What’s problematic about the World Cup in Saudi Arabia

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On Wednesday 11 December, the organization of the 2034 men’s football World Cup was officially awarded to Saudi Arabia. It was a widely awaited decision, because Arabia was the only country left: its candidacy was strongly influenced, if not driven, by the previous assignments decided by the congress of FIFA, the international football federation. The 2026 World Cup will in fact be held between Canada, the United States and Mexico, while the 2030 World Cup has just been assigned to Spain, Portugal and Morocco, with the first three matches to be played in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to celebrate the centenary. years since the first World Cup, played in Uruguay in 1930.

FIFA rules establish that, after a country has organized the World Cup, no other country of the same continental federation can organize the tournament for the two subsequent editions: for 2034 the North American, Central American and South American federations, the European one, were effectively excluded and the African one; therefore only the Asian and Oceanic ones remained. First Indonesia and then Australia, the other candidate countries, had already withdrawn in recent years, thus leaving Saudi Arabia as the only possibility.

The assignment to Saudi Arabia was greatly encouraged by FIFA and its president Gianni Infantino, who gave the candidacy a rating of 4.2 out of 5, the highest ever recorded, but it is receiving great criticism from many quarters, and in a more formal way and organized by various associations and organizations committed to the protection of human, civil and environmental rights. The main concerns, reported by various media and newspapers in recent days, concern the conditions of the workers, almost all of whom are migrants, who will have to build – and in some cases have already started to build – the impressive infrastructures planned (stadiums, transport, hotels ); the strong discrimination that exists in the country towards LGBT+ people and women, the environmental impact of the event and above all of those who finance it.

Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian regime in which, despite some recent openings and more superficial reforms, people’s freedoms (especially minorities and women) are severely limited and dissent is repressed. One of the strategies implemented by the Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman to try to change the country’s image, especially abroad, was to invest a lot of money in sport. It is a practice common to authoritarian regimes today and in the past that is today defined sportswashing: in 2018 the World Cup was played in Russia and in 2022 in Qatar, both countries with authoritarian regimes, but the same happened with the 1934 World Cup organized by Italy during Fascism and with the 1936 Olympics organized by the Nazi regime in Germany.

Last year the British newspaper Guardian he wrote that the Saudi sovereign fund (managed by the government and often referred to by the English acronym PIF, Public investment fund) had spent almost 6 billion euros on sport between 2021 and 2023. The 2034 World Cup, according to initial estimates, could cost over 200 billion euros, but the economic and image return apparently makes them convenient for Saudi Arabia in any case.

There has been a lot of spending on football in Saudi recently, with the arrival of many players from the main European leagues to the Arab one, including Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and Karim Benzema; matches of tournaments from other countries were played there, such as the Italian and Spanish Super Cups. Investments have been made in Formula 1 (a Grand Prix will be held in Jeddah from 2021), in golf (where Saudi Arabia has even managed to create an alternative circuit to the world one), in tennis (with the WTA Finals and the Six Kings Slam) and in boxing.

Cristiano Ronaldo, 39, watching a boxing match in Saudi Arabia in December 2023 (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)

For the 2034 World Cup, the most serious and urgent matter concerns the conditions of the workers who will contribute to the organization. On Wednesday Amnesty International, the most famous NGO dealing with the defense of human rights, published a statement signed by 21 organizations and entitled Awarding the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia puts lives at risk and reveals how hollow FIFA’s human rights commitments are. In the statement, Amnesty International’s head of labor and sport rights Steve Cockburn said that, based on clear evidence, “FIFA knows that workers will be exploited and will die if there are no structural reforms in Saudi Arabia, and yet it has chosen to carry on despite everything, risking taking on heavy responsibility for many human rights violations that will occur.”

A report by the NGO Human Rights Watch released last week highlighted that «migrant workers are facing widespread abuses across all employment sectors and regions. The Saudi authorities systematically fail to protect them and remedy these abuses.” The report, based on the testimonies of 156 workers or family members of people working in Saudi Arabia in various sectors (construction, tourism, private care services, logistics), takes it for certain that there will be serious violations of workers’ rights in the organization of what Saudi Arabia defined in its official communications as “the greatest World Cup ever”.

In Saudi Arabia there are 13.4 million migrant workers: they are about a third of the country’s population and come mainly from poor Asian and African countries. They are often forced to accept terrible conditions and almost non-existent wages because they are tied to their employers by controversy kafalaa legislative institute in some Middle Eastern countries that gives employers the power to decide on employees’ residence permits and which often turns into blackmail. A recent investigation by Daily Mail (an English tabloid which is considered more reliable in sports news than in other areas) reported that some people employed on the construction sites of stadiums already under construction actually work for free for the first two years and are then paid less than 3 euros per year. now, despite working exhausting ten-hour shifts in a very hot climate (the temperature can reach 45 degrees).

Also the Guardianwhich was the first newspaper to reveal that over 6,000 migrants had died during the World Cup in Qatar, most of them in the construction of stadiums, reported abuses and violations of workers’ rights in Saudi Arabia. In recent years the country has engaged in so-called “giga-projects”, that is, in the creation and construction of futuristic and gigantic infrastructures, the grandest and most utopian of which is a 170 kilometer long city which is called The Line and will probably never be completed. For the World Cup, Saudi Arabia has said it wants to fix 4 existing stadiums and want to build 11 new ones, one of which is right inside The Line. Despite the testimonies and warnings from the media and NGOs, in its report evaluating the candidacy, FIFA assessed the risk that human rights will not be respected as “medium”.

In Saudi Arabia the rights of several minorities are denied. The free expression of sexuality by homosexual and trans people is illegal, and can even be punished by death (in fact, the country still has the death penalty and over 300 sentences have already been carried out since the beginning of 2024). In 2023, the national tourism board updated its response to the question “Can LGBT people come to visit Saudi Arabia?”, stating that “everyone is welcome in Saudi Arabia and visitors are not asked to reveal this information personal.” However, no official reassurances have ever been given on the fact that LGBT+ people coming from abroad would not be arrested in the case of particular behaviors and this is generating and will generate major concerns for fans and enthusiasts who want to go to watch the World Cup matches.

There has been some small progress on women’s rights in recent years, but a strong patriarchal and chauvinist orientation remains in the culture and laws of the country: in the Global Gender Gap 2024, the annual report that measures gender disparities, Saudi Arabia it is 126th out of 146 countries examined. The only people linked to football who spoke out against the growing influence of Saudi Arabia in sport (besides the Norwegian federation, the only one not to vote for the awarding of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups) were around a hundred female footballers , through a letter written two months ago to FIFA president Gianni Infantino.

The subject of the letter was not in particular the 2034 World Cup but the large sponsorship agreement signed in April between the world football federation and Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state oil company (another testimony to the very close relations between FIFA and Saudi) . The agreement was described as “a middle finger to women’s football” and highlighted various controversial issues related to how Saudi Arabia treats women and LGBT+ people. “FIFA’s announcement of Saudi Aramco as its major partner has set us so far back that it is difficult to fully accept,” the letter read. After the 2034 World Cup was awarded, Infantino said that FIFA is aware of the critical issues and that they are confident that the host country will take care of it.

The Aramco issue is linked to the larger issue of environmental sustainability, another critical point of the 2034 World Cup. Very often these major events have a considerable environmental impact, mainly because many new infrastructures are built (which in several cases are no longer used once the event is over) and because millions of people arrive and move around, most of them by plane. For the 2034 World Cup, however, there is the added fact that the bulk of the money that Saudi Arabia will invest in the organization comes from oil, one of the main fossil fuels responsible for the climate crisis.

Saudi Arabia is the second largest oil-producing country in the world (after the United States) and above all bases a large part of its economy on oil, which is responsible for approximately 42 percent of GDP and 90 percent of export earnings . However, FIFA even indicated the risk to the environment posed by Saudi Arabia’s candidacy (and that for the 2030 World Cup, which will also be held on three continents) as “low”, a choice defined as “ridiculous” by Fossil Free Football organization, which deals with environmental sustainability in football.

Founder Frank Huisingh said the 2034 World Cup “will be extremely polluting, with the construction of 11 new stadiums and lots of air travel. But above all they will give a megaphone to a country desperately trying to use football to slow the transition away from fossil fuels and sell as much oil as possible for as long as possible.”