By Jordan Hum | Copy Editor
Every four years, the world gathers to watch the Fifa World Cup, a global competition in which countries compete for the highest achievement in professional soccer. With the event taking place in Qatar this year, a peninsula on the Persian Gulf, the world has once again united to celebrate the most popular sport in the world. However, behind the masquerade of the beautiful games, the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar is chock full of corruption and exploitation.
In 2010, the bid to be the host country for the 2022 World Cup was shockingly won by Qatar, a country with a population of only 2.9 million people. Additionally, Qatar had no previous footing in global soccer, never qualifying for the tournament since its conception in 1930. While Qatar lacks population and passion, they possess the great equalizer- money.
Since the 2010 bidding war, reports of corruption within Fifa, soccer’s governing body, have been constant. In one instance of bribery, Mohammed bin Haman, Qatari president of the Asian Football Confederation, “allegedly paid $1.6m into a bank account controlled by [Jack] Warner, half of it before the vote for the World Cup,” according to the Guardian. Warner, the then president of the Confederation of North, Central America, and Caribbean Association Football, was one of the 14 Fifa executives who voted for Qatar to host.
Once Qatar was announced as the host, an entire infrastructure had to be built, costing a staggering $220 billion. With such a large expansion, Qatar resorted to hiring migrant workers. These workers, mostly coming from South East Asia, were mistreated, leading to massive worker deaths.
According to BBC News, “30,000 foreign laborers were hired just to build the stadiums”, with “6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka [dying] in Qatar since it won its World Cup bid.” While the Qatar government claims only 34 workers have died of work-related events, that number is a gross underestimate since Qatar does not consider heart or respiratory failure as work-related.
In fact, the health problems that caused most of these deaths likely stemmed from the heinous working conditions. Workers still had to labor in temperatures up to 120 degrees. Emran Khan, a worker from Bangladesh, told CBS News that he “found himself working shifts of up to 48 hours straight.”
The World Cup is one of those unique events in which the entire world comes together under a singular passion. Having a country with a pre-existing infrastructure host, like Australia or America, two countries that were in the 2010 bidding war, would make the event more enjoyable.
The World Cup is more than just a celebration of soccer; it is a celebration of cultures. Having this year’s tournament marred with manipulation ruins the enjoyment and only promotes the inhumane aspects of money and power.
