The World Cup is meant to be a global celebration but along with all those cheers this time around there's been a whole lot of criticism and condemnation. From protests like this one to players taking a stand. So how did we get here?
Qatar! [Applause] This was the moment back in 2010 when Qatar won its bid to host the World Cup. A huge victory for the tiny but incredibly wealthy country of just 3 million.
The first in the Middle East to host the event. But right away there were questions, why was the country with dangerously hot summer temperatures like over 40 degrees hot, given a tournament that's normally held in the summer? Ever since, there have been unrelenting allegations of corruption.
Headline after headline saying that Qatar bribed corrupt officials from FIFA, which oversees the World Cup, to win hosting rights. Qatar has always strongly denied any wrongdoing but those allegations aren't the only problem. [Music] To host the tournament, Qatar has had to build a lot, spending an estimated 200 billion dollars on infrastructure.
Seven new stadiums, a whole new Metro system and around a hundred hotels. And it relied on foreign workers to get all this done. Workers who faced really harsh conditions And many of them, working in that scorching heat, have died.
Just how many is hard to know. The Qataris say 37 foreign workers have died at World Cup construction sites. But many have said that number is an undercount.
This report from the un's international labor organization found there were at least 50 work-related deaths and 500 severe injuries in 2020 alone. That's just one year of World Cup construction that's been going on for a decade. And at the beginning of that construction the International Trade Union Confederation estimated that as many as 4,000 workers could lose their lives.
If somebody thinks that by just hammering and criticizing and hammering critical as we'll achieve something well I can tell you achieve exactly the opposite. That's FIFA president Gianni Infantino. He wrote a letter to all the World Cup teams that was leaked to Sky News.
In it he asked them to focus on the football and avoid ideological or political battle But some teams are ignoring that. The Danish jerseys will either have faded logos or be entirely black to honour the workers lives England players took a knee and the Australian team released this video The decision to host the World Cup the Qatar, which resulted in the suffering and in the harm of countless of our fellow workers It's not just workers' rights, in Qatar, a conservative country with strict Sharia law, homosexuality is illegal. And just a few weeks ago this Qatari World Cup official called it damage in the mind.
Despite its laws, Qatar has been trying to reassure players and fans. Listen, everybody's welcome in Doha. We do not stop anybody from coming to Doha with any different backgrounds, any different belief.
Still some fans angry at FIFA for choosing Qatar in the first place, won't be watching. So it's time for FIFA to stop making excuses. FIFA has rejected the criticism.
This moral lesson giving one-sided it's just hypocrisy. And Qatar says it hasn't been fair, arguing that it's faced an element of racism as the first Arab country to host the tournament. Here's the Emir again speaking to his advisory council.
Qatar has faced unprecedented criticism, he tells them, many are questioning the motives behind it. For the next month, all eyes will be on this as Qatar tries to Showcase itself on the world stage. After all, that's what hosting the World Cup is all about.
But for Qatar, when this one is all over, the world may remember a whole lot more than just the soccer.
