An interview that disappeared – FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022
josimarfootball.com
josimarfootball.com
There's also a heck of a lot of stories about how Qatar was able to get the world cup in the first place. It seems that FIFA isn't exactly free of corruption, which is a shame because they're supposed to be in charge of the world's favourite sport. Of course there's no accountability in any way, who even knows who their national FA rep is? I guess that's one of the perks of running a sport with that much history, people will still feel compelled to watch.
One thing that's positive is that ordinary people are not ignorant about this situation. You'll find in every FB post about this there's a load of voices expressing what I've just expressed. So whatever the Qataris think they're buying with this massive outlay, they're not getting it.
On the sporting side it appears they're making a decent effort of building a home grown team that isn't going to totally embarrass them, which is quite the challenge.
Thousands in the overall construction boom.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90607440/at-least-6500-workers-h...
> In August, Amnesty released a report that documented that at least 15 000 migrant workers had died since Qatar was awarded the World Cup hosting rights in 2010.
So, 15000 deaths over 11 years, or 1,363 deaths per year. Worth noting that this number does not make a distinction between people working in Qatar for the World Cup or just anyone working in Qatar.
Wikipedia says 2.3m expats as of 2017[1]. Putting the death rate at 0.59 per 1000 people per year (for 2017, the number of expats has been increasing since 2010, so the number would be higher for 2010, lower for 2021). This would put it at the very bottom of countries based on death rate[2]. (It's already at the very bottom for death rate, but here we're only looking at expats.)
TL;DR The number quoted has very little to do with the number of people working on the 2022 World Cup, and isn't really alarming.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_mortality...
* The death numbers are as reported by Qatar's own statistics agency and Amnesty says there are significant problems with them.
* Migrant workers are working age, not elderly, so comparing this to overall death rates is probably misleading.
* "69% of deaths of workers from India, Nepal and Bangladesh between 2008 and 2019 were attributed to ‘natural causes’ or ‘cardiac arrest’, and contained no information about the underlying causes of death... experts consulted by Amnesty International have said that in a well-resourced health system, it should be possible to identify the cause of death in all but 1% of cases."
> The point officials are making is that there are about half a million Indian workers in Qatar, and about 250 deaths per year - and this, in their view, is not a cause for concern. In fact, Indian government data suggests that back home in India you would expect a far higher proportion to die each year - not 250, but 1,000 in any group of 500,000 25-30-year-old men.
What a poorly thought comment…
Conditions for migrant workers in Qatar are certainly not pretty, but we need to be careful to stick to the facts, if we don't want to bullshit ourselves.
Source: https://www.constructconnect.com/blog/construction-worker-de...
Google also tells me by searching << united states Construction Workers 2020 >>: << Number of Jobs, 2020: 1,514,200 >>
That sounds rougly equivalent in total construction workers, but US is about 25% lower in rate of death.
What is more disturbing to me is the treatment of low-skill migrant workers in Qatar. It is terrifying, and it strikes me as the very definition of a modern slavery economy.
Understatement of the year
FIFA is a bunch of corrupt crooks, and while some individuals have been shown the door when the amount of corruption became too large, the institution itself has done nothing to prevent corruption.
[1]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/de/start/dokumentation/medienmittei...
That was reported here with "Everyone will profit from this (decision)" Infantino quote in some headlines. It's like FIFA is run by the Ferengi... /s
While I also don’t love that idea there is a BIG difference between making more money for the organization FIFA and profiting from it vs direct corruption. Ie taking bribes from Qatar
FIFA the org doesn't need more money, any extra they get will get pocketed with intra-org admin, where the jobs are also doled out as favours.
You might not like it, but it's an entirely separate thing.
(Just like it's silly to call everyone you disagree with politically either a fascist or a communist. They are other bad things, too!)
Especially given the current de-globalization and nationalist sentiments in politics and the importance of football for politics as "panem et circenses", I expect anti-trust and even confiscation-scale action against oil sheik and Russian mob owners, should they attempt such a radical transformation of how football is played.
At least there would be less corruption in the match played in Singapore..
You can't deny that there are serious advantages of a World cup every two years (currently even the best players with long careers can't hope to play more than 4 World Cups - even 17 year old debutants like Bellingham and Pedri, so their chances of winning one are slim; there are many good teams that deserve to win, so giving more options can result in more winners, etc.), and it isn't unprecedented, the AFC and Copa America are already on such a schedule.
With all that load, players rarely have the time to recover from games, that plus the ever rising speed and run distance leads to more injuries, which again the players can't naturally recover from. It's a rat race to the bottom, and the players get ground down only so that advertisers can get more exposure for ads and random dictatorships can whitewash their crimes.
And it's not just the players that can't keep up any more, the fans can't either. Traveling is expensive and annoying, particularly for games during the week (attending a "Montagsspiel" means two days worth of vacation), international travel for the cups means plane tickets and hotel stays and that eats up money really quick.
Furthermore, more competitions and more matches means more opportunities for more players to play a part.
> And it's not just the players that can't keep up any more, the fans can't either. Traveling is expensive and annoying, particularly for games during the week (attending a "Montagsspiel" means two days worth of vacation), international travel for the cups means plane tickets and hotel stays and that eats up money really quick.
Not every fan needs to see every game in a stadium. More games, more chances for more fans to visit. With a World Cup every two years, demand will probably be slightly lower/spread out, meaning more fans overall can go see the games. Not to mention that a World Cup every two years means much more host countries, which can be huge, for local fans and the sport locally. There'd be more shared hosts, hopefully close together. I'd love to see more neighbouring countries host, and i bet many countries and many fans in those countries would love to as well, especially for countries where qualifying to be a part of the thing isn't always an option.
In reality, coaches are under pressure to always put up an A-level selection. For the FC Bayern, that means Manuel Neuer between the goalposts no matter if the opponent is FC Chelsea or Greuther Fürth (the current bottom of the Bundesliga). The only scenarios outside of regulars being injured where coaches are fine to experiment with B/C level players are friendlies, training matches and irrelevant games (UEFA CL group phase, when the result of the last game does not matter).
> Not to mention that a World Cup every two years means much more host countries, which can be huge, for local fans and the sport locally.
Unfortunately, a World Cup requires large, expensive stadiums - billions of dollars, usually borne by the tax payers. In countries like the US or most of Europe, it is economically feasible to either use existing stadiums or build new ones (like Germany did) that get used for decades afterwards. In countries without a large (!) football fan community, these will all either rot or cause massive financial losses for their upkeep - like what happened in Brazil and South Africa [1] or Russia [2]. Qatar will likely be even worse, they already plan on one of the stadiums being torn down directly after the World Cup [3].
Not to mention the supporting infrastructure (public transport, hotels, press venues, roads) - if the stadiums aren't used to capacity, that's a lot of waste there too.
> I'd love to see more neighbouring countries host
That only spreads the expense, but the waste will be the same. A World Cup (and for that matter, also Olympic Games) only make sense in countries that can use the infrastructure at the designed scale for decades.
[1]: https://www.musikexpress.de/millionen-projekte-was-aus-den-w...
[2]: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/sport/fussball-wm/hohe-kosten-ka...
[3]: https://www.stern.de/sport/fussball/wm-2022-in-katar--neugeb...
That might be greedy, but it's not a sign of corruption in itself.
There's plenty of real corruption in FIFA to choose from.
Every world cup assignment of the last decades was loaded with corruption charges - including, to my shame as German, the 2006 World Cup.
More World Cups, more opportunities for grift and corruption. Not to mention that there aren't many stable democracies left willing to host World Cups, there's a reason why Qatar and Russia ended up hosting 2018/2022.
Nah, stable places are totally willing to host, if it was offered to them. They are just not willing to bid as high as Qatar and Russia were. (Where bidding is informal, basically how much bribery you were willing to do.)
> Every world cup assignment of the last decades was loaded with corruption charges - including, to my shame as German, the 2006 World Cup.
I can believe that. But the amount of money in bribes is still relatively trivial compared to the total amount they make from the World Cup.
(In general, what's so infuriating about bribes and corruption is how low the stakes are. If someone is willing to sell out their country for a few billion Euros, I wouldn't be mad. But have a look at eg the paltry sums that changed hands in the CDU-Spendenaffäre. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDU-Spendenaff%C3%A4re They are talking about mere millions.
Compare also https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in... )
Blatter and Platini are both facing a trial right now: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59133079
In 2019, Platini was detained over the awarding of the World Cup to Qatar: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/18/michel-plat...
> Michel Platini, the banned former Uefa president and France football legend, has been detained in connection with a criminal investigation into alleged corruption relating to Fifa’s decision to host the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, French justice sources have confirmed.
Do you sell tobacco that causes your users to die a painful and lingering death from cancer? No problem, sponsor one of the most famous vehicles in F1 history.
Are you leading a fascist state that will go on to murder six million Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and other "undesirables," not to mention plunging the world into war? No problem, host the Olympics, they'll gladly let you use it as a propaganda exercise.
But of course, if someone boycotts the Olympics, they are being "political." If someone raises their fist in protest, they are "besmirching the Olympics." if you aren't paying for it, you aren't allowed to exploit it.
What has changed since 1976 and 1936, respectively? Nothing.
I remember both John Oliver and South Park covered these topics.
Not trying to switch topics or go whataboutism but I'm genuinely concerned about the massive corruption and exploitation around the modern sports industry that's somehow become acceptable nowadays, with FIFA being the richest and most corrupt non profit in the world.
This current situation reminds me of the "bread and games" popularity near the fall of the Roman empire.
(Of course, where they got that wealth is another question.)
Burn it to the ground.
However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here. It just so happens that it's the biggest sport in the world, hence worth so much money to $REGIME who will do anything they can to capitalise.
But it's the culture around the sport in the UK, and greater Europe, that's awful. Remember hooligan "firms" in the 1990s? Those things don't happen in a vacuum. Chiefly, the football culture in the UK is inextricably tied to the entrenched class system, in the worst ways, unfortunately - and I haven't seen the Premier League's televised pundits ever advise their fans to maybe, perhaps, actually be good ambassadors for the sport to the rest of us.
(Okay, Michael Owen is an exception - my perception is the rest are like Eric Cantona: officially reprimanded, but we can tell people are lapping up his then abhorrent personal conduct. The same way people support Trump, I suppose).
FIFA aren't running a tight-ship from the top. The tiers under them aren't coming close, and the conceptual levels below are only worse.
Or like yeah there are some example of players that were violent and crazy, as you can find in any place with a number of humans doing it, I'd say HSBC was laudering cartels money and funding terrorist, all bankers are criminals?
Actually one can argue that the rules in football haven't kept up with the evolution of humans. When they defined the size of a goal, the average adult male was a full 10 cm shorter than they are today. People are running faster and jumping higher.
The sport would be a lot more exciting if you increased the physical dimensions of goals and pitches, so you would have 10 goals in an average game instead of 0 to 3.
10 goals has never been an average, to reach that, the goals should be twice the size at least.
I don't thing the size of the goal or people getting taller / faster is the reason we don't see many scoring. A big problem for me is the amount of downtime and the amount of foulplaying. Schwalbes are a real skill. Players fall to the ground way too quickly.
Smaller field would make things more interesting.
Do note soccer is currently tremendously exciting for millions of fans worldwide. I understand you mean well, and everyone is free to suggest changes (some of them good), but the sport right now is very exciting for huge numbers of people.
Informally it's a tremendously easy and fun game to pick up. Any kid with a foot ball and some room can play with their friends. It's even how some players start.
I don't think excitement is the biggest issue with football. The biggest issues are probably corruption in the business organizations around it, violence due to hooligans, etc.
I've never met a football fan in my life that complains about there not being 'enough goals'.
What an american take that is.
In high scoring games, the best team on the day tends to win.
In low scoring games, there are more upsets, as a single moment can have a greater impact.
Therefore even if your team is objectively worse, you go to the game with some hope in your heart.
Making football into a high scoring game could ruin it.
I can easily see it being a class-related thing in the UK, but the wealthy and cultured are very much into football in, say, Italy and Germany.
I'm very glad that kind of sports-violence culture isn't a worldwide thing, and it makes me sad that the same sport can be innocent enough to be associated with suburban "soccer moms" in one place, while celebrating the wrong team can get you killed in another place.
I have a book that convincingly makes the case that physical exercise, sports, is a favorite tool of the fascist. To my knowledge, it's never translated from Dutch, but I think there must be research on this in English as well.
There is a lot to take away from it, simple things like organisation and schedule keeping to team building, sportsmanship and determination.
Cold winter morning / evenings on the pitch or at the lake made me a better person im sure.
I had to play football at the extremely low ranking state school I went to and found the whole experience utterly miserable. My son attended a public school and played rugby there and I enjoyed watching him play and he seemed to get a lot out of it, while the on the pitch experience was far rougher than football the culture around the game seemed far more civilised. Of course that could just be the context of the different type of school but I thought it went deeper than that.
Edit: A nice touch at our school PE department was that they were mostly ex Paras and they seemed to treat us more like recruits than schoolkids. There was one ex Royal Marine who while working us just as hard was at least good natured about it, whereas the others seemed to be in a state of continual anger.
In Argentina at least, football is linked to the people, low and upper class; it's a "popular" sport. In contrast, Rugby is linked to the elite; mostly well to do spoiled kids (in the public perception, at least). There were a couple of beatings/murders linked to spoiled rich kids who were Rugby players, enough that in our public perception today a Rugby player is definitely not considered a "gentleman" but a rich brat potentially prone to violence.
However, I'd draw the comparison between a large crowd of rugby supporters leaving a match and a similar sized crowd of football supporters. I used to live near the Easter Road football ground in Edinburgh and that was pretty unpleasant and threatening on match days (particularly when Glasgow Rangers were playing...). I've never encountered the same level of sheer nastiness from a rugby crowd (and Edinburgh gets a lot of them) as from football crowd.
I remember once getting the last train from Glasgow to Edinburgh the day of an Old Firm match - one set of supporters at one end of the carriage, the other set of supporters at the other end and a few of us non-combatants sitting in the middle desperately trying to pretend that nothing was happening. That was fun.
NB Scotland does have a weird sectarian angle to football which doesn't help - although I don't think this is nearly as bad as it used to be.
I was thinking more about the actual players. It's also not a real statistic, just public perception: that Rugby players are spoiled rich kids prone to beating up other kids if they don't like the color of their skin.
It was just a bit sad to read, as it sounds exactly like something my grandfather would say. He's in his mid-to-late 70s now and still eaten up by things that happened in his childhood and early 20s (things that plenty of other people go through and don't allow to destroy their entire life).
His inability to deal with it in a healthy way has made the last 5 decades of his life miserable, and it kills me to see another person go through this as well.
I understand this is not a simple task for the average Aspie, but please try to understand what happened and integrate it into your outlook in a way that allows you to function as a healthy adult.
That being said football is a source of joy, entertainment, and camaraderie to hundreds of millions of people around the planet. There's really no "lack of any redeeming values in football". You should perhaps come to a grassroots football match, away from the multi-billion dollar dirty business the sport at a highest level has become, to see that.
(I don't like football either; neither watching nor playing, but I don't mind if other people engage in it.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if the USA men’s team would become world champion within a few decades. The sport is growing rapidly in Spanish-speaking areas, Spanish-speakers are the fastest growing linguistic group in the United States, the country is sport-minded, and the USA men’s team already is ranked 11th in the world (https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id13505) (ahead of Germany!)
The former seems reasonably plausible, if the trends you mention hold true.
- Iceland (population 350,000 or so) reached the quarter finals of the European championships, a tournament with, probably, stronger teams in the finals than the world championships. Only 13 teams from Europe can qualify for the latter. Looking at the world rankings, all of those are in the top 20 of the world, and, for example, Serbia, at 23 wouldn’t make it to the final 32.
- South Korea ended fourth at the world’s, mostly by wanting it more.
I don’t see why the USA wouldn’t be able to better than those, certainly if they get a bit of luck on their side.
Remember, Greece won Euro 2004 but have struggled since, often not even qualifying. Greece are not a good team. Period. By the same token, just because the Netherlands failed to qualify once or because Germany were knocked out in the first round of a world cup, that does not make either a weak team - they just had an off-day.
All said, i agree with the original point - i won't be surprised if the USA men's football team is a force to reckon with in the next decade. Same goes for the Canadian men's team.
The Greek team from today and from 2004 do not share a single member, do they?
Of course, you could argue that some institutional factors persist?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_women%27s_nati...
That’s reflected in the fact that, currently, 8 of the top 10 countries are from Europe (the other two are the usual suspects Brazil and Argentina)
One difference is that, unlike in chess, there still are many uneven matches. If you’re Liechtenstein, Andorra, or Gibraltar, for example, you’ll play lots of qualifiers against Spain, France, Germany, and the like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Nations_League corrects that a bit, giving such teams much better chances to tie or even win games). You don’t see such things in chess.
John Oliver has made a great summary of FIFA's darker side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlJEt2KU33I
Just a couple of weeks ago, Bayern Munich's annual general meeting ended with the club's directors being yelled at for refusing to discuss their sponsorship agreement with Qatar.
https://nationworldnews.com/bayern-munichs-agm-ends-in-uproa...
As one can see from your link, it's definitely less than perfect in practice, but that's why the fans are supposed to have any say in deals like this instead of the club being able to do whatever they want to like in most other countries.
Turns out the club bylaws put sponsorship decisions entirely in the hands of the leadership, and this was affirmed in court, so there's no way for the fans to cancel the Qatar deal without convincing the very people who made the deal.
[0]: in German: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/26-11-21-macht-b-1-1-529-alle...
The World Cup is played in winter every year if you live below the equator.
The point is that the World Cup has previously taken place at a consistent time of year, every time. If they made this change as part of a plan to distribute league disruption globally then we’d talk about it as such, but they made this change as part of a corrupt voting system that led to a bad decision with a load of fallout they’re still trying to work out.
What a paragraph. The death toll is at least in the many thousands, perhaps even >10,000.
I found eg https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r... which tries to count all deaths, not just what can be attributed to the football stadiums.
(It's a high death toll in any case. But we should still stick to the facts.)
So you literally just made up a statistic out of nothing and posted it here? Why do you think that’s ok?
Dozens of people died of COVID last year.
Beth:
You forking idiot, millions died, not dozens.
Alan:
Okay, so it's a lot of dozens. What's your problem?
It's pretty laughable for you to suggest that people can't just say what they want on the internet
That's around ~700 deaths per year. But Qatar has ~1.5million workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. So, ~700/year is not an outrageous number for natural deaths (works out around 0.04%). This is way lower than the death rate in the USA for a young age segment (25-40): https://www.statista.com/statistics/241572/death-rate-by-age...
Qatar is hurting more by not allowing an independent and transparent journalism around the conditions and deaths of these workers. Just shows the idiocy at the top level of their government.
That must be the understatement of the century!
This is THE understatement of the year, if such a race would be held your comment would win by a mile.
Allow me to make the point more clear. If a race would be held for the overstatement of the year, the comment "FIFA's last years of its over a century lifespan was the freest of corruption" would win by a mile.
Is there a Nobel Prize for Understatement? I'll like to make a nomination.
the hypocrisy of the west when it comes to money is what will cause it to become extinct within the next century..
too much corruption at every level
also too much politics, what brits are trying to achieve here?
that reminds me of the attempts to kill the UEFA Champions League with what ever the US had cooked
I used to get excited by these events because the sport still seemed to be prioritized and people got genuinely excited by seeing talent rise to the level. I came of age hearing just how good Messi would become after his early appearance for Argentina in 2006 I think. His rise has witnessed the transition to players representing teams and entire brands. It hardly feels like sport but lifestyle, prestige, and entertainment, something Qatar is desperately trying to purchase as their oil money starts to dry up.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-24394971
Maybe there was earlier reporting on this but this was the best I could do on my phone.
Unfortunately, human rights violations don't interest anyone anymore, unless they are of political interest to someone (e.g. the butchering of Jamal Khashoggi).
The UN is a dead paper tiger, with the US, China and Russia in the Human Rights Commission and the Security Council each protecting themselves and their respective allies from consequences.
The US only care about wherever they see economic interests (Iraq!), the EU is too fractured and under the economic thumbs of Russia (gas) and China (cheap goods, destination for German cars), and China and Russia don't give any fuck about human rights.
We live in a world of the strongest, not in a world based on the global rule of law. And I fear it might take another World War or an alien invasion for humanity to finally overcome that. The alternative, and this is where I fear the planet is heading, is China exporting its questionable ideas of authoritarianism across the world.
We need more centralization (democratically backed, of course!), not less.
If these figures are true, then no matter how 'successful' the World Cup 2022 turns out, it will always be tainted by these shameful figures.
> Official Qatari statistics show that over 15,021 non-Qataris – of all ages and occupations – died between 2010 and 2019
I think it's worth putting the number into context. There's 2,300,000 non-Qataris in Qatar. 1,670 deaths per year puts the mortality rate at 0.72 per year per 1000 people. That's 10 times lower than the global mortality rate as of 2020.
Now I concede that the U.S. has much better workplace safety guidelines, with OSHA and the like, compared to less developed nations. So that percentage would surely be much higher in Qatar, but how much higher? If we assume that 5% of deaths were work related in Qatar, then that 0.72 overall mortality rate becomes 0.036 per 1000 people, same as the US, with its much better workplace safety guidelines, while assuming a 29x greater percent of deaths being workplace related.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr70/nvsr70-08-508.pdf
Does any of that strike you as a problem?
Or heck, do you ever think that Amnesty International is better equipped to make statements than you are?
Pragmatically (and very generously, in the situation) speaking, with no "positive feedback loop", no oversight, how can societies improve? Investigate the deaths and find ways improve the situation.
I'm not saying it's exactly like slavery, but with no transparency I don't want to be part of rationalising it and letting it pass unnoticed as if we didn't see it.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/08/qatar-failure...
However I would say that things have improved significantly, and are continuing to improve. You speak of a lack of oversight, but the fact that we're in this thread discussing this issue means that there must be some oversight. From international bodies to individual journalists there's many people concerned about labour rights, and these concerns aren't something the Qatari government can just ignore, as evidenced by the numerous labour reforms.
That’s a problem. You’re ignoring actual experts and spreading misinformation and now lies.
Your responses to the commenter above (across a few threads) are sounding hysterical. I'm not sure why. :(
At least they seem to be trying to work out the numbers and thing for themselves, and are looking for external sources for information to work with.
Pointing out flaws in critical reports is not "defending human rights violations," it's highlighting weaknesses in the case, which helps people to make a stronger case.
(Plus, something isn't right and true just because Amnesty says it.)
People on here are totally misreading the Amnesty report though. The report does not say 15,000 immigrants died from World Cup construction. It says 15,000 migrants died over the period specified (which is a nominal figure), but it says that they do not understand what the cause of death was because Qatar is either purposefully or incompetently diagnosing this. That needs to be fixed.
I don't think Qatar is unique in mistreating its immigrant labor. Everywhere I've lived in the West does this to some degree, though not as seriously as Qatar was doing in the past.
In my country (Australia), there's about 1.05 million people in the age group 25-29 (which I assume most migrant workers are about, so should be a good baseline proxy), and 800 deaths per year in that age range.
By that baseline, Qatar, with it's 2ish million migrant workers, should see about 1,600 migrant worker deaths per year if everything is normal.
15,000 over 12 years seems on the low side, if anything. I'd be more worried about the 37 deaths they've specifically narrowed to employees working on the World Cup. But even then, same problem. How many people are working on the World Cup? If it's 1,000, then 37 deaths is ridiculous, but if it's 500,000 all doing stuff like construction and transport, it could easily be close to the safety profile of that work in other countries.
Australia has about 200 workplace deaths per year. 40 per year in construction with around 1.1 million employed in the industry. Qatar is claiming 20% of it's migrant workforce is in construction and 10% of fatalities in that group are from work related incidents. That puts them at 62.5 per year per million workers. About 50% higher than Australia's construction industry. Which isn't great, but it's also not outrageous unless Australia is an outlier too (I haven't looked at other countries yet).
If you can’t do that, stop making this argument. It’s insulting.
This may or may not be the case but if there was free press, we’d have the full picture.
The Chinese government is able to change the behavior of multinational companies, so why can't we ;)
List of sponsors: Adidas, Coca-Cola, Wanda Group, Hyundai, Qatar Airways, Visa, Budweiser, Hisense, McDonalds, Vivo
I fear that this will become his legacy and right now, I think he's ok with that.
I see what you did there
.. he and his new yacht are likely okay with that.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/entertainment-celebr...
Can't be that many because I haven't seen any news about it.
Sibling comment has been modded to death by talking about players coming from countries with slavery, that seems over the top, but another online comment I've read is that in the Middle East, slavery is right there, meanwhile in the West there is a bit of distance. Who makes your clothes (probably underpaid Bangladeshi, or nowadays, Ughyurs), who makes your electronics (probably Chinese factory workers in not-so-great conditions), or who mined the minerals needed for them?
So, if a star player really feels a certain way about this, I'm not sure the money has as much sway over them as it would over someone else, like you or me, or some lesser known player (whose boycott would have much less effect).
That 400 million dollars of potential prize money, excluding all the extra ad revenue players might receive for wearing a particular brand of shoe or drinking a particular beverage, is enough to evaporate any morals. There's also the prestige factor, the dream of being crowned the best of the best.
I've heard some stories of teams considering a boycot, but very few of those teams had any chance in getting through the qualification round. It's very easy to boycot an event you don't take part in.
For the sake of sports, soccer teams have ignored the horrid treatment of the locals many times over. FIFA is corrupt beyond saving and the Olympic Committee isn't much different. The real game being played is that of the corrupt, taking money to ensure coca cola and friends can sell ads to enough people.
We've seen massive changes in platform culture online when advertisers got scared of being associated with bad stuff, like with Elsagate on YouTube, so I think the only way to get anyone to care is to threaten the income of the parties involved. Treat any advertisement on Qatar 2022 as an endorsement of modern day slavery and be sure to let the web know how you feel. Maybe, just maybe, when the big companies start to pull out, the teams and players will suddenly find their morals again.
Will Countries Boycott The Qatar World Cup? https://youtube.com/watch?v=7KL9LExsPLI
(TL;DR: No)
The only thing that would work would be for people not to buy tickets and not to watch the matches but sadly that is unlikely to happen.
The idea that asking a government or FIFA to do anything is laughable, the world cup is far too political for most organisations to risk being blacklisted/cancelled/lose contracts/lose face whatever
Better yet, if Germany, Italy and a few others offered to host a tournament for the qualified teams (with FIFA blessing or not) maybe others would join?
This is how the NHL should have treated the Olympic ice hockey tournament in China: rather than boycotting they should have simply played the games in Taiwan to make a point. Whether they would count as Olympic matches would make no difference. The kick in the groin to Chinese and Qatari bigwigs would be glorious. Millions in bribes wasted .
What she is telling me, though, is that there are high hopes the World Cup will bring about changes to society, especially regarding gay rights, to accomodate the visitors, which will then stick after the end of the event.
Qatar was finally forced to implement some beginnings of democracy this year, ahead of the WC, after having managed to successfully put them off for a decade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Qatari_general_election
Other than that: individual boycott doesn't work. For example, I don't buy Apple products but the company is doing more than fine.
How is a number like that acceptable?
What if the event was Roman and I replaced workers with gladiators? Would the entertainment be more obviously a weight of blood?
This type of wealth is a form of modern war. Albeit, the other side which follows successful, or non successful war. This is mostly paid for with oil profits.
15,021 non-Qataris have died. The number includes any expatriate in Qatar - teachers, managers, fast food servers, VPs - everyone. Even among construction workers, the vast majority are working on projects that have nothing to do with the World Cup. For context, something like 80% of the 2.6m people in Qatar are expatriates, and these deaths occurred over a 9 year period. You can do the math.
Then one is forced to objectively look at the facts, and things get murkier:
- Migrants are willing to co tinue yo travel despite the negative press - Migrant home countries are never in the news lodging official protests or expressing serious concern. - In fact, home countries seem to do absolutely nothing to curb whatever alleged excesses could be happening.
Maybe people are focused on the wrong problem. If death rates are not scandalous or even serious (outside of higher death rates consistent with industrial occupations deemed as hazardous) what seems to be unquestioned is Qatar's abuses in imprisonment of any person, migrant or not.
I'd like to hear more about cases like this article.
I've been to the last 5 world cups. I am seriously considering boycotting visiting because of articles like this one. Good journalistic work.
Closing: Regarding someone's awful experience in school with Association Football abuse. Im sorry this happened to you. As a parent of several kids that constantly play "soccer" in every room of our house, i can tell you the sport brings immense joy to many, including little ones.
As a parent, thank you for reminding me to stay alert about abuses at school masquerading as PE.
Why is that? Is there no transparency and free press reporting on it? Then the numbers should be assumed to be much worse.
What's more relevant here from an environmental standpoint is the cost of adding lifestyle amenities (water, energy, landscaping, construction, etc) on the ground for the million or so football fans who will descend upon a country not especially designed to handle such a high volume of traffic without committing some serious ecological cost.
They will be a huge successes like the Winter Olympics in Sotschi, Russia 2014.
More than 6.000 dead workers due to the World Cup, the event should be stopped to avoid more deaths in future events.
But nothing will happen, it's the sad truth of it all.