Opinion | Why Qatar Deserves to Host the World Cup, Actually

The exploitation of football for geopolitical goals has undoubtedly imperiled the game’s integrity. But here, too, it often feels that there is a willful blindness at work. Long before Gulf sovereign wealth funds turned around the fortunes of struggling clubs, Europe’s top leagues were awash with injections of cash from China, Russia and the United States. What the Gulf states have done — most recently with Saudi Arabia’s purchase of Newcastle United last year — is to intensify the transformation of the game into prestige projects for billionaire owners that has been years in the making. Whether in the astronomical player transfer fees, prohibitive ticket prices or the enormous licensing costs paid by broadcasters that are then passed on to consumers, football has become increasingly inaccessible to its fans.

Which brings us back to the main event. While fans in Europe and North America might find the journey to Doha daunting, this World Cup is poised to be more accessible to many others: people in Asia, Africa and the Middle East won’t have to contend with costly transoceanic flights or intrusive visa requirements. By contrast, one of the hosts of the next World Cup, the United States, had until recently a “Muslim ban” that would have kept Iranians from being able to watch their team compete. Up to 100,000 Iranians plan to make the short flight to attend this year’s tournament. (Troubling reports that some Yemeni fans have inexplicably seen their admission to the games revoked has undermined one of this tournament’s bright spots, though.)

The significance of the first Arab World Cup has been overshadowed by other issues, many of them legitimate. The biggest concern has been about the rights of migrant workers in Qatar. Human rights watchdogs, journalists, fans and players have all spoken out. For nearly a decade, the International Labor Organization has investigated allegations of systemic exploitation and forced labor through the “kafala” sponsorship system, which gives employers near total control over their migrant workers.

But some of this discourse plays on Orientalist tropes that treat Qatar and other Gulf countries as exceptional, rather than as one more locus in a global flow of capital and labor. Published in 2010, one critique of Qatar’s labor practices traces the kafala system to “an overly developed sense of honor.” Others depict the kafala system as a natural outgrowth of traditional Arab culture. In reality, it was a British colonial invention inherited by newly independent states in the 1970s.

While the announcement of major reforms that promise to dismantle the kafala system has been encouraging, the question of enforcement will linger long after the end of the World Cup and the global spotlight has turned elsewhere. One would hope that future World Cup hosts — and their labor practices — are given the same kind of scrutiny.

On one level, the Qatar World Cup represents all that is wrong in hypercommodified megaevents: global consultancies, multinational corporations, government agencies, FIFA itself. And yet this year’s tournament also makes clear that the game is no longer the exclusive domain of European states and their erstwhile Latin American colonies.

Football is a cultural force like no other. Its intricate history has transcended boundaries and captured the hearts of millions in the Middle East and beyond. It is something on which to project hopes and fears, anxieties and aspirations. As the teams representing 32 nations take to the field in the month ahead, those aspirations will take center stage.

Abdullah Al-Arian (@anhistorian) is a history professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and the editor, most recently, of “Football in the Middle East: State, Society and the Beautiful Game.”

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