2034 World Cup: FIFA accused of ‘utter negligence' towards migrant workers in Saudi Arabia

New York Times

14-05-2025

Two leading human rights groups have accused FIFA of being 'utterly negligent' in its responsibility to the millions of migrant workers who will build the stadiums and infrastructure Saudi Arabia needs for the 2034 World Cup.
The scathing criticism of world football's governing body is detailed in two new reports on migrant-worker deaths in the Gulf state published on Tuesday by FairSquare and Human Rights Watch (HRW). And they come a day after FIFA boss Gianni Infantino accompanied U.S. President Donald Trump on visit to Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh, where they met the Gulf state's de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Advertisement
The research, which is based on investigations into the recent deaths of 48 migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal, paints a picture of a host nation that still pays lip service to safety on building sites, has no interest in properly investigating accidents and is painfully slow to compensate bereaved families.
But the two studies also criticise FIFA for failing to learn the lessons from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, where government officials eventually admitted that hundreds of migrant workers had died while working on projects linked to the tournament.
'The gruesome workplace accidents killing migrant workers in Saudi Arabia should be a huge red flag for businesses, football fans and sports associations seeking to partner with FIFA on the 2034 Men's World Cup and other Saudi 'giga-projects',' said HRW's deputy Middle East director Michael Page.
The HRW study includes accounts of workers dying in awful accidents but also dropping dead due to heat exhaustion. The families of these men are usually left with no information about what really happened and often face long delays in repatriating the bodies of their loved ones or in receiving any financial compensation.
In March of this year, British newspaper The Guardian reported that Pakistani migrant worker Muhammad Arshad had become the first known death at a stadium construction site when he fell from the upper level of the Aramco Stadium in Al Khobar.
FairSquare's report focuses on the lack of data collected by the Saudi authorities on their migrant worker population, the failure to certify deaths properly and the absence of any attempt to learn from accidents when they happen or to hold anyone to account.
'Millions of workers are going to be pitched into this system,' said FairSquare's founding co-director Nick McGeehan.
Advertisement
'There was a 40 per cent increase in the migrant-worker population in the five years leading up to Saudi Arabia being awarded the World Cup in 2024 — it's up to 13.2million. It's a system where the people in charge have very little regard for their welfare or the welfare of their families.
'The inevitable result is there will be a surge in deaths in construction and most of those of deaths will be unexplained. It will be hard to determine how many will die but it's indubitably the case that many thousands will, and that's utterly unacceptable.
'It's particularly galling when you consider that many of the deaths will be a direct result of the FIFA 2034 World Cup. FIFA's response to the risks was amateurish, and that's being kind. It was utterly negligent. They gave Saudi Arabia's bid the highest score of any they had received with scant regard to any of the very obvious risks.
'We published a report last year that found that FIFA was entirely unfit to govern something as important as world football. At the time that felt like quite a bold claim but it now it just feels like a statement of the obvious.'
As part of its bid for the world's biggest sports event, Saudi Arabia has committed to building 11 new stadiums, eight of which it is yet to start, 134 training facilities, 185,000 new hotel rooms, fan zones, conference centres and a railway between Riyadh and Jeddah. And that is before you factor in the completion of the world's biggest construction site at Neom, the futuristic city in the desert that is the centrepiece of Mohammed Bin Salman's strategic plan for the country.
Saudi Arabia's bid team did not respond to a request for comment from The Athletic but FIFA shared with us the letter it sent to HRW from its general secretary Mattias Grafstrom.
The letter, which was sent last month, lists the steps FIFA has taken in recent years to integrate human-rights commitment into its statutes and points out that Saudi Arabia has 'been investing heavily in the development of its society and economy', efforts that have been helped and encouraged by western companies and governments.
Advertisement
Grafstrom, who is preparing for FIFA's 2025 Congress in Paraguay this week, continues by noting the various steps the Saudi government has taken to reform its labour laws since 2018, such as abolishing parts of the kafala system which ties workers to their employers, and introducing standardised workers' contracts.
The Saudi government, he notes, has also committed to working with the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) 'on the further expansion and effective implementation of these reforms'.
'It is against this background that the FIFA Congress composed of all its 211 member associations has awarded the FIFA World Cup 2034 to Saudi Arabia,' he wrote.
'In that respect, and in line with its human rights commitments, FIFA seeks to play its part in ensuring strong protections for workers employed by third parties in the construction of FIFA World Cup sites.'
FairSquare and HRW, however, are far from convinced and have called on FIFA to demand that the Saudis make four seemingly straightforward commitments:
In a briefing with journalists to explain their reports, FairSquare and HRW were joined by Ambet Yuson, general secretary of Builders' and Wood Workers International (BWI), a global federation of construction workers' trade unions from 111 countries.
Earlier this year, the BWI filed a forced labour complaint against Saudi Arabia at the ILO on behalf of 21,000 migrant workers who are still owed unpaid wages by two bankrupt Saudi construction firms.
Yuson hopes to get a response to that complaint before the end of this year but said the Saudi authorities are not letting him or the BWI into the kingdom to conduct any inspection visits, despite requests to do so from overseas contractors. Qatar, on the other hand, did allow him and his colleagues to make visits.
(GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)