ON March 26, the national football teams of Norway and Germany protested against 2022 World Cup host Qatar.

At the opening of their qualifying matches with Gibraltar and Turkey, the 11 players of Norway wore shirts bearing the message “Human rights on and off the pitch’. The players of Germany lined up in shirts that spelled out “Human rights” before their clash with Iceland.

The Netherlands subsequently joined Germany and Norway’s clarion call in shirts that said “Football supports change”. While this may seem unthinkable to many football fans, there is a campaign in Europe by professional football players, politicians, and human rights activists to boycott the 2022 World Cup.

Before we start talking about what is happening in Qatar right now, it is worth mentioning that the other aspects of the World Cup host are not without their concerns and controversies, especially the bidding process governed by FIFA, which has recently been the centre of corruption allegations.   

There are valid concerns about Qatar’s capability to host an event like the World Cup given its limited football history, lack of infrastructure and its intolerable weather. It gets more comical when other countries that lost the bidding to Qatar are the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Any of these countries would be a much better bet than Qatar.

Since FIFA has awarded Qatar the right to host the World Cup in 2010, there were numerous reports of alleged bribery and corruption from FIFA’s senior officials. There are at least three senior officials who had been accused by the US Department of Justice of receiving bribes to vote in favour of the Gulf state. It’s certainly a damning verdict for an international organisation that is supposed to safeguard all things related to football.

However, corruption was not the reason for the Norway, Germany, and Netherland teams’  recent protest. Rather it was the appalling number of migrant workers’ deaths in Qatar since 2010 when it was elected to host the World Cup.

UK’s The Guardian newspaper recently revealed that more than 6,500 migrant workers have died since 2010 and it is a shame that all of these deaths are related to football.

For Qatar to host the World Cup, the country has undertaken an unprecedented hyper-charged plan to build seven new stadiums, airports, a public transport system, and an entire new city named Lusail by 2022.

And since Qatar’s economy is mostly reliant on migrant workers, this major construction project has seen Qatar importing more migrant workers to fulfil the labour demand.  Yet Qatar has shown to be lacking in labour reforms that is compatible with international human rights standard, which led to thousands of migrant workers continue to be exploited and abused. 

The temperature in Qatar certainly does not help those migrant workers toiling in construction sites as many international bodies have agreed that the searing temperature is a major factor for the many workers’ deaths. Yet Qatar’s response to thousands of deaths of migrant workers, who had sacrificed their lives to build stadium and towers for the country, remains limited.

FIFA is also equally complicit in the human rights abuses happening in Qatar. When FIFA decided to award Qatar the right to host the world cup, it should have been aware of Qatar’s shoddy human rights record and its exploitative labour system would not have gone down well with the great influx of foreign workers due to the construction boom a World Cup creates. 

One of the great things about the beautiful game is that it is not afraid to get its hands dirty for an attempt to become a force of good, even though the good it produces is more often minimal.

Some have argued that the international football team should have boycotted the World Cup to send a loud and clear message to FIFA and Qatar. But German star player Toni Kross disagreed with the call to boycott the tournament. Although he admitted the decision for Qatar to host the World Cup was indeed wrong, he argued a boycott would not change anything.

Though the protest is instrumental in highlighting the human rights abuses in Qatar and may hold it to international accountability, it might turn out to be a mere symbolic gesture that leaves things unchanged.

The World Cup in Qatar will be allowed to take place with much fanfare.     

Personally, I am still debating whether I can bring myself to watch a tournament that is not only tainted by corruption but thousands of unnecessary deaths due to exploitation.

Football, for all its joy and sorrow it has inflicted upon me, is a sport that I passionately love and nothing in football is bigger than the World Cup tournament.

But I also believe that my love for football is not unconditional and we should be aware that the 2022 World Cup is built on the graves of thousands of migrant workers. – April 4, 2021.

* Kenneth Cheng has always been interested in the interplay between human rights and government but more importantly he is a father of two cats, Tangyuan and Toufu. When he is not attending to his feline matters, he is most likely reading books about politics and human rights or playing video games. He is a firm believer in the dictum “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.