Pablo Tardáguila  

Staff reporter 

The world cup, hosted in Qatar, has started and is the most important sporting event in the world, with an estimated five billion people watching it. That is more than half the population of the world. 

Normally, the countries which have held a world cup are those with a wide soccer culture and enough infrastructure to hold the world cup. That was until 2010 when FIFA, the (Football international federation association) said 2022 would be held in Qatar. This was a surprise to the soccer world cause Qatar did not have a large soccer tradition and only had one stadium, whereas the requirement was to have at least twelve stadiums. Another change is that for the first time the world cup will be in the fall because in summer Qatar has extreme heat. The only thing that endorsed Qatar was the almost infinite money that was made from the oil produced and sorted by the country. The journey for being ready by 2022 started and Qatar planned to bring the people from Pakistan, a country where the wages are much lower, and made them work all day and night long without any insurance and crossing the line of labour exploitation. These facts were denounced by many human rights organizations like “Amnesty International” and many countries that still did not know how Qatar was selected. To all this, FIFA did not say anything and had no intention of doing so.  

In May 2015, Swiss authorities stormed a luxury hotel where FIFA was having a conference. A few days later, several FIFA executives were accused of having committed fraud, money laundering, and, more importantly, having received bribes from Qatar to vote for them in the voting five years ago. This was named “FIFA gate.” In the following months, the new executives of FIFA tried to change the world cup headquarters, but these attempts were in vain since no country dared to take the reins of the organization so hastily. Finally, they decided to keep on with the world cup in Qatar. Giano Infantino, the current FIFA president said, “Now that nothing can be done, it is when we have to support Qatar in order to have a decent world cup for the people who work in it and at the same level as the previous ones for the fans.” After these events, Qatar took the hiring of workers a little more seriously. However, human rights are far below the standard. A few months ago, The Guardian published an article stating that 6,500 people died in Qatar during the construction of the infrastructure.