On Wednesday, football’s global governing body FIFA officially confirmed the joint bid of Spain, Portugal and Morocco to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup as well as Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the quadrennial mega event four years later. As both bids were unchallenged, the final decision, made at a virtual “Extraordinary FIFA Congress”, was a mere formality, but FIFA wouldn’t be FIFA if the entire process hadn’t been surrounded by controversy.
First there was the way the organization circumvented its own “principle of confederation rotation” by adding Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to the 2030 ticket as part of a 100-year celebration and thereby ruling out any South American bids for 2034, not to mention the environmental and physical impact of flying teams across the globe in the middle of a tournament. By making sure that only federations from Asia and Oceania could bid for the 2034 World Cup and setting a deadline too tight to meet for other applicants, FIFA effectively fast-tracked Saudi Arabia’s hosting ambitions, shortly before announcing a multi-year global partnership with Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant.
Secondly, there was the expected uproar from human rights groups, who flagged the treatment of migrant workers in the Gulf state as well as its treatment of women and members of the LGBTQ community. In its official “Bid Evaluation Report”, FIFA largely swatted these concerns aside, giving the Saudi bid an overall score of 4.2 out of 5 – the highest score ever awarded. According to the report, the inclusion of human rights within the criteria for evaluating bids is “about making decisions based on evidence of how effectively bidders intend to address human rights risks connected with a tournament. It is not about peremptorily excluding countries based on their general human rights context”. Reacting to the report, Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s Head of Labour Rights and Sport, said: “As expected, FIFA’s evaluation of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid is an astonishing whitewash of the country’s atrocious human rights record. There are no meaningful commitments that will prevent workers from being exploited, residents from being evicted or activists from being arrested.”
As our chart shows, Saudi Arabia’s “general human rights context” is in fact sub-optimal, as the country routinely ranks near the bottom of international indices on governance and human rights.
