Essay: Football is Life, Football is Death

On the 2022 Men's World Cup

“Football is life,” goes fictional footballer Dani Rojas’ mantra in the TV show Ted Lasso. And many of us football fans would agree.

But the fact is, in this 2022 men’s World Cup, Football is Death. 

At least 6,500 migrant workers died to make this tournament possible. And many football fans, host nation Qatar, and the sport’s governing body FIFA could not give a fuck. 

In a tournament with 64 matches total, with at least 90 minutes per match, the death tally comes to this: at least one migrant worker death for every single minute of match play (this, according to  Robert Rutledge, an Associate Professor of physics at McGill University who specializes in statistics). If you watch this Sunday’s final between cupholders France and Argentina, try to at least remember that macabre toll as you extoll the ways Kylian Mbappé mesmerises you and the delights that Lionel Messi’s feet create

I will not be watching because I have boycotted this tournament. 

In this 2022 men’s World Cup, Football is Death. At least 6,500 migrant workers died to make this tournament possible. And many football fans, host nation Qatar, and the sport’s governing body FIFA could not give a fuck. 

It’s the first men’s World Cup I have not watched since the 1978 tournament held in Argentina that I followed with my dad and brother from our living room in London. That was my first World Cup and, though I did not know it at the time, my introduction to sportswashing. That 1978 World Cup was held in a country ruled by a military dictatorship which held thousands of political prisoners in clandestine detention centres across the country, including the largest just a few blocks from the stadium where that year’s World Cup final was held.  I might not have known that but I’m confident that FIFA did.

Just as I am confident that FIFA knew what selling the 2022 World Cup to the absolute monarchy that runs Qatar meant. 

The more authoritarian the better. FIFA has told us that’s what they prefer.

In 2013, its then-secretary-general Jerome Valcke said too much democracy can be a hindrance when organising a World Cup. 

"I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup," he said. "When you have a very strong head of state who can decide, as maybe [President Vladimir] Putin can do in 2018... that is easier for us organisers than a country such as Germany, where you have to negotiate at different levels…The main fight we have [is] when we enter a country where the political structure is divided, as it is in Brazil, into three levels - the federal level, the state level and the city level…[There are] different people, different movements, different interests and it's quite difficult to organise a World Cup in such conditions."

 So it’s been clear for years now, that waiting for FIFA to develop a conscience is as futile as waiting for my country of birth Egypt to qualify for the World Cup. 

"I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup," FIFA secretary-general Jerome Valcke in 2013.

This men’s World Cup represents the apotheosis of FIFA fuckery. The more we let FIFA get away with, the lower it dragged our moral bar with it until we arrived here, the Qatar World cup, the apotheosis of fuckery and the nadir of a moral standard. Authoritarianism: check. Misogyny: check. Homophobia: check. And yes all that checked for the 2018 World Cup in Russia. I am guilty of playing along with sportswashing. I claim no higher moral ground here.

But.

The Qatar World Cup took that fuckery and plunged further into that nadir because even for those who play the whataboutery game, for whom no country is free of sin and therefore none can throw that first stone, the 6,500 migrant workers who died while making this tournament possible was our loudest moral alarm bell and collectively we failed the test.

Some workers plunged to their deaths building the city that did not exist but which has hosted the tournament, some died in the hellish heat of Qatar’s summer (a heat the footballers and fans were spared by the unprecedented decision to hold this World Cup in November and December rather than the June and July schedule the men’s tournament has followed in its 92-year-history), and others, men who left their home countries healthy, died a few years after repatriating from conditions directly related to the abusive work conditions they endured in Qatar.

The families of those men who died to make this men’s World Cup possible have not been compensated. And many of the migrant workers who survived after making this tournament possible have not been paid what they were promised because host-nation Qatar, which has spent a gobsmackingly astronomical record $220 billion to make this World Cup possible (16 times the amount invested by previous men’s World Cup host Russia), has not coughed up the money. 

FIFA knew all of that and did not give a fuck.

The message that FIFA has sent us is that regardless of the outcome of the World Cup final this Sunday, the winners are greed, corruption, and an absolute monarchy with money to burn but not on the very workers who made this spectacle of a vanity project possible.

And in case you thought playing along with Qatar rather than boycotting the World Cup would improve things for migrant workers, the trade union leading attempts to improve conditions for those workers in Qatar has warned that a positive World Cup legacy is unlikely after proposals for a migrant workers’ centre and wider reform were met with “deafening silence” by government officials.

That same country that could afford to effectively squander 122 percent of its GDP—which the World Bank puts at $180 billion—on a vanity project does not give a fuck about migrant labourers. 

Football is death.

And not enough of us gave a fuck.

Why?

Because that death was of the poorest of the poor. The Covid-19 pandemic was not unprecedented in showing us that the lives of the poorest of the poor are the cheapest to squander. And in the case of Qatar, as well as its Gulf neighbours–countries with billions upon billions of petrodollars to squander on vanity projects–it has been the lives of the poorest of the poor that made possible not just the World Cup but the very glitzy “Vegas in the other desert” ethos of so many cities in the region.

Football is death.

And not enough of us gave a fuck.

Why?

It has been hard not to watch this World Cup. There is a collective joy that the tournament engenders, whether you watch the matches in cafes with friends and loved ones, or alone as you live tweet your reactions that then plug you into a global community that mimics the power of connection those watching in the stands feel.

Football is never just about what happens on a pitch for 90 minutes between 22 players. It is a microcosm of a greater story in which we each find our place to stand. 

I might not have watched the tournament but I know that Morocco’s fourth place is not just the furthest any African or Arab team has made it in the World Cup, but I know that it also brought the joy of victory of the team of formerly colonized people over the team of former colonizers, that indigenous Amazigh people in Morocco were left to wonder where they could claim a place in that victory, and that in beating Spain in the quarter final, Morocco’s victory vicariously ignited a recognition that Spain’s right wing and racist revisionists have long tried to erase, of the centuries-long Muslim rule over Spain. 

As powerful and necessary a “fuck you” to white supremacists and colonizers as all those points are, let us pause for a moment and ponder how sour a victory that is when it involved trampling over the Black and brown bodies lost in the making of this World Cup. 

Is it a victory of the white supremacists if it is a victory scored over the bodies of people of colour–at least 6,500 of them?

Football is never just about what happens on a pitch for 90 minutes between 22 players. It is a microcosm of a greater story in which we each find our place to stand. 

Thank you FIFA for showing us that it is football, not just religion, that is the opium of the people.

And in case you think FIFA has learned anything, remember that it awarded the 2026 World Cup to North America at a time when the Trump administration had in place a Muslim ban. 

I grew up watching football with my dad and brother. I have written about my love of the sport in my books as well as in essays for various publications. The older I get the more I question the cost to my conscience in continuing to watch the game, especially men’s football.

I’ve written of the spike in intimate partner violence that accompanies both the weekly matches in domestic leagues as well as the win, lose, or draw increase in that same violence that accompanies international tournaments such as the World Cup. 

And it’s not just the supporters of the game. Their behaviour, remember, mirrors that of the football idols they follow. On the pitch, off the pitch, from managers to players to the men who support them: patriarchy fuels a dangerous cocktail of toxic masculinity in football as well as many other men’s sports. Football tournaments did not invent patriarchy. The latter drives the men’s game and the harm it takes home. 

Since a woman said Mason Greenwood raped her, I have not been able to watch and live tweet the games of Manchester United, the team I have been supporting since 1976, when I was nine. 

And I’ve connected it all to patriarchy, because the abusive behaviour of superstars like Giggs must be directly connected to the behaviour of abusers in the stands, in the pubs, and the homes who watch them. The through line is patriarchy.

"Clubs are organisations that can speak to the people a lot better than the government. They help create a culture, so when a...football club...accepts someone found guilty of violence against women, it says to the…people that it's acceptable,” says Monica Sapucaia Machado, a professor of political and economical law and specialist in women's rights.

The message that FIFA has sent us is that regardless of the outcome of the World Cup final this Sunday, the winners are greed, corruption, and an absolute monarchy with money to burn but not on the very workers who made this spectacle of a vanity project possible. And the losers are of course the very workers who made this spectacle of greed and corruption possible but more tellingly our collective consciences. 

Sport is the microcosm of the world we live in. I am not introducing politics into sport, as said by some in response to those of us who insist on having these conversations; politics are irrevocably intertwined. 

Football, especially so on a global level with the World Cup, gives us a chance to learn and in this World Cup to spectacularly fail the test.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.  

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