The 2022 World Cup has been at the centre of many controversies over the past decade, from corruption to the abuse of migrant workers. All the issues in question stem from one source, the host nation of Qatar. There is a lot of data available to suggest that Qatar has not done enough to solve the issues that surround its greatest ever sporting event.
The first major issue with the Qatar World Cup is the fact that it barely has any stadiums with the 40,000 capacity required to host a World Cup match. This means that the country has had to build eight new stadiums for the competition. The problem with this is that to do this Qatar has bought in thousands of migrant workers from South Asia (mainly from India and Nepal), and then made them work in extremely poor conditions. This has led to thousands of migrant worker deaths in Qatar over the past decade.
These thousands of deaths can be attributed to the appalling conditions which Qatar has for migrant workers. Qatar is located in the Middle East, and in the summer temperatures can reach over 40 degrees Celsius. The workers are not given any sort of support to work in these temperatures, and thus many choose to work during the night (with far lower levels of light, which can be very dangerous) to avoid the scorching heat.
These deaths are often attributed to unexplained heart or respiratory failures. These could be because of the extreme temperatures that these workers are exposed to. If this is the case, it is clear that Qatar has not done enough to protect these workers from the extreme conditions in which they are working. On top of this, an alarming number of deaths have been attributed to suicide. This could imply that the conditions of working are so bad that the workers are killing themselves to escape it. Whatever the reasoning is, it is crucial that Qatar needs to give migrant workers a safer and more humane environment to work.
The other main issue with the Qatar World Cup is corruption. Qatar managed to win the World Cup bidding war despite having a far lower quality package than its competitors, but why is this?
The answer is that Qatar offered so much money to FIFA members that it essentially corrupted the bidding process. The graph above shows the initial ‘bid’ that was made by each World Cup host over the past 20 years. Qatar’s total is more than five times the amount of the previous five hosts combined. It is clear that Qatar has used its large financial stature to ‘rig’ the World Cup vote and give us a World Cup that is more fuelled by money than passion.
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