FIFA awarded the World Cup to a state where slavery is actively facilitated

FIFA and Blatter must surely bear a considerable moral responsibility for both the manslaughter and the slavery upon which the 2022 World Cup is being constructed

(Getty Images)

Last week FIFA announced that it was moving the 2022 World Cup to November or December over concerns that the players would find it too hard to compete in the blistering heat.

One could almost be moved at the concern for the players, if it did not reek of the hypocrisy that taints the administrators of the world’s most popular game. Because while FIFA has been wringing its hands over football playing conditions, they have displayed negligible concern for the conditions of the migrant construction workers who are building the infrastructure and venues for the tournament.

In 2013 it was estimated that over 500 Indian workers were killed in Qatar’s preparations for the 2022 World Cup. This revelation provoked worldwide concern and condemnation of FIFA’s glib attitude towards Qatar’s working conditions.

It even compelled Sepp Blatter to take notice. He travelled to Qatar in November 2013 to “raise the issue of workers’ rights”, but was careful to add that there was no question of the World Cup being taken away from Qatar.

One year on, to the surprise of no one, nothing has changed. Figures released at the end of 2014 indicated that overall worker deaths were in the region of one a day. They show that Qatar and FIFA are still comfortably on track to fulfil the International Trades Union Confederation’s (ITUC) horrendous prediction that 4,000 workers would be killed in order to enable Qatar to host the World Cup.

This carnage is a symptom of a deeper issue: that of slavery. It is a truism to say that today slavery is everywhere illegal. But is it?

In many places, including the Gulf states as documented by Anti-Slavery International and ITUC’s investigation back in 2011, and Qatar is no exception, slavery is actively facilitated through a system known as “kafalah”. This is a system whereby migrant workers require the “sponsorship” of an employer to obtain work. Once there their passports are confiscated and they are prohibited from changing employers, irrespective of how abusive the employer becomes.

No matter if workers are not being paid for months on end for long hours of hard work in scorching heat or live in squalid conditions. They cannot leave - that would make their status in the country illegal and they would simply be arrested. They can’t even leave the country to go back home without the employer’s written permission.

Qatar winning the bid for the 2022 World Cup in 2010 (Getty Images)

Bluntly put FIFA awarded the World Cup to a slave state, one in which slavery is underpinned by the legal system which treats the workers as disposable commodities not as human beings.

Personally I would love to see the World Cup in Qatar, if it would guarantee that the construction would be completed using decent work, not slavery. But Qatar has not done this and FIFA’s protestations of concern and demands for change have been weak, insincere and utterly ineffectual.

FIFA and Blatter must surely bear a considerable moral responsibility for both the manslaughter and the slavery upon which the 2022 World Cup is being constructed. One would like to imagine that this would weigh heavily on Blatter’s conscience if he has one.

So, as the Messis and Ronaldos take to the pitch in the pleasant coolness of the Qatar winter they will be playing in venues built by a medieval system of cruelty which breaks the lives and bodies of poor people who went to Qatar seeking nothing but a decent living. Instead they found enslavement and death.

Still FIFA stands idly by, counting its blood money.