FIFA is set to generate £3bn from the World Cup in Qatar, while thousands of migrant workers have lost their lives in the Middle Eastern state since it was awarded the blue riband event.
New figures detailing the football governing body’s budget for 2022, included in its annual report, reveal it is anticipating a windfall from broadcast, marketing rights and hospitality.
But while the international governing body eyes profits, which are expected to exceed £1.1bn in 2022, the workers who have been preparing for the competition, which kicks off on November 21, have suffered.
More than 6,500 migrant workers from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are believed to have died in Qatar since it won the right to host the World Cup 10 years ago.
Since 2010, seven new stadiums, an airport, roads, public transport systems including a metro, hotels and a new city, have been built or are under construction to host the World Cup finals at a cost estimated to be as high as £138bn.
“A very significant proportion of the migrant workers who have died since 2011 were only in the country because Qatar won the right to host the World Cup,’ Nick McGeehan, a director at FairSquare Projects, an advocacy group specialising in labour rights in the Gulf, told The Guardian during an investigation last month.
The number of deaths has been compiled from government records in the home countries of the workers, but many are not recorded in detail and simply listed as ‘natural’.
Qatar estimates just 37 workers have died on the construction of World Cup stadiums, but it keeps limited records and does not investigate deaths, according to human rights groups.
Migrant labour makes up 95 per cent of the workforce on the World Cup sites and those working in the Middle Eastern state earn a minimum wage of £200-a-month, can go months without pay, sometimes are not paid at all and live in squalid conditions, campaigners say.
-Punch