FIFA Should Compensate Migrant Workers Injured Building Qatar World Cup, Report Says

The soccer World Cup held in Qatar in 2022 took the most popular sporting event to the Middle East for the first time. But it was trailed for years by reports of injuries, and even deaths, suffered by workers who created an entirely new country — including a subway network, hotels and a nearly a dozen modern stadiums — in preparation for the tournament.

Now, a report commissioned for FIFA, soccer’s governing body, has recommended that FIFA itself take direct responsibility for some of the injuries by compensating some workers or, for those who died, their dependents, according to two people with direct knowledge of the report.

The report offered no specific dollar amount of compensation. In the past, Amnesty International has called for at least $440 million for any compensation fund. FIFA, which has $4 billion in its reserves, has so far paid no money to anyone harmed.

“All reports and recommendations were considered during a comprehensive review by the FIFA administration and relevant bodies,” FIFA said in a statement to The New York Times on Friday before publication of this article. “While all recommendations could not be met, practical and impactful elements were retained.”

Referring to the report, the statement said, “It should be noted that the study did not specifically constitute a legal assessment of the obligation to remedy.”

The report and its recommendations were prepared last year, and have been secretly guarded as FIFA grappled with the impact of publication. FIFA has committed to publishing it by the end of this year.

The report includes several proposals and was written by Human Level, a human rights advisory firm hired by FIFA. During the tournament, FIFA had come under pressure from some of its own member nations, rights groups, sponsors and fans to investigate its responsibilities for the thousands of laborers who worked on the World Cup projects.

The report was meant to also address accusations that human rights abuses — like working and living in unsafe conditions and wage thefts — were commonplace experiences for laborers in Qatar.

Should FIFA not compensate workers, “the international community should see and condemn your failure to do what you are supposed to do,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch. She has been in direct talks with FIFA over compensating workers involved in the Qatar World Cup.

Hassan al-Thawadi, the official who led Qatar’s World Cup, said in 2022 that “one death is too many,” but also that the World Cup has in general been a catalyst for improvements to labor rights in the country.

Since awarding the World Cup to Qatar, FIFA has added a human rights component to its host selection process for future events. That has brought scrutiny on its impending decision to award the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, which is embarking on construction projects that dwarf those that took place in neighboring Qatar. A vote takes place on Dec. 11.

Many of the workers on the 2022 tournament were brought to Qatar from some of the world’s poorest countries. They suffered harms ranging from wage theft to injury and death from workplace accidents or the effects of working in the searing Gulf sun.

Human rights organizations have put the death toll from World Cup and related projects in the thousands. The official count by Qatari World Cup organizers — which they limit to deaths on projects directly linked to the tournament, like the building of stadiums — was 37, and only three if just workplace accidents are counted.

The Times in 2022, citing official data, reported that at least 2,100 Nepalis died in Qatar in the 12 years between FIFA awarding it hosting rights and the start of the tournament. Many more were injured, The Times reported, and had exchanged a lifetime of savings, or become heavily indebted, just for the right to work in Qatar.

Similar reports emerged before the Qatar World Cup from other nations, places where dire poverty and a lack of opportunities have for years driven workers to seek jobs in the Gulf.

An internal slide produced by FIFA two months before the start of the World Cup, and reviewed by The Times, detailed a payment mechanism that envisioned “humanitarian relief payments” for workers and their families, “who suffered harm in the course of their employment and would otherwise not have access to adequate remediation.”

The FIFA slide stated that a special trust with independent governance would administer the trust but that a final decision would be made in March 2023. It is unclear if any decision was ever taken.

Qatar, a tiny thumb-shaped peninsula in the Persian Gulf, used the tournament for nothing short of a nationwide transformation, engaging in a 10-year, $200 billion overhaul with the World Cup as its center.

The decade-long building project regularly generated ugly headlines about the treatment of migrant workers, who were predominantly from South Asian countries including Nepal, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan but also from Kenya and Ghana.

The report, according to the people with knowledge of its contents, also pointed out that other organizations have a shared responsibility with FIFA to remedy abuses, and it recognized some steps that have been undertaken to improve labor conditions in Qatar.

FIFA this week announced a $50 million so-called FIFA World Cup Qatar legacy fund, in association with a slew of United Nations affiliated bodies. That announcement was met with immediate criticism from human rights organizations.

“By giving $50 million to the World Health Organization, U.N. refugee agency, and other organizations but not a single penny for the families of migrant workers who died building the stadiums, this Legacy Fund just seems like another attempt to distract from FIFA’s lack of care or compensation for the people harmed by its own actions,” said Andrea Florence, the director of the Sport and Rights Alliance, a group created by rights organizations.

“FIFA should take responsibility for its impact and use some of its $7 billion revenue from the 2022 World Cup to compensate those who suffered to make it happen,” she said.

FIFA described the fund as “a pragmatic and transparent initiative that will encompass social programs to help people most in need across the world,” and pointed out that a separate worker support and insurance fund had been set up by Qatar in 2018, largely to deal with unpaid wages.

Within FIFA there have been debates about how to deal with the report, with officials aware that they would face criticism and further demands over compensation. But human rights leaders, and, in private, even some FIFA officials, also noted that FIFA, as a signatory to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, has responsibility to remedy situations where it can be directly linked to harm.