Jerry Atrick wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 7:36 pmFigures vary - Amnesty claimed 15000, Qatar claimed 40. From your post the Guardian claimed 6500. . .

As I pointed out earlier there are 2M migrant workers there at any given time

So if 6500 died over 10 years that would place average mortality numbers per 1000 far below the global average of 9 per 1000 people per year because with 2m workers we could expect to see 18000 deaths as average mortality

Numbers can be misleading when taken without context

That said, it's a fucking shitshow that it's even there to begin with

I posted a fact check by DW that discussed this in detail. Comparing the death rate to country or global averages is misleading because those include the very old and the very young who both have much higher death rates than working age adults. Workers also undergo health checkups before they are awarded visas so they're healthier than the average for their age group in their country. Many Nepalis suffer health complications and premature deaths that are directly attributable to their work in Qatar after they return to Nepal but aren't counted in the death toll. Those who die in Qatar after being worked to death are rarely counted either.

How many people died for the Qatar World Cup?

Qatar accused of paying Ecuador players $7.4 million to throw their opening match

https://www.hindustantimes.com/sports/f ... 2-amp.html

ali baba wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 12:03 am

Jerry Atrick wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 7:36 pmFigures vary - Amnesty claimed 15000, Qatar claimed 40. From your post the Guardian claimed 6500. . .

As I pointed out earlier there are 2M migrant workers there at any given time

So if 6500 died over 10 years that would place average mortality numbers per 1000 far below the global average of 9 per 1000 people per year because with 2m workers we could expect to see 18000 deaths as average mortality

Numbers can be misleading when taken without context

That said, it's a fucking shitshow that it's even there to begin with

I posted a fact check by DW that discussed this in detail. Comparing the death rate to country or global averages is misleading because those include the very old and the very young who both have much higher death rates than working age adults. Workers also undergo health checkups before they are awarded visas so they're healthier than the average for their age group in their country. Many Nepalis suffer health complications and premature deaths that are directly attributable to their work in Qatar after they return to Nepal but aren't counted in the death toll. Those who die in Qatar after being worked to death are rarely counted either.

How many people died for the Qatar World Cup?

Good info, thanks.

I definitely agree, and expressed as much in an earlier post regarding mortality rate being lower due to a workforce typically being younger and healthier than the average

However with 2m workers at any given time there certainly will be an element of mortality

Typically, the lower skilled workers will bear the brunt of the dangerous conditions and by extension, contribute to accidental deaths disproportionately

But the figures are varying wildly from one source to another so I do feel they are rather inflated, because...

If 2m migrant workers x 10 years = 20m workers and 5k to 25k have died its still extremely lower lower than average mortality even when adjusting for median age

That isn't to say that workers haven't died because of inadequate conditions and health and safety. Clearly many have. It's just that the overall numbers seem inflated probably as a stick to beat the organizers with

@Jerry Atrick Fair points. It's worth remembering that Brazil had 8 deaths during it's preparations for the world cup and other hosts rarely have more than 1 or 2 but they tend to be cooler and more developed.

I'm of the opinion that we shouldn't have allowed Fifa to sell the 2022 cup to Qatar and no one should have accommodated their desire to move the competition to the winter. If Fifa is so corrupt that it would allow its cup to be hosted in an inhospitable oven country then it should have been allowed to fail.

angsta wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 9:36 pm

She hits the nail on the head here.

Nice knockers...

There's a 4 part documentary about FIFA and how Blatter came to power, and Jack Warner the president of the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central America and Carribean football associations) and the bribes to vote for world cup hosts.

The awarding of the Word Cup was a huge payday for these barons of football. The awarding of TWO future world cups at one time in 2010 was the first time it was done. Russia beat England for 2018, and ludicrously, Qatar over the USA for 2022.

The reason for two awards at once can be explained simply: the members of the 22 man executive committee were mostly old men, and this was a chance of a double payday as none of them would be around for any more votes. They took they money and f**k the consequences for FIFA. This is what started the American investigation into FIFA and all those indictments.

The world cup is supposed to give a country a huge PR boost. So far Qatar is being put in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, and this is now reflecting very poorly on FIFA, with the President not helping by making idiotic speeches. In a few weeks it could turn into a multi billions dollar PR disaster.

FIFA Uncovered on Netflix.

Doc67 wrote: ↑Sun Nov 20, 2022 8:52 am FIFA Uncovered on Netflix.

Watch that yesterday, worth it.

Always knew it was corrupt but just how blatant it was was interesting.

Just gonna put it on it there that it was always obvious that chuck blazer was a dodgy guy, just take a look at him

Another good article from The Times.

It’s football on a heavy acid trip but the Qataris have what they crave — the world’s attention
Air guitar, £20 beer and Bangladeshis posing as Argentina fans — this World Cup is a festival of bonkers but its hosts could still be the ultimate winners

Early on Thursday evening in Doha, around 100 men in Argentina shirts charged down the Corniche, the seaside promenade, screaming Lionel Messi’s name. Some were almost in tears with the passion coursing through them. They carried a 30ft Argentine flag, waving it aloft like a holy gonfalon.

You find this sort of raucous male jingoism at any World Cup, it’s what football runs on. Except this time there wasn’t an actual Argentinian in sight. These men were all Bangladeshi migrant workers, hailing from Dhaka and Chittagong.

Every hour I’ve spent in Qatar has thrown up similarly bemusing moments. Why is all this happening? What the hell is going on? Doha in the build-up to this most bizarre of tournaments has felt like globalisation on a heavy acid trip. Five Nepali lads in Holland shirts brought over from Kathmandu. A Keralan family simultaneously supporting Germany, Brazil and England. It is a grand festival of bonkers.This is a city state barely bigger than Yorkshire, so everyone is packed into the capital: migrant workers, up to one million fans, an army of temporary labourers and even a few Qataris walking around regally in their thobes and abayas. It looks like Las Vegas, sounds like Babel and prays like Mecca.

On the Corniche, I found Jahadu, an English-speaker. “How come you are all supporting Argentina?” I asked. “Did someone pay you?” He shook his head. “We have been waiting for this tournament for years and there is no Bangladesh team to support. This is Messi’s last chance to win a World Cup.”Which is true, but I’m not sure it quite gets to the nub of the matter. To find out more, on Friday morning I headed to Asian Town, the large migrant labour camp on the outskirts of Doha where Jahadu and thousands of others like him live.

Row upon row of hulking barracks stretch across the fenced camp, each one numbered. The bedrooms are small and musky, packing four or even eight men into tight, gloomy spaces. Friday is the holy day, so hundreds of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis in their white prayer robes followed the muezzin’s call to the mosque. Everyone else took the opportunity to buy some food: it is their only day off.
I wonder if the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, who claimed in an outlandish press conference on Saturday that “I feel African, I feel gay, I feel a migrant worker”, has any idea what life is like down here at the coalface.

This is what it takes to make the unlikeliest of World Cups happen. Qatar has spent an estimated £200 billion on this tournament. It has built futuristic stadiums, endless training pitches, immense irrigation systems and a giant metro system from scratch.
But to really make this thing go, it needs men. Young men from Africa and India willing to wave glowsticks, hump luggage and build fences. Men willing to leave their families and work exhausting hours for low pay because it’s somehow better than what’s available at home. This World Cup sits on their tired shoulders.

In Asian Town, I met Sylvester Owusu, 30, a buck-toothed Ghanaian in an Arsenal shirt. With his brother, Evans, he has come to Doha on a six-month contract to work as a baggage handler at the airport. Back in Accra he is a physician’s assistant, and he hopes to put the money he earns in Qatar towards becoming a paediatrician. He earns $300 a week and manages to save $200. His wife and two kids are back at home.
Was it worth it? “I wish I hadn’t come,” he said. Why? “I work 12 hours a day. There is no social life. Nothing to do. I’m not happy.” Owusu is trying to continue his medical studies in the evenings, but he’s usually too knackered. Some of the other men visit the local brothels, where about £40 will buy a moment’s oblivion. I shudder to think how these women get here, or how they are treated when they do.

Owusu’s only bright spot is the tournament itself. He adores football, but isn’t sure he wants to spend any of his hard-earned savings on a ticket for a Ghana game. “We will watch when we can, though,” he said.
The tournament is a respite from drudgery, a flicker of splendour in a hard life. That’s what brought all those wild Bangladeshis out onto the Corniche. Their messianic passion is the most authentic thing I’ve seen all week.

The heat is on
The heat in Doha never stops. It is baked into buildings during the day and radiates back out through the night. It is humid and fierce. In 2015, five years after winning the bid, the Qataris moved this tournament from summer to “winter” to avoid a meltdown. Normally it would have rained by now and cooled down. But not this year.

The city is a plutocrat’s fever dream, magicked from the desert scrub by petrodollars and the ruling Al Thani family’s will to power. It is a dazzling array of magnificence and squalor. A place where you see a sweaty policeman searching frantically for the owner of a lost Louis Vuitton handbag. Where lilac Lamborghinis sit patiently outside hotel bars, engines running.
When the oil and gas money started pouring in during the 1970s, the Qataris wanted everything quickly, so they import most of their brands: restaurants by Nobu and Hakkasan; university campuses from Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon; sculptures by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. The 30ft spider that looms over the lanyard-wearing hordes at the Fifa media centre is Maman by Louise Bourgeois. The even bigger 50ft fire-breathing spider that graces the Qatar 2022 electronic music festival is fresh from Glastonbury’s Arcadia stage. I last stumbled past it at 4am in a muddy Somerset field.

The World Cup is the engine of this journey. A chance to show the world how far Qatar has come since it was a dusty pearl-fishing backwater, run as a protectorate by the British from 1916 until 1971. To move beyond just hydrocarbons and become a cultural and political force that cannot be ignored.

“The World Cup isn’t the end point; it is just a rung in the ladder for Qatar,” explains Sulaiman Timbo Bah, my guide to the Education City Mosque. “There is plenty more to come after this.” The tournament is part of Qatar’s 2030 national vision, to become an “advanced society capable of sustaining its development and providing a high standard of living for its people”.

But which people? Only 12 per cent of the country’s population of three million are actually Qatari. The Qataris are born on easy street: free healthcare, electricity, water, education. Zero tax. These are closely guarded privileges. The emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, can bestow 50 of these precious citizenships a year. If a Qatari woman marries a non-Qatari man, their children are not citizens.
The migrant workers have no path to citizenship at all. Their presence here is conditional and constricted. Thanks to the World Cup, there has been some reform of the kafala labour system, a form of indentured servitude that was instituted by the British. But how much real change has taken place is not clear.
The Qataris are unsurprisingly defensive about criticism of their tournament and their country. I joined two brothers, Ahmed and Muhammad, both in their twenties, for mint tea on Friday night. Did they believe the tournament would be a success? “You are going to see something that will take your breath away, inshallah,” said Muhammad.

What did they make of the criticism? A long moment of silence. “When the football starts, it will astonish you,” said Ahmed. They just didn’t want to talk about it.

The other critical question they wouldn’t answer, of course, was: will anyone be able to get pissed? Qatar sparked mass panic among British fans when it made a screeching U-turn on Thursday and banned beer sales at the stadiums. The lads will no longer be able to gulp down watery Budweisers in the roasting hot stadium fan zones, but there’s plenty of booze if you know where to look.

I bade farewell to Ahmed and Muhammad and headed to the Irish Pub, hidden away at the top of the Best Western hotel, to find some craic. It was like walking into a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Portraits of a beaming Billy Connolly and Colin Firth looked on as Germans and Mexicans smoked and got hammered together. American GIs from the nearby Al Udeid airbase sank tequilas and played air guitar to Bon Jovi. Filipina prostitutes in leopardskin dresses were pawed by beery middle-aged men.

I settled down with Dan Jensen and a group of Danes, who had secured their own Carlsberg dispenser for the table and were emptying it fast. How were they finding things so far? “Not enough drink,” said Dan. “Now we’ve found this place, though.” He wasn’t too worried about the stadium beer ban. Like many with friends in the city, he had taken advantage of the underground expat booze network and ordered a casual 500 beers to his rented apartment. He even had some gin delivered, which he was particularly pleased about. “Now we just need some tickets to the games,” he said.

There will be drink and dissolution, then, for those who really want it and can afford to pay £13 a pint. Others will come away disgruntled from their encounter with this searing sharia petrostate.
In truth, for all the liberal pablum they’ve put out about female empowerment and the greenest World Cup ever, for all the murals dedicated to migrant workers and attempts at sportwashing, the Qataris only half care what the West thinks. They can continue selling us their gas and mostly ignore the teeth-gnashing.

They are fed up with apologising and fed up with what they view as western hypocrisy and double standards: centuries of imperialism, war in Iraq, far more complaints over this tournament than were made about Russia in 2018. “For what we have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before giving moral lessons,” said Infantino in his press conference. No doubt the emir was nodding along.
What has become obvious after a few days in Qatar is that this World Cup isn’t for “us”. It’s not for people who want to sit in mitteleuropean squares and get plastered on Heineken. It’s not about LGBT or ESG or DEI. It is the first Arab World Cup and it will run accordingly.

Friday night was a wild party on the Corniche: Bangladeshis, Moroccans, Algerians, Indians, Pakistanis, Qataris, Tunisians, Senegalese, the migrant workers, the fake fans, the adopted ones. They were having an absolute ball, dancing to Queen and Calvin Harris, going potty on a dhow to the Vengaboys’ Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!; stone-cold sober, hardly a white person in sight. Football isn’t just our game any more. A starker demonstration of this would be difficult to find.

This World Cup is forcing us to look at a country we’re usually happy to ignore. We buy gas from Qatar, we sell it prime London property like Harrods and the Shard, we sneer and harrumph at its backwardness, but do we know or care what this place is really like? Now we do. The Qataris have our attention.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/its- ... -wvz03vmq9