This year’s host for the most awaited and famous event for many soccer fans around the globe, the World Cup, is entangled with major controversies that range from prominent bribes to record-breaking violations of human rights.
This is the first time the Qatari soccer team, one that never qualified to participate in the World Cup, was granted an automatic entry after they were announced to host the games in 2022. The main reason why they first bid is because they wanted “to promote a positive image of the country abroad”, and to gain visibility, said Danyel Reiche, professor at Georgetown University Qatar. Due to the political and economic legacies closely interlaced with this tournament, millions worth of preliminary corruption allegations in FIFA, the governing body of the event, have been conducted by one of its executive committee members, Mohammed bin Hammam, the bridge that brought the World Cup to Qatar (Vox, 2022).
Qatar is now known for hosting the most expensive World Cup in history, spending nearly $220 billion on infrastructure while relying on a highly exploitative migrant labor system known as the kafala, which tethers workers to a single employer and forbids them from leaving their job or country without permission. Workers who were building stadiums for the games earned as little as around $6.15 per hour. Some had their passports confiscated and were constantly subjected to a culture of fear and intimidation. Nonetheless, they were forced “to live in unsanitary and overcrowded accommodations” and had “to pay billions of dollars in recruitment fees to secure their jobs in the World Cup” (The Guardian, 2022).
With an estimated of 6,500 dead workers in this small wealthy gulf in the Middle East, some due to the long working hours under temperatures as high as 45ºC, “Qatar has failed to explain up to 70% of migrant workers deaths in past ten years” (The Guardian, 2022). Families who lost loved ones are left not only with no compensation but also in debt.
On September 2020, Qatar ended kafala and introduced the first “non-discriminatory minimum wage” in the Middle East. Yet, a year later, in 2021, allegations regarding the abusive working conditions in hotels and the “zero-tolerance [Qatari] approach towards violating companies” were exposed. A few months before the World Cup started, migrant workers were sent home, leaving them in debt and with no work. Meanwhile, “security guards at the heart of World Cup festivities claim they are paid just 35p an hour, appear only to get one day off a month, and are housed in dirty camps on the edge of the desert” (Kelly, 2022).
Aside from the exciting moments that all of us get to enjoy during the weeks of the World Cup, is it worth spending millions of dollars on building disposable stadiums? This year's World Cup is indeed highlighting major global issues that still need to be addressed, such as but not limited to modern slavery and severe violations of human rights.
Comments