By: Maya Kumar, Ananya Jain and Saanvi Bahadur
“I feel Qatari, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled.” These bizarre words were spoken by FIFA president, Gianni Infantino in an address regarding the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The World cup, held in Qatar, has faced massive media attention in previous weeks, and it’s not just because Morocco is in the semi-finals. The 2022 FIFA world cup has shown that the game surprisingly has broader implications than just being fun to yell at your TV. The world cup is the largest football sporting event, hosting over 30 teams and bringing an average of $6.4 bn to their host countries. This year, FIFA has been used as a lens through which many have pointed out the poignant injustice within Qatar and the FIFA organisation itself. With a tangled web of allegations, FIFA has dug itself into a corner like never before. The next few weeks will be crucial in deciding the future of the FIFA organisation.
Hosting the FIFA world cup in Qatar was an unprecedented decision, as it is the first time that such a large-scale sporting event has been held in the Middle East. Events in the Middle East often come with the stigma of prevalent violence, injustice and human rights violations; many Middle Eastern people hoped this would be different. “Apart from visibility, it’s also about having some influence in international affairs and being able to punch above [your] weight,” says Georgetown University of Qatar professor Danyel Reiche. Despite Qatar being 4th richest country in the world due to their booming oil industry, they still struggle to underscore themselves as a hub for global affairs; perhaps because of its numerous human rights violations.
From the get-go, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as Amnesty International have been highly opposed to FIFA setting up a base in Qatar since it was announced in 2010. One of the largest issues that were made apparent was the poor working conditions migrant workers had to deal with, which would only be exacerbated by the presence of the World Cup. They make up over 95% of the labour force in Qatar showing that they are the backbone of the Qatari economy, yet the immense pressure that was put onto these migrant workers to cater to the thousands of fans that would visit Qatar, as well as the building of infrastructure that would be needed to support them, is just unfair and cruel. Although Amnesty has partnered with the Qatari government to create frameworks and reforms that would ensure the fair and adequate treatment of migrant workers such as allowing employees to change occupations and leave the country without first securing permission from their employers, these rules are not often upheld, regulated and enforced. Amnesty themselves admit that whilst their rules look good on paper, in practice they lack enforcement and therefore don’t give rise to any real, tangible change. We can see similar violations with FIFA in past instances such as hosting in Russia in 2018, a country that blatantly annexed Crimea and is now at war. This begs the question - how does FIFA select their host countries and what is the line which they are willing to cross?
The exemplification of this can be seen in the number of deaths that occurred while erecting the World Cup. Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar’s World Cup announced that “between 400 and 500” migrants died. “I don’t have the exact number,” he admitted sheepishly. The very failure of the Qatari government and FIFA organisation to not even know the number of people whose death they are responsible for is indicative of the nature of these organisations. After all, FIFA is a profit-maximising entity, but does this mean they should ignore the injustices that occur under their very noses? Their weak attempt at evading the blame came in the form of a, frankly, outlandish press release in which the current FIFA president claimed that he could empathise with those affected by the Qatari regime, despite having no real basis for this. Qatari migrant workers don’t need our sympathies; they need advocacy and real structural change to ensure that this cycle of abuse does not continue any longer.
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