Under its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has unleashed a spending spree on global sports, turning the kingdom into a contender for the biggest events.
This Wednesday (11), football’s governing body is expected to confirm that Saudi Arabia has secured the biggest prize of all: the men’s World Cup in 2034.
No other competition on the planet attracts as many eyes as the centuries-old quadrennial tournament, a national team competition that puts host nations in the spotlight in a way that only the Summer Olympics can match.
But human rights groups opposed the Saudi bid, saying the country’s human rights record raises risks for the thousands of migrant workers from some of the poorest parts of the world who will be brought in to build infrastructure — stadiums, airports, roads and hotels, and even a new city—to hold the tournament.
Other critics, including fan groups, say FIFA — the global soccer body that nearly collapsed a decade ago after many of its top leaders were indicted on corruption charges by the U.S. Department of Justice — manipulated the vote for the Saudis by changing the candidacy rules.
Under FIFA rules, the organization’s 211 member nations must select a tournament host during a single vote, and there are usually several contenders. This year, however, FIFA members will vote at the same time for two tournaments — the World Cup in 2030 and 2034. And they will have to vote on a package, essentially approving bids for both tournaments or neither.
Furthermore, the only competitor for the 2030 event is, for the first time, a group of six countries from three continents — Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Thus, any nation voting against the Saudi candidacy would also be voting against these countries hosting the 2030 event.
FIFA recently said the rule changes “followed a comprehensive consultation process across all confederations” but did not explain why bids for the two tournaments were combined. This week, FIFA published an assessment of the Saudi bid, saying the country was on track to reform its labor system, with changes that will reduce the risk for workers involved in construction work needed for the World Cup.
The announcement about the tournaments will be made in Zurich, following a formal vote by the national football federations of FIFA member nations.
But in contrast to previous years, when announcements were made with great fanfare, Saudi Arabia will receive its award in an unusually low-key way: a vote in a virtual meeting that could create a moment more procedural than celebratory.
Furthermore, international media will be absent. FIFA has not announced any plans for a press conference after the decisive meeting about its most prestigious and most important revenue-generating event.
Hosting the World Cup is part of Crown Prince Mohammed’s ambitious plan to reorient the country, in part by diversifying its economy. Sports and entertainment have been at the center of this plan for the past decade, as the prince has brought the world’s top sports and sporting talent to Saudi Arabia, at a staggering cost.
“We have hosted more than 85 global events, and we have delivered at the highest level,” Saudi Arabia’s sports minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal told the BBC in a podcast published earlier this month. “We want to attract the world through sports. We hope that by 2034, people will have an extraordinary World Cup.”
He dismissed as “superficial” claims made by advocacy groups that Saudi Arabia’s sudden and enormous focus on sports was a way to distract the world from its human rights record. Similar accusations — known as sportswashing — have been made against Saudi Arabia’s neighbor, Qatar, which hosted the 2022 World Cup.
Human rights groups point to a recent report commissioned by FIFA into the treatment of migrant workers who built stadiums and other venues in Qatar for this event. Many of these workers were injured and even killed due to dangerous working conditions.
The report, which took FIFA a year to publish, said the sporting body should compensate the injured and the families of killed workers, as well as workers who were victims of wage theft and unscrupulous middlemen involved in the recruitment process.
Michael Page, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, said the scale of risk posed by Saudi Arabia in hosting the tournament was even greater. “There are about 13.4 million migrant workers in Saudi Arabia, compared to 2 million in Qatar,” Page said in a call with journalists, in which he was joined by other opponents of the grant.
“Many work in remote and harsh conditions that could exacerbate the human cost of hosting the tournament,” he said.
In recent years, tennis, golf, Formula 1 racing and top-level boxing have been beneficiaries of Saudi largess, as have some of the world’s most famous footballers, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, who have been lured from Europe to play in Saudi Arabia. .
But managing to host the World Cup would be an achievement of another magnitude.
It would be “important across the board, particularly in managing reputational risk,” said Andreas Krieg, a research fellow at the Institute of Middle East Studies at King’s College, London.
He said winning the bid will allow Saudi Arabia to “complete this whole episode of normalization that the kingdom has gone through” following the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi monarchy. Khashoggi was murdered inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. An intelligence report published by the Biden administration said Crown Prince Mohammed approved the killing. The kingdom denied the allegations.
“This allows the Saudis to say, ‘We are a normal country, and the world is treating us like a normal country,'” he added.
