By: JJ G
Before the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, questions arose quickly. Many soccer fans were thrilled the tournament was coming up, but many also raised concerns about Qatar’s human rights violations.
Qatar is a small country in the Arab world on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. This is the first time that Qatar has hosted the World Cup. Qatar was able to afford all of the stadiums and food because of the oil and gas that they produce.
But just because they could afford to hold the World Cup does not mean it was easy to set up. The host country must take care of all 32 soccer teams and provide enough stadiums for all the games. The stadiums also must be large enough to fit about 1 million people.
Fans still do not know why Qatar was chosen to host the World Cup, as they are such a small country. Some people believe that Qatar did not play fairly when the country won the right to hold the contest. People thought it was unfair because there are so many people that live in that area and most voted for Qatar to be the hosting country.
But the questions are not all the concerns and questions Qatar had. They had a huge amount of work to do, like building seven new stadiums, buildings, and roads. Most of the work in Qatar is done by many people in different countries. Qatar has 313,000 Qataris but over 2 million foreign workers.
Many of these workers were treated very badly. They were forced to work in poor conditions for hours and hours. Thousands of workers were reported injured or killed while building for the World Cup.
Seth Blatter, a former FIFA president, even said, “For me, it is clear: Qatar is a mistake. The choice was bad.”