The remains, the white elephants and the dark social balance left by the World Cup in Qatar Code List

It hadn’t been 12 hours since Brazil beat Korea in Ras Abu Aboud Stadium 974, in Qatar, when the machines began to extract the first cargo containers with which its structure had been raised. It was inaugurated on November 20, 2021 and only 13 games were played there. The total cost of its construction was 230 million dollarsthe cheapest of the eight stadiums that were built on this small peninsula of Persian Gulf. Although extremely expensive for the use it had. Each match played there cost $17,692,307.

The excuse for such spending is that this structure will have a second life. According to financial timeswill be rebuilt in Montevideo as part of the offer of stadiums that Uruguay will present, together with Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, to organize the world cup 2030, exactly one hundred years after the first World Cup in history was held there. The idea is to raise the 974 containers to a boat and do the 8,000 miles as Qatar until Uruguay. Nobody knows if the business has already been carried out or how much the Uruguayan government could have paid for such a volume. It would just be a gamble anyway. There are other host proposals and it will all be decided in a rigged vote of the presidents of the world’s soccer club federations in Geneva.

The other stadiums are also going to be reduced, dismantled or converted to try not to become white elephants. The total cost of the World Cup was 220,000 million dollars. The stadiums cost about 10,000 million, an average of 1.250 million each. The Lusail stadium, the largest in the tournament, with a capacity for 80,000 spectators, will host the Cup final, but will never see an international football match again. Design by famous architects. Foster+Partners it will be stripped of most of its seats and repurposed for shops, cafeterias, and possibly a school and health clinics. The upper stands will be converted into housing, while the pitch will be used for community matches. Another pharaonic project for a country of less than three million inhabitants that does not need stadiums or another shopping center.

The other courts will also be transformed in some way. The stadium Al Bayt, the second largest, has a tent-like design that will be dismantled. The upper levels will be removed and the remainder of the structure will be used for a new five-star hotel, shopping center and sports medicine hospital. the stadiums Ahmad bin Ali, Al Janoub and Al Thumama They will see their capacity reduced to around 20,000 spectators after the World Cup, although even this may be optimistic considering the usual attendance. They will be adopted by the two oldest teams in the emirate. the rayaneight-time winner of the Qatar Stars League, will move to Bin Ali, while Al Wakrah It will be from Al Janoub. These teams could have stadiums for less than a tenth of what these cost.

The thing about the stadiums is clear evidence that this World Cup was a nonsense created by FIFA for Qatar to wash its face for having promoted the international terrorism, handing out extraordinary sums to organizations like ISIS, Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad, and violating human rights. The Qatari government publicly admitted that in the construction of the stadiums and the rest of the infrastructure for this World Cup at least 400 foreign workers died due to the harsh conditions to which they were exposed. And as they tried to expose several participating teams -repressed by FIFA and threatened to expel them from football- violates the rights of sexual minorities and women. A proportional idea of ​​what this “face lift” cost the Qatari sheikhs is that while 220,000 million dollars were spent for this World Cup, the previous two, that of Brazil and Russia, cost around 13,000 million each.

Those that are not dismantled are the prisons for Qatari political prisoners. This week the case of abdullah ibhaisa former media director for the Supreme Committee that organized the World Cup, who has been in prison ever since he dared to be the first to denounce the conditions to which foreign workers were subjected They built the stadiums. The prisoner’s family released a letter through the human rights organization FairSquarein which he states that since the World Cup began, Ibhais spent four days “in complete darkness in solitary confinement after being physically assaulted” with the air conditioning at full power and “used as a torture device”. Punishment is for contributing to ITV documentary Qatar: State of fear? whatIt aired in Britain two weeks ago. “He was in a two-by-one-meter cell with a hole in the floor for a bathroom and near-freezing temperatures,” the letter added. “I already had several bruises after the attack by the prison guards and I couldn’t stop shivering as the cold air blowing towards me never stopped. I hardly slept during those four days,’ he told us”. Ibhais had been sacked from his position on the organizing committee in 2019 when he informed his superiors that he had found some 200 foreign workers in Education City stadium without drinking water at temperatures above 40 degrees. those who they had not been paid their wages for four months.

The one who has already won the World Cup is FIFA who gets $2.6 billion in TV rights of the tournament A part of this money is distributed among the participating teams. But it is only a small part if we take into account that the world champion will take just 42 million dollars. It is only officially known what the United States will do with the money it receives: it will have to be divided equally with the women’s soccer team. In other countries there were campaigns on social networks so that what is collected by the national soccer federation is transferred to fan clubs and to promote the sport in the poorest neighborhoods on the planet. But no one has to account on these amounts.

Environmental defense organizations are also doing the math and they see enormous nonsense in this world. Greenhouse gas emissions skyrocketed, mainly due to air travel. It is estimated that this Cup will produce 3.6 million tons of CO2 equivalent, carbon, as much as the annual emissions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo or those of Iceland and Montenegro combined. The previous World Cups in Russia, Brazil and South Africa were equally disastrous, with emissions of more than 2 million tons of polluting gases. These abstract figures, which are underestimated, represent a concrete and tangible contribution to climate change.

All this without counting that Qatar has no water. In his desert territory it barely rains an average of 74 milliliters a year. It depends on the desalination of gulf water. The water from which the salt is extracted represents 60% of its total supply, and practically all residential consumption, which is subsidized for the 900,000 Qataris from families of origin and the other two million foreigners who reside legally, although They don’t have the same rights. Groundwater makes up the other quarter of the country’s supply and is used by farms. It is extracted with mechanized pumping systems and runs out quickly. The cost of desalination is very high, requires between 3.5 and 4.5 kilowatt hours of electricity to obtain 1,000 liters of drinking water. Also the cost to nature. The salt returns to the Persian Gulf, along with the salt dumped by all the other countries in the region, and it is destroying corals and life in the sea. Qatar’s electricity and water company, Kahramaa, estimated that During the month of the World Cup, consumption would rise by at least 20%. Private studies believe that this figure is much higher if one takes into account that there are 1.2 million foreign visitors. Qatar had promised a carbon neutral event.

There is still no data on the extraordinary increase in waste generated in the stadiums that are located within a 70-kilometer radius. Japanese fans probably have more details. As we know, they were the only ones who collected what their compatriots had discarded while watching the games.

Teacher daryl adairfrom the Technological University of Sydney, a specialist in the subject of sport and its social implications expressed it this way in an essay published this week on the site The conversation: “Promotional rhetoric, whether from FIFA or its stakeholders, routinely emphasizes the ‘unifying and inclusive power of football and the World Cup.’ However, statements such as ‘soccer is the universal balm’ or ‘the World Cup breaks cultural barriers’ they just don’t hold up to scrutiny. What happened cannot be allowed to happen again. Future World Cups will have to comply with social, economic and human rights obligations that Qatar (2022) and Russia (2018) did not have to respect”.

For such a deep reform, much tighter controls will be needed on local football clubs, national associations, federations and the so-called FIFA, a body separate from any oversight despite having such a profound influence on so many millions of people around the world. For now, there are no indications that its highest authorities have been affected by the criticism they received for having allowed this World Cup to be played in such lamentable conditions. fifa President, gianni infantinosaid shortly before the start of the Cup that I was fantasizing about the possibility of a World Cup in North Korea.

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