Hassan Ammar/AP Photo
Workers walk to Lusail Stadium, one of the 2022 World Cup stadiums, under construction in Lusail, Qatar, December 20, 2019.
The 2022 Qatar FIFA World Cup spurred global outrage when mainstream media caught wind of the fact that 6,500 migrant laborers had died in the construction of new soccer stadiums for the event. Social media users and major news outlets rightly labeled the World Cup a humanitarian crisis, as Qatari private contractors, tasked with overseeing the construction of stadiums, hired thousands of migrant laborers, withheld their passports, and forced them to stay and work long hours in dangerous conditions, with fatal results.
Now, Saudi Arabia looks set to extend this humanitarian crisis with its foray into world sports. The recent Saudi incursion into golf, tennis, and soccer may seem glitzy on the surface. But beyond the expensive public relations facade, a human rights crisis is taking place, as the sovereign nation gears up to host various global sporting events—such as soccer’s 2027 Asian Cup, which will require three new stadiums and a major overhaul to four others.
The reason is that Saudi Arabia also has an extremely abusive migrant labor system that is basically similar to the one in Qatar. News outlets, and many professional athletes and sporting associations, remain hypnotized by the money that Saudis have thrown around, but questions must be asked about what this means for the migrant laborers who will break their backs for the spectacle of the sports revolution.
The Saudi Sports Grab
Over the past few years, Saudi Arabia has transformed the world of sports as we know it. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, has instructed the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), a sovereign wealth portfolio, to pursue global sport industries, host major sporting tournaments in Saudi Arabia, and buy out major sports associations. Some journalists have argued that the reason for this investment is primarily economic: to diversify the kingdom’s economy, long reliant on crude oil exports, in a shifting socioeconomic climate.
This does make some sense. Buying big chunks of the sporting world will garner lucrative broadcasting rights and encourage financial investment. If the Biden administration continues to pursue clean-energy investment, then Saudi Arabia has a clear purpose to diversify its economy: Saudi Arabia is the greatest source of U.S. petroleum imports from Persian Gulf countries.
However, there are certainly other motivations. The Saudi state’s venture into sports may also soften its brutal reputation for human rights abuses. Aside from the barbaric Saudi criminal code and its record of executing protesters and immigrants, it has been under heavy international scrutiny since 2018, when bin Salman reportedly ordered the assassination and butchery of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, who was a Washington Post columnist and U.S. permanent resident. Social media has popularized a new term, “sportswashing,” to refer to the process whereby individuals, companies, and nations bankroll big-name sporting events and sports teams to distract from their human rights abuses. Many have criticized the Saudi sovereignty of whitewashing its image through its heavy investment in sports.
Saudi’s financial stampede into the sporting world has only accelerated in 2023. Earlier this year, bigwig executives of the PGA and LIV, two previously embittered rival golf associations, eagerly bent the knee to Saudi money, agreeing to merge under the administration of the PIF, despite widespread opposition to the merger in the United States. In the soccer world, it took ownership of four clubs in the Saudi Pro League, and has since offered hundreds of millions, in some cases billions, to lure the biggest stars in the sport to play in the Saudi league, which will now host giants of the game, like Cristiano Ronaldo, Karim Benzema, Neymar, and many others.
The irony here is that these sportswashing attempts will require even more grueling work from migrant laborers. To mask its reputation for human rights abuses, Saudi Arabia will have to make its ongoing humanitarian crisis even worse.
The Kafala System
Like most other Arab Gulf nations, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia uses the “kafala” system of migrant labor sponsorship. The system of kafala (meaning “custodianship” or “guarantee” in Arabic), has been in operation since the 1950s. Migrant labor constitutes more than 80 percent of the private-sector workforce in Saudi Arabia. Migrants working under this system in Saudi Arabia mostly come from India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Lebanon, and Egypt. The construction, services, retail, and domestic work sectors in particular rely on kafala workers.
Human rights agencies often criticize the sponsorship system because it does not abide by international human rights law. The system provides private citizens and companies with complete control over migrant workers’ employment and immigration status, forcing migrants, who enter Saudi to make money for their families back home, to remain in Saudi Arabia once they immigrate—bereft of legal means to return home, or even to switch jobs before their contracts expire.
All of this has deep relevance to Saudi Arabia’s sports grab. The sovereign state’s Sports Ministry has begun to invite private contractors to submit prequalification documents to prepare for their bids to build new soccer stadiums. Work on these stadiums will begin between October this year and February 2024. In addition, 30 new training grounds and facilities will be built in close proximity to the stadiums, to be used for the 2027 Asian Cup. These construction efforts will rely on thousands of workers who will have to submit themselves to human rights violations.
Those sympathetic to Saudi labor practices might point to the fact that in 1985, Saudi Arabia introduced various measures to nationalize its workforce (known as “Saudization” efforts), which in principle aims to diversify the nation’s workforce. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the Saudi kingdom faced one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. Because of this, in 2011, the state’s Ministry of Labor implemented the “Nitaqat” program, which required companies to employ a certain percentage of Saudi nationals, depending on the industry.
However, these reforms have largely failed to bring much change to the private sector, which has continued to rely on cheap migrant labor. Saudi nationals have been unwilling to fill construction or other low-income roles, which many of them regard as degrading. Such work has long been stigmatized in Saudi Arabia, in which national identity is upheld by strong racial and class prejudice.
Private companies also regularly evade employment quotas. As scholar Steffen Hertog writes, the Ministry of Labor has “faltered in its ambitious attempts to micro-manage labor market structures, as its administrators were neither able nor motivated to regulate individual businesses consistently.” As a result, “state and business never managed to find a credible accommodation on how to implement the policy.” It is likely that private companies involved in the construction of new stadiums and public infrastructure will use the same abusive migrant labor program as Qatar did for the World Cup, especially since other major construction projects (like the Red Sea Project) have relied on migrant labor. The humanitarian crisis is attached at the hip with Saudi’s sports grab.
Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Major international pressure will be needed to halt this impending human rights crisis. Saudi Arabia is clearly concerned with its reputation for workers’ rights abuses and has sought to pay lip service to quell the flames of international criticism. In March 2021, it introduced labor reforms that allowed some migrant workers to change jobs without employer consent after 12 months’ employment. However, we should take these reforms with a fistful of salt. Migrant workers and their dependents still rely on their employers to facilitate their entry and residency. Moreover, these reforms excluded migrant domestic workers who make up 30 percent of the country’s ten million migrant workers. On top of that, passport confiscations remain common. In April 2021, one month after the March reforms, at least 41 Sri Lankan women remained detained at a deportation center in Saudi Arabia after having already been incarcerated for months, waiting to go home.
This is not the first time the Saudi regime, clearly concerned with its global image, has “reformed” the kafala system. In 2015, it introduced fines for employers who confiscated migrant workers’ passports, or failed to pay salaries on time or provide copies of contracts to employees. Despite such legislation, such practices remain commonplace. Qatar itself announced the end of the kafala system in 2019 and “reformed” its abusive labor standards in 2020, when it introduced a nondiscriminatory minimum wage and claimed it would allow all migrant workers to change jobs before the end of their contracts, without their employer’s consent. The effect on preparations for the 2022 World Cup was negligible.
Saudi Arabia is following Qatar’s playbook every step of the way. There are clear reasons for it to do so. Despite international criticism, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar became the most lucrative tournament in FIFA’s history, earning the association an unprecedented $7.5 billion in revenue from four years of commercial deals. Qatar also greatly benefited from the event. Following the World Cup, Qatar received 730,000 tourists in January and February 2023, a rise of 347 percent from the previous year. From the Qatar government’s perspective, all those dead workers were well worth it. And while that World Cup was a single event, the Saudi sports grab proposes to make the country a permanent center of global sports. Without international activism, Saudi Arabia’s migrant workers may well experience a labor crisis worse than the one previously witnessed in its neighbor.
