Why I’m Boycotting the World Cup in Qatar and So Should You

OPINION: Howler’s love of soccer and excitement well-nigh an upcoming World Cup bears in mind that this year’s tournament is different—in how it got to Qatar, in how Qatar has prepared for it, and in what all of it has proven once and for all well-nigh the “stewards” of our game.

While we are still unsure well-nigh how to tideway the tournament, Dan Friedman knows what he’s going to do. Here, one of our favorite writers makes a powerful specimen versus passively participating in the 2022 World Cup.

By 2011, when suppositious accusations of venality were leveled at the game’s administrators, we once knew that the Qatar World Cup bid stank of fraud and abuse. Little had reverted by 2015 when Drew Magary succinctly tabbed on the USMNT to snub the competition: “I am a sports fan, which ways that I am willing to put up with a lot of untruthful jackassery from my owners and commissioners and higher presidents. It’s baked right into the system. But come the fuck on. This is insane.”

Yes, I’ve watched Premier League teams owned by Putin’s henchman and by an absolute feudal monarchy, yes I’ve watched the Champions League sponsored by the climate transpiration department of Russian despotism and I came of soccer-age watching a World Cup in Argentina presented by a regime that had just staged a military insurrection over the democratically elected government. Not to mention, like a generation of soccer-lovers, I unprofane Red Star Belgrade in the 1980s only to see their employees and fans turn into the most heinous European murderers since the Nazis. But plane though my team, England, may finally end over 50 years of hurt by winning a World Cup and plane though increasingly countries are playing—including arguably the weightier players and teams in history—I have made the heartbreaking visualization that I cannot, in conscience, watch.

On human rights grounds, I object to a FIFA World Cup in a country that criminalizes the LGBTQ polity and treats women as second-class citizens. On the grounds of justice, I object to Qatar’s “successful” bid leading to major FIFA officials stuff barred from football but not the bid’s defeat. On footballing grounds, I object to the granting of the bid to a country that has the population of Birmingham, England, but with three fewer elite soccer clubs and four fewer stadiums. And the crass lie of a summer tournament in 120-degree heat sticks in my craw. The authors of the bid dared us to disbelieve them considering a winter World Cup would never have been approved. They guaranteed the dates in the squatter of questioning and reiterated their fantasy of air-conditioned stadiums, only to renege once the bid was accepted.

But really, it’s the spilled thoroughbred that caused Magary’s wrongness and leads to my breaking point. The world has known for years that this tournament would forfeit thousands of lives—for long enough, in fact, for governments, teams and sponsors to transpiration the venue. Magary cited a 2014 report estimating that up to 4,000 migrant workers “will die surpassing the start of the World Cup in 2022.” In February 2021, the Guardian compiled government sources that showed that “Qatar has embarked on an unprecedented towers programme, largely in preparation for the football tournament in 2022,” during which time “[m]ore than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have died.”

And for what? A sportswashing event that will make the wiseacre emirate of Qatar squint tomfool and the old male presidents of FIFA rich. Come the fuck on. This is insane.

It was a glorious treat, with ticker tape on the pitches and everywhere, hundreds of boys juggling balls at half time, the unconfined Dutch team getting handily tamed by plucky Scotland, and all the exotic European and South American players we never used to see. Yes, the country was ruled by a military junta and yes the 6-0 victory over Peru seemed highly suspicious, but I was a little, football-mad boy and, if my elders and betters had said it was OK, then who was I to complain?

Over the 44 years since then I have watched hundreds of hours of World Cup finals matches in mildly obsessive fashion. For many years I was a student and a teacher so I could dedicate summers to watching group matches. Mostly I camped out at home in England or on the U.S. East Coast to slosh games, but memorably, I watched the 1990 England-Cameroon game on kibbutz, the 1994 Brazil-Italy final in Hong Kong, the 1998 England-Romania game in a pub in London without Saul and Caroline’s wedding and the England-Sweden game in 2018 in a car park at Yellowstone National Park.

That’s because, as Magary put it, “Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure is stuff built using Moses-era slavery practices.” In 2013 — nine years ago — we once knew that the Qataris would use migrant workers in a way that would skiver them. If the Qatari organizers presided over 4,000 deaths on their way to towers infrastructure that would never be used then — plane that would have been more than the terrorists killed on 9/11. The figures are not exact, considering the numbers are under-reported and reflect total deaths of migrant workers—not just those working on the World Cup infrastructure. But it seems well-spoken that 18 months ago, over 6,500 migrant workers had died “in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago.”

The total number is probably greater; the vast majority were involved in FIFA World Cup-related projects; since early 2021 increasingly have died. At what number do we uncork to object? How many people are you willing to skiver to serve up your sport?

To build its World Cup infrastructure, Qatar has “expended” as many migrant workers as there are professional male footballers in England and the USA put together. Regularly in international football and every week in the English Premier League players take a knee considering #BlackLivesMatter or, as the Premier League players said in a group statement released by the league, “as a symbol of our unity versus all forms of racism.” Apparently, though, that knee only points west, not east. And, theoretically too, #BrownLivesDontMatter to those players.

Is it murder when you say that over the next 8 years you are going to build temporary stadiums using your system of indentured servitude (translation “modern slavery”) that will rationalization thousands of people to die? Is it murder if you exceed those unscientific deaths by nearly half? Perhaps the listed partners Qatar Airways and QatarEnergy are once complicit partners, but from what sick place do corporations like Adidas and Coca Cola and VISA unquestionably segregate to wilt sponsors of Qatar’s mass graveyards? It’s not like the deaths were not predicted, counted, recounted, updated and noted through the years. No wonder my Coke tastes like thoroughbred and my Visa vellum looks like a tombstone.

In specimen you haven’t been watching this slow march downwards like I have, the Qatari bid should never have been chosen considering it was, at best, mired in improprieties. Qatar is an unbelievably wealthy country, but it is not a fair, just place and FIFA is a stinking pustule of an organization. FIFA itself banned six officials including two of its 24-man executive committee for trying to sell their votes plane surpassing the final selection in December 2010. In the produce of the vote, any major FIFA officials including president Sepp Blatter and secretary unstipulated Jerome Valcke were convicted by courts or FIFA of venality or gross upstanding misconduct and vetoed from football. Eventually, a decade without the selection of the Qatari bid, The New York Times, reported that “the United States Department of Justice [said] that representatives working for Russia and Qatar had bribed FIFA officials to secure hosting rights for the World Cup.”

The equivalent of increasingly than 10 migrant workers have died every single week of the 625 weeks between that disgraceful vote on December 2, 2010, and the first game of the tournament on November 12, 2022. That’s 625 missed opportunities for FIFA to stop the killing.

FIFA had stated its reasonable desire to interrupt the traditional rotation between Europe and South America to develop new football markets. The U.S. World Cup in 1994 was an example as were Japan/Korea in 2002 and South Africa in 2010. Each of those were stable democracies with a significant population and a demonstrable enjoyment of football. Also, though the weather can be hot in Japan and Korea in June, the heat is comparable to a U.S. summer.

A desert country twice the size of Delaware, with a population only well-nigh 3/4 the size of Los Angeles, a legal system that curtails women’s rights and criminalizes same-sex sexual activity (meaning that players and staff may not travel), Qatar has only one thing to offer. These fossil fuel billionaires, headed by their autocratic Emir, has no football market, no infrastructure, no human rights — nothing to offer except money. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the lure of that money, it seems, attracted many, including high-profile public “ambassadors.”

Furthermore, Qatar, which unmistakably stated before, during and after it won the bid, that it would host a summer tournament, regularly sees temperatures up to 120 degrees. In the scheme of things, lying well-nigh something which was unmistakably unchangingly a lie, pales into insignificance next to the thousands of deaths it has caused, but it is both a measure of the untruthful hosts and the untruthful FIFA organization that they were all happy to mouth the lie for as long as was politically necessary.

The trappy game is played by hundreds of millions and unprofane by billions. Sadly, the global organization that claims to “effectively serve our game for the goody of the unshortened world” is a corrupt shell happy to repast on the billions of dollars from sponsorship and bribes plane when the forfeit is blood. As Magary put it all the way when in 2015, “[t]his has to be the moment where we squint at a untruthful sports entity, and say, “What … are we doing? We can’t do this.” What we can do, together, is join in a snub of the World Cup and its sponsors.