[CodingJeebus]

International football has to be one of the most corrupt communities in sports, which is saying something. Between bribing WC officials to sway votes on World Cup locations and awarding the tournament to a country that saw 6,500 deaths of workers building the stadiums[0], to implementing dynamic pricing at the current World Cup, a move like this feels very par for the course for these guys.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

[throwaya30103]

From the article you linked :

>There have been 37 deaths among workers directly linked to construction of World Cup stadiums, of which 34 are classified as “non-work related” by the event’s organising committee.

And regarding the 6500 figure (for the 10 year period 2010-2020) :

>While death records are not categorised by occupation or place of work, it is likely many workers who have died were employed on these World Cup infrastructure projects,

The recent heatwave hitting Europe is said to have cause 1000 excess deaths in a week in France alone (again numbers are projections).

[tzs]

> Between bribing WC officials to sway votes on World Cup locations and awarding the tournament to a country that saw 6,500 deaths of workers building the stadiums

Qatar is a terrible place when it comes to treatment of workers, but that number of deaths is actually unusually low.

The 6500 figure was the deaths for all foreign workers in Qatar over a 10 year period, a country which uses foreign workers for almost all of its labor force (about 95% is foreign). They have around 2 million foreign workers. Compare to the number of citizens of Qatar which is around 400k.

6500 deaths among those foreign workers over that time period works out to a death rate of around 33 per 100k per year.

Compare that to the death rates for males aged 25-34 in the US, which is somewhere in the 160-250 range. I'm comparing to males in that age range because around 80% of the foreign workers in Qatar are male and they are predominantly 25-39.

Qatar's 5-8x lower death rate than the US still could be an indication that they have a serious problem with worker deaths, but to determine that someone would have to dive much deeper into details.

For example a significant component of the US deaths is poisoning (drug overdoses are counted as poisoning). Qatar has a very strong anti-drug policy with little tolerance and harsh penalties, so I'd expect that they don't have many drug deaths.

Same for drunk driving. They also are very intolerant of drunk driving, and consider a driver to be drunk if there is any detectable alcohol in their bloodstream after an accident. (Also, I'd expect most migrant workers don't drive).

The Guardian really should have noticed this and investigated. They really dropped the ball here.