Qatar 2022: The World Cup That Changed Everything – The New York Times

“This event was entirely built on the backs of migrant workers, on a completely unequal balance of power,” said Michael Page, deputy director in the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights Watch. “These were very predictable abuses.”

Though Qatar has now — at FIFA’s behest — halted most construction projects and sent home most of the workers before the World Cup starts, it remains reliant on imported labor: Security professionals from Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt and France, among other countries, have been imported to bolster an overmatched local police force. A new wave of migrant workers has arrived, meanwhile, to staff the hotels, man the stadiums and serve the food.

The country’s small size, though, has done nothing to contain its ambition. This summer, for example, Qatar announced that as part of the World Cup it would hold a dance music festival at Ras Abu Fontas, just south of Doha, featuring a fire-breathing, laser-shooting spider borrowed from the Glastonbury music festival in England.

“In the few months before a tournament, most countries are scaling down,” said Ronan Evain, a director of Football Supporters Europe. “Qatar has just kept scaling up.”

The aim, organizers say, is to ensure an unparalleled fan experience. It will certainly be a different one: Qatar shocked FIFA and fans alike on Friday by deciding, only days before the tournament’s opening match, to go back on its promise to allow the sale of beer at its eight World Cup stadiums. It will still be available in certain World Cup areas, including for several dedicated hours a day in fan zones, but there was no denying Friday that the hosts had, belatedly, reset the tournament’s traditions to satisfy local rules.

The about-face raised new questions about whether everyone — particularly LGBTQ+ fans — will face the kind of welcome that Qatar’s organizing committee and FIFA have consistently guaranteed.

This month, Khalid Salman, a former Qatari national team player now deployed as an ambassador for the World Cup, did not seem to have heard the organizers’ messaging. “Homosexuality is haram here,” he told a German documentary, using an Arabic word that roughly translates as forbidden. “It is haram because it is damage in the mind.”