights records are undoubtedly aware of how sport has the potential to reshape their international reputation,” says Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International’s UK chief executive. “This is the modern playbook. The calculation appears to be that a new investment in sport may bring some temporary criticism, but that this will be outweighed in the longer term by the substantial rebranding benefits.”
In that sense, this World Cup will ensure Qatar is associated with modern equivalents of, say, Gordon Banks’s save against Brazil. It is a powerful thing. As one source argues, “it’s a lot harder to invade somewhere if they’ve just hosted a World Cup”.
This is where reference to Saudi Arabia is so pointed. The bid for the World Cup came amid an escalating regional rivalry that led to the 2017 Gulf blockade, Qatar on one side, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia on the other. And what is happening on Sunday? It was supposed to just be the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Instead, the World Cup’s opening game has been moved, overshadowing everything and underlining what sport has been reduced to.
The reasons that Qatar shocked the world in 2010 was because they didn’t seem to have support or even infrastructure, given Fifa’s own report described their bid as “high risk”. They did have a lot of money, though. Whistleblower Phaeda Almajid has since claimed she was in the rooms as members of Fifa’s executive committee were offered bribes of $1.5m. It has similarly been reported by the Sunday Times that Mohamed bin Hammam, the driver of Qatar’s bid, had used secret slush funds to make payments to senior officials totalling £3.8m. Bin Hammam was banned for life from all Fifa related activities by the ethics committee, although this was later overturned due to lack of evidence, but then reinstated over conflicts of interest.
In April 2020, the United States Department of Justice alleged that three exco members received payments to support Qatar. The FBI’s William F Sweeney Jnr stated how “the defendants and their co-conspirators corrupted the governance and business of international soccer with bribes and kickbacks, and engaged in criminal fraudulent schemes”.
The Supreme Committee has long denied the claims.
If there’s one issue that has most dominated coverage of Qatar, and especially angered the state, it is the report of 6,500 migrant worker deaths first set by The Guardian. That anger, to be blunt, is itself an outrage.
The only reason Qatar can possibly dispute the figures is because of the circular tragic farce that the state simply won’t investigate deaths. “This is the scandal of it,” McGeehan says. “It’s the wrong argument. It’s about the proven negligence and the rate of unexplained deaths.”
That, according to a 2021 Amnesty International report, stands at approximately 70 per cent. What can be said with absolute certainty is that the actual number would be shocking, although even the three deaths officially recorded – Zac Cox, Anil Human Pasman and Tej Narayan Tharu – is obviously tragically bad enough. It goes without saying that a sporting competition should not involve a single death or any human suffering.
And yet Qatar has involved numbers that, statistically, are likely to be magnitudes higher. Hundreds of thousands of workers have been for years forced to work in searing summer months, which FairSquare describes as a “demonstrable risk” to workers’ lives due to “clear evidence linking heat to worker deaths”, especially when allied to strenuous work.
A report Qatar itself commissioned found workers are “potentially performing their job under significant occupational heat stress” for a third of the year. One in three workers were found to have become hyperthermic at some point.
