With excitement, FIFA World Cup Qatar brings controversies

SAN FRANCISCO - For more than a decade, controversy surrounded Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup and human rights organizations have been raising red flags from abuse of workers to the county's treatment of women and the LGBTQ community.

An international organization called Human Rights Watch detailed the life of migrant workers in Qatar. They were hired for cheap labor ahead of the World Cup.

"Millions of migrant workers have built the infrastructure that was needed to host this World Cup," said Michael Page, the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch in the Middle East. "Unfortunately, they faced a widespread number of serious abuses building this World Cup."

Since 2010, when FIFA awarded the hosting rights to Qatar, Human Rights Watch kept record of reported worker abuse within the host nation.

"We're talking about thousands of unexplained deaths, widespread wage theft, paying illegal recruitment fees," said Page.

Those workers all entered what's called the Kafala System - it offers visas and opportunities for migrants to earn fast cash and send money back home.

But there was no real enforcement of labor protections; that system also required an employer's signature for a worker to quit a job they no longer wanted to work. It's so common in the Middle East, many human rights activists compare it to "modern-day slavery."

"There are kind of stacks of these digital records over these years, but FIFA is one of those institutions that, when they want to, they really try not to listen," said Page. "Especially when it comes to human rights concerns."

FIFA, the international governing body of soccer and the World Cup, says it did listen.

In a statement to KTVU, the federation says in part: "FIFA is implementing an unprecedented due diligence process in relation to the protection of workers involved in the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022... FIFA has actively pushed for the implementation of broader labour reforms that apply to all companies and projects across the country and benefit all workers in Qatar."

Sports management professor Michael Goldman of the University of San Francisco says FIFA has made some changes. Pressure resulted in Qatar getting rid of the Kafala System and passing a number of laws to reform the migrant worker situation.

"Could one say this is a positive benefit to awarding a tournament like this to a country that wanted to use the tournament to facilitate some of these changes? Yes. Would we wanted to see these changes earlier? Sure."

Because those changes weren't earlier, some question if, ethically, the World Cup should move forward in a country with a history of turning a blind eye to abuse.

Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center of Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University says the controversies sometimes outweigh the event itself.

"The World Cup and Olympics are supposed to celebrate humanity," he said. "[They're] supposed to celebrate what we have in common and yet when they award the countries that have these poor records, it almost taints the event overall."

So why did FIFA select Qatar as a host nation? Qatar won the bidding process for the opportunity in 2010. Part of the pitch to the world was the idea of broadening horizons and taking the tournament to the Middle East for the first time in its history. Some people question that.

"If Qatar had a massive population and was a hotbed for football development, it would a lot more sense hosting the World Cup there."

But many point to FIFA's history of allegations of corruption. Specifically, dozens of FIFA officials receiving suspensions and even indictments for allegedly accepting millions of dollars in bribes. FIFA's embattled president in 2010, Sepp Blatter, has recently called the winning bid a "mistake."

"I don't think the idea of a World Cup tournament is to find countries with horrible track records of civil rights and go there to try to work for change," said Heider.

"The way it was awarded and the choice for awarding it, to me, is very suspect."

Now leading up to the tournament, many soccer federations, including US Soccer, known as USSF, are raising awareness; not just for the migrant workers but also for the county's view of women, people of color, and the LGBT community.

"[There is] detention, mistreatment in prison, being sent to force conversion centers," said Page of Human Rights Watch. 

The U.S. went as far as change the color of its crest to include rainbow colors, instead of the standard red, white, and blue.

"Does it really influence the Qatari stakeholder? I'm not sure," said Goldman.

"Does it make for some media exposure and good PR for the U.S. national team? Yes. Does it keep us engaged and almost justify the U.S. team being there? Yes."

Experts say FIFA, with new leadership and pressure from stakeholders, is now looking to move on from its reputation of corruption. It may even look to avoid selecting controversial countries for World Cup venues in the future.

Though human rights activists say there is much more that needs to be done to make right of the last 12 years in Qatar, some experts say FIFA may have accidentally become a catalyst for social change in the Middle Eastern country.

"Just like Apartheid in South Africa and many other social systems, the informal nature of those systems take longer to work through," said Goldman, who worked with FIFA during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

"We might look back at this in decades time and say that was a major inflection point."

The 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar kicks off November 20th when the host nation, Qatar, faces off against Ecuador.