Scammers, Traffickers and Bribes: The Dirty, Criminal Secrets Plaguing FIFA’s World Cup in Qatar - featuring Philippe AuclairDraft Episode for Nov 29, 2022
01:12:54 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat that's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

A desert camp outside the Qatari capital city of Doha, 2014. 65 construction workers, most of them Nepalese, are trapped, living in conditions unfit for animals and losing hope. Their employers haven't paid them a dime for a year, despite the promises of relative riches back home at a ramshackle agent's office in Kathmandu.

Back there, the men, and they are all young healthy men, have been offered contracts worth three, four or more times a regular salary. This for them is a chance to leapfrog their poor nation's economy, send their kids to college, maybe even start a business of their own. But when they arrive in Doha, a different kind of reality sets in. The men's passports are taken, they're stripped of their rights and given another very different contract.

This one doesn't say foreman or manager or any of the mid-rank roles so many of them have been offered back home. Almost all are designated labourers and the bottom line on this so-called double contract, which is highly illegal all around the world, is a lot, lot lower than the first one. The men quickly realise they've been duped, trafficked into a system known locally as kafala.

A sponsor has paid for everything: wages, visas, accommodation. The men are starting in debt and they may never crawl out. It's a modern form of slave labor run by Qataris and foreigners looking to get a toehold in the construction of the biggest sports tournament of them all: the FIFA World Cup. Awarded in dubious circumstances to a Gulf Peninsula with about as much football heritage as the average Midwestern US city.

Worker rights are just one of a slew of scandals and crimes to beset the event, but they're arguably the most egregious and the most deadly. Thousands of young men, South Asians, Africans and others, fall foul of kafala, forced to work in blistering heat and in conditions resulting in a death toll of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.

says one security guard from Ghana to a reporter, quote, you don't get any food. Getting water is an issue. This is a five-star hotel, but I can go half a day without water. It makes you wonder, what kind of a hotel is it? Well, this is the reality of FIFA's World Cup and the organized crime that has built it.

For many of those trapped in Qatar's migrant worker camps and standing on the doors of opulent five-star hotels, the only way out is in a body bag. This is The Underworld Podcast. The Underworld Podcast

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast where we dig into the latest horrible crimes going on everywhere. You name it, there's something awful going on, chances are we're going to cover it. I'm Sean Williams in London. I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City. I've just spent an entire day writing, well...

about 100 words about weed in the pool. Danny, what about you? Not much, man. Just kind of getting things up to speed since we came back. You know, we've got patreon.com slash normal podcast where we have all the bonus stuff, but I just set up the iTunes version of that. So now you don't have to go to Patreon if you want to get bonus material, ad-free episodes, even, I think we might even put the end of some episodes behind a paywall eventually. You can just do it right from iTunes. And if I can figure out how to do it on Spotify, I'm going to do that too.

Yeah, I think the episode, the bonus we just put up is about Hezbollah and their criminal activities from South America to West Africa and everything like that. So definitely, if you're interested, give it a listen.

Cool, yeah. So we're back. I mean, this is episode two, new series, contract shenanigans over. And I don't know if you've been living in Iraq or just in America, maybe, but there's this pretty big football tournament going on in the Gulf, and it seems like it might catch on. And I saw you shitposting about the England team the other night, so I guess you've been enjoying it too, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, this is like your sport, and you got lucky that the US didn't beat you. So I'm going to mention that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's completely true. Anyway, on that note, I kind of caught up with a while back with football writer, musician, general renaissance man, Philippe Auclair in the West End of London. Uh,

And we talked about the various crimes associated with this FIFA World Cup. And trust me, there are tons. And if you don't know Philippe's work, look him up. He's been one of the most dedicated and relentless journalists critiquing this tournament. And he's a fascinating guy to chat to about it all. Yeah, anything I'm missing at all? Do we need to talk about? I guess we've got merch maybe coming soon. We've got a bit of a gap in that at the moment, right? Yeah, we're trying to figure that out right now. So don't fret. We'll get that up soon. And yeah, I'll just let you guys...

Take it from here as I bow out as you discuss soccer. All right, let's kick it off. Hi guys and welcome to the show. And from the top, you might hear some uncharacteristic noise, which is because this podcast has finally given into destiny. And I'm coming to you from a lovely pub in the middle of London on a grey... It's not so grey and gloomy now, actually. It's quite nice.

But it'll probably change in half an hour. On a Monday afternoon, I'm joined today by writer, author and musician Philippe Auclair. So football expert and more importantly for this show, football shithousery expert. And in case anyone cares, I think I read you also the first Frenchman to write for Wisden, which in my book makes you a superhero, frankly. Yes, for Wisden and the cricketer.

That's beautiful. Great. Well, maybe we can get onto that in a little bit. Thank you for joining us, Philippe. So I'm not sure if anyone's aware, but as we're recording this, we're about five weeks away from something called the World Cup. It's going to be held in Qatar. It feels like a strange thing to say even this far down the line. And we've done on the show some things about FIFA and corruption. I mean, you could write several volumes of books about that. We did a show recently about Jal Havelange and his connections to Brazilian gangsters back in the day.

But Philippe, you've been writing about the scandals and crimes that have enveloped the World Cup all the way back to its announcement. And in 2013, in fact, you wrote a piece for Eurosport claiming that the whole thing was a, quote, shambles. Do you stand by that? What was that? Well, yes, I do stand by that. And it stems from an investigation I did for France Football, which I started in...

I started for good in 2012. I first published a piece in the Blizzard in which I was talking about a meeting that had taken place between the French president Nicolas Sarkozy at the time, the president of UEFA and vice president of FIFA, Michel Platini, and some Qatar dignitaries, including the crown prince who is now the emir of Qatar after replacing his father in 2013. I think my editor at France Football, it caught his attention. He said, why don't you write about this for France Football? I said,

Yes, okay, fine. And he said, okay, carte blanche. I'm going to pair you with somebody else who is used to investigations of this kind, called Éric Champelle.

And I got on famously with Éric and we started working on it and we worked for six months and we published 30th January 2013 the first of our pieces, so-called "Catarrh Gate" and which we carried on writing for something like two and a half years. So yes, I was in early

I threw the hat in early, so to speak. And it literally took over my life, yes, for the best part of three years. And I haven't stopped since then. But I'm also investigating other things now, not just what happened for Qatar 2022. Even though I have to say there's enough material there probably to last a lifetime. Yeah, definitely. I mean, when you started researching this, did you expect to

to find the amount of information or the amount of corruption and crime that you've uncovered since? No, absolutely not. At the beginning, it's a hunch. Obviously, you always need a source to start with, which was my case. I had a very, very good source.

who told me about this meeting at the Élysée Palace. But what I didn't realize is that how this would capture many people's imaginations or attentions. And it kind of snowballed. And the more we were unwrapping

the more we found and the more we realized we didn't know much. It was a bit like a pass the parcel, you know, at a children's party. And you never get to the end. So it's like layer after layer after layer after layer after layer. And then we realized, oh, hold on a minute, because this is actually linked to a strategic political program from Qatar. This is linked to questions of geopolitics, of national security,

which, to be honest, absolutely nobody was talking about at the time. And so we went into that direction as well. Then we saw the ramifications in European football, with Spanish football in particular, the relationship with Paris Saint-Germain, of course. My goodness. So it became, at the beginning, it was just like one story. And then when we started working for real on that story, you know exactly how it works yourself.

As you go, you realize there are plenty of things on the side of the road that you hadn't even seen the first time around. And so we started picking up those pieces and trying to put them together like this gigantic jigsaw puzzle to understand how football was governed, how it could be that we came to a decision which at the time was an aberration.

was more than a surprise, was a shock, I think, to anybody involved in football, the reasons why it happened, and also the reasons why the World Cup was not taken away from Qatar, which is also a fascinating subject. So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that it was random, not at all, but at the beginning there was an element of, my goodness, this is a very big place,

and there are so many doors here, which one do we open first? And then we realized it's part of this labyrinth. And to be honest, I'm still in it and we're still in it now. And we're, what, a few weeks away from kickoff. Yes. I'll try not to get too depressing during the show because it is incredibly dark, a lot of the stuff that's gone on. I guess we can kick off with the bid process itself. And I wanted to start, there's a New York Times piece from April last year, which is the point where US Justice Department officials finally confirmed in public that

reps for Qatar in the 2018 World Cup in Russia also have been bribing FIFA officials I mean there's

like the least well-kept secret in the world, perhaps. Here's a quote from that story, actually. Prosecutors made the accusations in an indictment charging three media executives and a sports marketing company with a number of crimes, including wire fraud and money laundering, in connection with bribes to secure television and marketing rights for international soccer tournaments. So, in case anyone was wondering whether this show was going to veer from our organised crime remit, then don't worry, we're on it. And also, the DOJ has pointed the finger at three South American officials in particular...

This again from the New York Times, quote, And the third man, Ricardo Teixeira, the former leader of soccer in Brazil, remains in that country which does not have an extradition treaty.

So every single...

part of this was being picked off by various corrupt officials. Yes. To be honest, I don't know what the libel laws are for your particular podcast, but we've got to be a little bit careful here. I mean, I have to say, I thank you to the DOJ for this paragraph in the indictment because we were waiting for somebody to, I would say, um...

loosen up some of the ties which bound us as journalists from what we're reporting. We could only suggest, allude. We could point the finger at some irregularities. And then they arrive and, you know, in good FBI fashion, big hobnail boots, bang, you know. And they said it. The Qataris have, of course, denied that anything like this happened.

But those three, I mean, to be honest, Lioche de Chera and Don Julio were targets of ours from the very, very beginning. Interestingly enough, there were also people, the people who were present at a secret meeting between the then emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad.

who was deposed by his son, Tamim, in 2013, which is another extraordinary thing that nobody seems... Everybody seems to think it's completely normal, but there you go. And they met him in Rio de Janeiro several months before the bid, several months before the vote took place on 2 December 2010 in Zurich. So it is... What you've got to look at is...

beyond a single case. It's like, or two cases, which is Russia 2018, which by every, you know, all the elements we have in our possession indicate that they work the old fashioned way, as in if money changed hands, it was in brown paper envelopes and it was actually really very direct, not very imaginative at all. Whereas the others, and I mean, I really mean the others were working through different means, as in

Nobody does. I mean, the old, here's $50,000 in a brown paper envelope under your hotel door.

so that you vote for so and so, which is something which has happened a number of times previously in the world of football and soccer and many other sports, by the way, and has happened within the Olympic movement, for example. This is really, this is the past. The way it works these days and the favoured way of doing that is obviously to have payments to corrupt officials to go via several screens of companies

And one great way of doing that is through broadcasting rights. Because what is a World Cup worth? What is an MLS season worth? We don't know. It's whatever you're ready to pay for it. So it's possible for somebody, as it happened in this case, to purchase the broadcasting rights at a knockdown price and then sell them on the same day

It's happened for three times the amount. Pocket the difference. That's your bribe. Now, go and prove that. Go and prove that's a bribe. It's very, very difficult. So that's the way it's worked. We've also found out that, for example, one of them, I can't be too specific here, if you don't mind, because, again, it's not just libel laws, but it's also subjudice because the investigations are ongoing. One particular football official received a huge amount of money through a bank account that he held in Monaco.

And that is on the record. The person who paid that amount of money was not an official from Qatar, as in official from the organization committee, but was allegedly a very important businessman who was basically being used as a conduit so that the money could arrive to the right official to secure his vote.

It's a huge sum of money here. So that's why broadcasting rights are so critical. And that's why, and also because of the confidentiality which goes around this kind of business agreements, it's even more difficult for us journalists and for law enforcement agencies to have any idea what the hell is going on here.

You know, if I buy it for a million dollars and say it's for three million, it's actually rather more, 100 million and 300 million. You know, what are you going to say about it? What are you going to do about it? Very often, the nature of those deals remains completely unknown. And so, since you have a structure as well, FIFA, which at the time and still now is characterized by secrecy, lack of transparency, lack of accountability,

lack of good governance,

This is a free-for-all. And at the time, everybody, except perhaps the Belgians and the Dutch, everybody was doing things which were really borderline or had crossed the line according to FIFA's own statuses. But that didn't make any difference. The most corrupt vote in the history of football took place on the 2nd of December 2010. Qatar got the World Cup in 2022 and the Russians got 2018.

And it's not just those two bids either. I mean, FIFA's got four countries that have hosted the World Cup. I think I was reading on Deutsche Welle that the Germans had done pretty much the same thing for the 2006 World Cup, right? The Germans did the same thing for 2006. There are loads of stories around South Africa 2010.

In fact, it's very difficult to find a recent bid which hasn't got some measure of corruption in it. When we say corruption, by the way, I always use the word perhaps in a more general way.

than people would normally. They would normally say corruption means money has been exchanged. It's not necessarily exchange of money. It can be also enabling somebody to exert more control over a certain administration. It can be moral corruption. They're completely indissociable. And you look at what, for example, the English bid did.

Well, the England bid as well actually got a real rap on the knuckles from FIFA themselves for what they were doing. Because, for example, when you propose to hold a friendly and the proceeds of that friendly will go to that federation and you know that that federation is 100% corrupt and everything will end up in the pocket of the president of that federation, you know what you're doing. You're actually corrupting. There's no other word for it. And every single bid... I mean, it had...

It's in a way that vote of 2nd of December 2010 is the culmination of a process of corrupting

which had begun years earlier. I mean, the big game changer was, of course, when Sepp Blatter became General Secretary of FIFA. And, you know, you've talked about Joao Avalanche. But what Sepp did is that he brought in Adidas. I mean, that's what actually that was the move that was the big bang of FIFA as a commercial power.

And when you bring in money of that amount, a kind of amount of money, obviously you change the nature of the game completely. You create a monster, which is actually the word that I believe Joao Avalanche used in a conversation with Sepp. And Sepp actually said it himself. So because of the huge amounts of money involved, suddenly you are enabling, facilitating...

and you're laying the ground you're making the ground ready and you put a lot of manure on it a lot of shit on it and basically yes you are creating an environment which is ripe for corruption and in 2010 FIFA was at a stage of corruption which was

almost unthinkable in as much you look at the list of the people who took part in the vote on that day, plus the two who had been suspended because they'd been caught on camera willing to sell their votes to whoever was giving them the most money. You look at them and you look at where they are now, and it's basically a collection of banned, jailed

Anyway, all these people have had an interesting career since then. They've all been found out. And so that was the apotheosis, I would say, of a certain kind of, of a certain incarnation of FIFA, which has been replaced by a different one. So we've moved from what I would call the corner shop

to the hypermarket as in the sums are even bigger and the corruption doesn't work the same way at all because it's not about giving a few million to the delegate from this country or that confederation no it's much bigger than that there's still money changing hands but it doesn't work the same way at all it's now become just the same way like for example you used to buy your books from a bookshop you now buy them where you shouldn't from Amazon FIFA has gone from bookshop to Amazon

And the world of football, yes, has gone exactly the same way. It's worth just giving a shout-out to Andrew Jennings at this point because he did so much pioneering work on FIFA corruption and he was getting pilloried by the organisation and by various corners of the media at the time.

saying he was just flat out a fabulist. He has described FIFA as Sepp Blatter's private mobbed-up club and, quote, the definition of an organized crime family with loyalty coming from the national associations and goodies trickling down like World Cup tickets, unaudited grants, and so on and so forth.

So I think they're a bunch of gangsters. I don't trust them and I don't think anyone should. Sounds pretty much spot on. What did you think about the way that Andrew was kind of treated back then as well? I think the most astonishing thing is how what he found out was more or less ignored, which is absolutely astonishing when you think about it.

He was very much a lone wolf. But the problem is that when you're a journalist and investigating this type of thing, when it comes to sport, very quickly you encounter a major problem. It's the fact that, certainly in Europe, most media organizations have got vested interests in sport.

in football in particular, which is obviously the most important of all games. So it could be in several ways. Like, for example, it could be because you bought the TV rights or the radio rights for a particular competition. Now you're not going to want to kill

what you've just bought because you are diminishing the value. So therefore from upstairs people say, you know, come on, go easy on those guys. You know, we've just bought the rice for Christ's sake. This has happened to me, by the way. I'm not going to say from whom, but this has happened to me to be asked to tone down or not to do certain types of work because there was a direct relationship between a prospective employer and an international body.

And that's something which everybody has got to deal with in the sports investigative business. So that's the right holders. But also, if you look at it, for example, Sky Sports, who have

the rights to so many things these days in England or in the UK and in other countries. So they also have a relationship with some printed media, like for example, it would be the Times and Sunday Times and plenty of other, you know, I know the structure of the group has changed. So I'm talking here in general.

But in Australia, for example, they do have interest. And in the US, of course, Fox. So you have vested interest there. So these people are not going to go. And if you've got a great story, they might not open their news bulletin with that, will they? And this even goes down. It trickles down to even normal broadsheets.

for whom access to sports actors, important sports actors, is absolutely indispensable so that they have stories to give to their readership. And if you publish something which is very critical of an organization like FIFA or the IOC or a particular federation or confederation, obviously you're going to be in the bad books of that organization. And next time you come to them, you say, well, I'd like to talk to so-and-so. I'd like you to arrange an interview with this player, blah, blah, blah.

No, you won't. So, and it's a kind of compromission by association. And because it's all so tightly knit and it is a microcosm, it's very difficult from stories like this, unless they're huge and you can't ignore them, to gain a foothold in the discourse about the sport, which is something that I'm finding out, or we are finding out, I should say, even now, it's still the case. You know, you have a number of...

I mean, maybe we'll talk about this later, but for example, I've been involved in investigation in the links between organized crime, online gambling operators and the biggest clubs on the planet.

and leagues in the planet and which absolutely, I mean totally, I really wouldn't stand by our findings. They've barely been mentioned anywhere else. And there's a very good reason for that. It's because to do so,

to be an echo chamber for those kind of findings would create some serious difficulties with people who are absolutely indispensable to you functioning as a media outlet. And so Andrew...

found out about that one way around it was the published books and the books were very successful and books which had a direct impact now how many investigative journalists can say that well I think you know it's very rare if it has a little impact you think that if people talk about it that's already great in his particular case it forced people to look there was the ISL scandal I mean we can't go too much to granular detail here

But, you know, one piece of advice to anybody who listens to us, just go to Andrew Jennings' books, look at them, read them. It's all there. And so Andrew was, in a way, on his own. And he had the type of personality...

which certainly meant that it didn't hinder him or affect his willingness to approach those subjects quite the opposite. But within the profession, he was admired, hugely respected. He was not an easy guy, but he was

He was straight. And he was a phenomenal journalist. And we wouldn't be talking, I think, today without him. I think that's how big an influence it's been to all of us who work in this area. Absolutely. And I guess...

to say some things about Qatar itself before we move on to some other aspects of the World Cup in case so many of our listeners from outside of the traditional football world I mean we're talking to you America um

It's interesting to note that one of the title lines for FIFA that was bringing this game to a new audience, i.e. in the Gulf or they would probably say the Middle East. So Qatar is one of the world's richest nations per capita. I think this comes as no surprise to people. It's got only 310,000 citizens per capita.

of a population of almost three million which says quite a lot about the the the source of labor there um so that gives its people a gdp per head of around 112 000 us dollars which makes them i think i think they might be the third or fourth richest per head behind luxembourg and maybe you know some european micro states perhaps or maybe their top i'm not sure um

And it's worth mentioning that of the 24 eligible voters in the 2022 bidding process, currently 10 are either indicted, have pled guilty or have been banned altogether from football.

Of course, on a similar but separate note, Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini have been in hot water of their own over various corruption charges, but there are dozens of others to speak of. The idea that FIFA is granting this game to...

a new audience um when you know football mad nations in the middle east like egypt morocco algeria almost everywhere uh are right there and what does that kind of say about the way that fifa operates on a on a kind of public level you know the way that they communicate this to the world um

It seemed to me that they almost don't care. They play on people's apathy to some extent about this stuff. I think that, yes, there is that. In some ways, they were precursors to the Age of Untruth, I suppose. I think that they were themselves shocked by the decision they'd taken. I can certainly tell you that Seb Blatter was shocked because he definitely didn't want Qatar to get the World Cup. He wanted the USA to get the World Cup.

It was his big dream. He wanted FIFA to be the great gatherer of world powers so you would have the US and Russia and perhaps China in the future. That's the way he saw the grand project.

And they took a decision which was purely based on their own personal interest. And that's that. There were reports which were done by the technical committees of FIFA, which, by the way, are excellent or were excellent. And those reports, we should remind...

our listeners that the fact those reports the only country for which they waved the red flag and saying we shouldn't go there was of course Qatar and there were two reasons for that the first reason which is very interesting and I really want to please remind me if I skip that point because the World Cup was moved from the summer to the winter which is also worth talking about

But the inspection team from FIFA found out what we knew, as in the temperature there during the summer makes it impossible to play football. It's just impossible.

It's temperatures of over 40 degrees in the shade. I've tried to play football there in the summer and it is impossible, I can tell you. Well, I played once a five-a-side tournament in Egypt in June and I will never forget it. Ever, ever, ever, ever. And it was during Ramadan as well, which means that we didn't have access to water during the game. So, not an experience I would do again anytime soon. But, anyway, the

I've lost the thread because I'm now thinking of how I was on the touchline thinking that I don't want to play anymore. I don't want to play anymore. No, it's... They cared about their own interests and it surprised them. Because the technical committee, this is where I wanted to go. So you have to edit all this out. But...

The technical committees of FIFA, which again are excellent, wave those red flags. The temperature was one of them. Another one was the exiguity of the Qatari territory, which is for an American audience, the size of Connecticut. For a British audience, it would be the size of, I think, Somerset and Cornwall put together. For a continental audience, it would be the size of even smaller than Wallonia and Belgium. So it's tiny.

So the executive in itself creates a problem, which is a security problem. Very, very difficult to organize security when you've got everything in such a concentrated space, as any security specialist will tell you. And it was flagged at the time as well as a danger. And so nobody thought that they stood a chance because they literally had been told, you know what, you shouldn't really be bidding for this. You're wasting your money.

But they carried on. One wonders why. And they genuinely believed they had a chance of winning it. And obviously they knew things we didn't know at the time. But the report that was done by the technical committees of FIFA was made available to the 24 members of the executive committee plus Sepp Blatter. Of these members of the executive committee, only one requested a copy of it. Ha ha ha!

The others didn't even bother reading it. So there was absolutely no point. They were not interested. And it could be that you say, you know, that's all the same. It's just an exercise. It's just to make sure that the bidding countries at least do the hard work, the hard yards before they give you their proposal. In a way, it's a means to make sure we've got a good tournament because they have to do their job properly.

But it's a bit like those PhD theses that nobody ever reads because they're too long, you know. But at least you've got to do it. But the guys, the jury, decided, "Eh, it doesn't matter really. Let's just vote for them." And so they did. Which is quite astonishing when you think about it. I'm still astonished now, you know, because I remember even a week before the vote took place,

And people were kind of war rooming what was going to happen. So you had your list of delegates and you knew that, OK, some of those guys are going to vote for this particular bid because, for example, the English guy is going to vote for England. The Japanese guy is going to vote for Japan. You can carry on like that. Mohammed bin Hammam is a Qatari, so he's going to vote for Qatar and so on.

But then what we didn't know was how the votes would evolve round by round. And what we didn't know, for example, was that UEFA, the European Confederation, their delegates would vote almost as one for Qatar. What? How is that possible? How is that possible when the president of FIFA, Michel Platini, had been...

I would say publicly vocal about his support for the US, but it was known, very well known, that he supported the US case. It was also known that he had told the Qataris at one stage, guys, you don't stand a chance, why don't you just, you know, make way? And then suddenly, Platini votes for Qatar. So does Marios Levkaridis, the Cypriot delegate, which is actually quite a funny story, because after the event, when...

We tried, Eric and myself, to go into who voted for whom. Secret vote, by the way. So what we're doing here is just suggesting, because nobody said who they voted for except Michel Platini. Let's at least give that to him. Actually, he owned up. You know? Myoslef Karitis did as well. And so I got in touch with a Greek colleague,

And I said, could you dig a little bit into Marios and anything interesting in what's happened after the vote? And my friend there, Antonis, sent me, I remember, sent me an email and he said, which was like bingo, and said, have a look at that.

and I saw a piece written in the local Cypriot press in which it was stated that a piece of land belonging to Marios Lifkaretis' family had been sold to Qatar just a few months after the vote for three times its value. And I thought, that's it, we got him. And so we published it. And amazingly enough, it wasn't taken on by anybody.

I know it's the usual story. I think there was a mention by Matt Dickinson in the Times. But I thought, this is crazy. This is really a big one for us. And Marius Lefkaritis was actually questioned on Cypriot Radio about it. And his reply, I've got an audio recording of it. And Johnny says, Mr. Lefkaritis, isn't that a bit strange that you should happen to sell it?

piece of land for an awful lot of money to the Qataris like three months after the vote and Lefkarity said business is business

It was literally his answer. So that tells you, I think, anything you need to know about the motivations of these people. I'd like to add that my dissertation on Arthur Miller was wonderful, if anyone wants to read that. So that was a romp, my own work of academic text. But also, I was just thinking about how good a Somerset Cornwall World Cup would actually be. It would be fantastic. Yeah.

Yeah, we would have to build some stadiums because unless we could use the rugby union stadiums there, but it would be interesting this way. This said, Exiguete, you know, I think the Dutch-Belgian bid was fantastic, but it's still bigger than Qatar and all the stadiums were, you know, in place or needed to be renovated or perhaps enlarged some of them, but most of it was in place. The other thing which is extraordinary, you have to think that Qatar...

The number of people who've got a license, people who are registered, hold a registration with the Qatari Federation.

there are only 7,500. That's not a lot. 7,500 people out of whom you're supposed to get a national team which by FIFA rules is going to be seeded for the competition. That also didn't make sense. And people will say, oh, there is a footballing tradition in Qatar. Well, there's a footballing tradition absolutely everywhere. You know, I think you...

There's a soccer tradition in Omaha, probably. That's the whole point of football. There is a tradition anywhere. But to come back to what you were saying, the fact it was presented as extraordinary for anybody who knows anything about the region or the Arab world in general...

whatever the expression is worth. So it was presented like an Arab bid. And you think, what? Are you aware of Qatar's situation in the Gulf? Are you aware of the fact that the Emiratis can't stand the Qataris? And it's reciprocal. The Saudis can't stand the Qataris either. The Egyptians are not too keen on them because of the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Qatari royal family. Right.

because of the links between Qatar and Iran, and so on, and you carry on and think, no, no, no, this is crazy, this is a basket case. Yes, and you think, yeah, Morocco, yeah, would be great. Actually, I would love to see a World Cup in Morocco. Egypt was also, who actually bid for the 2010 World Cup, would also be a possibility. But it really made no sense. Whichever way you wanted to look at it,

All the justifications you could find were after the act. They were just a means to justify the unjustifiable. So yes, of course, you're going to...

force the piece of the jigsaw puzzle oh it's a square but it's going to become a rectangle or a circle doesn't matter if I press hard enough it will find its way in and that's what they did and that's what we keep on doing because we've got now a FIFA president Jenny Infantino who actually by the way has moved his home address from Zurich to Doha yeah

That's interesting. And he's telling us it's going to be the greatest World Cup ever staged and the greenest World Cup ever staged. Well, the greenest World Cup ever staged, there's so little accommodation in Doha, there's no room to actually get the fans in, that they've organized, they've come to a special agreement with neighboring countries so that fans can actually take air shuttles.

from Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and maybe even Egypt I can't remember but at least those three so they can fly in and fly out for match days so that's an extra 168 shuttles per day during the duration of the greenest ever World Cup it makes no bloody sense and I'm being very polite when I'm saying that

Yeah, I think as I was on the way to meet you today, I was re-listening to the Guardian Football weekly episode with the Football Supports Association head, and he was talking about the various accommodation setups, including cruise ships, these horrible-looking little fan villages. I guess that's a bit outside of our remit, but it just sounds dreadfully dull and a horrible experience. It just sounds rubbish. Yeah.

But staying in Qatar and obviously almost directly associated with those fan villages is the issue of workers' rights. From the very beginning, people would sound in the alarm about the situation in the whole GCC region where in many cases, I mean, I lived in the UAE for a year.

migrant labor far far outstrips any locally born citizens um and if you go to dubai you go to abu dhabi you go to any of the major cities in the region you'll find giant workers tent cities in the middle of nowhere where people were treated pretty appallingly um and unsurprisingly building a world cup from scratch in a country of almost no infrastructure for such a tournament that's been a real huge problem um

I'll give another shout out at this point to The Guardian because a lot of their work has been fantastic. They've done a lot of video stuff that I put on the reading list that people can have a look at if they want. All kinds of horror stories of workers coming from

various parts of Western Central Africa or South Asia, many of them Nepali. What have you looked into there? What kind of situations have you found over the years? First of all, when we talk about the World Cup, we should think of the World Cup being not just a tournament, but a whole project which is also around the World Cup. And because what the country lacked was not just stadiums.

They also lacked the infrastructure to welcome the fans who would go to that World Cup. That meant, obviously, hotels, but that meant also transport links. Talking of grain. Exactly. Which, by the way, bought them a lot of time and... What would be the word?

a lot of time and understanding from certain Western governments because obviously Western companies were used to build those

rail links, hotels, you name them. And those companies were also employing migrant workers and in fact some very famous, well-known Western companies have been treating their migrant workers there absolutely appallingly. Now of course when you do some work in Qatar, it's one of those countries where you do have to have some Qatari participation in your share capital and so forth, but

It doesn't matter. Western companies were also involved. Some of them are completely complicit with that. I'm thinking of Vinci. We can name names. There's no problem about that. I think if you do a Google search about Vinci Qatar workers' rights, I think you'll find a few things there. French company, by the way. Vinci.

And so there was, I mean, the project is gigantic because we're talking about, for example, a whole new town,

which is part of Doha, but it's called Lusail, which is on the edge. It's planned to have something like 200,000 inhabitants in the future. Maybe, yeah, okay, why not? Anyway, it's been built. So they brought even more migrant workers in.

in what was already, you know, a population, which, as you say, is 10% natives, inverted commas, because you can be born in Qatar and not have Qatari citizenship. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can be a third-generation Doha family. You still won't get, unless the MESA saw himself, you will remain a foreigner with very few rights, basically. And...

So what the Guardian did was to expose what was happening to the migrant workers at large. Because it's always possible if you're the Qataris or FIFA to say, oh, but there were only three deaths happening on construction sites. And you will say, well, the same happened in Russia. It was eight or in Brazil. It was 14 or whatever. And say, well, unfortunately, it happens and so forth. And we can. It's already pretty disgusting to talk like that.

But the fact is, that's not the point. The point is that you need railways, tram lines, whatever you call them, to go to those stadiums. You need hotel rooms and so forth. And the problem is Qatar at large and the way that it's...

it treats its migrant workers as is the same as you were saying in the UAE where it's perhaps even worse by the way than it is in Qatar so it was a huge issue but at the time there was no clause in the bidding regulations drawn by FIFA to have a human rights record which would agree with FIFA's avowed vision of humanity

If that were the case, I don't think Russia would have got it for 2018. And certainly Qatar wouldn't have got it for 2022. They've put in those regulations after the event. And I'm actually looking forward to see who they give the 2030 World Cup to. And I'm also interested to see how, for example, and maybe that's straying a little bit from the subject, but...

There are elements in the FIFA Charter of Human Rights which would suggest that there are a certain number of American states, U.S. states, where the World Cup shouldn't take place because they use the death penalty. And, yeah, one amongst, you know, and also the fate of migrant workers in the U.S. is also, and Mexico, and Mexico, my goodness, is certainly worth looking at. But anyway, FIFA ignored all of that.

for Qatar. And we arrived at a situation where we knew that there were going to be huge human rights problems. We knew that because of the World Cup and the project that was underlying the World Cup. Some people at the time in human rights agencies, you know, raised the red flag again. Very few people listened to them.

We published with Frost Football a long piece about it back in February 2013, I believe. It was taken on by absolutely nobody. And I mean nobody. Nobody better than I did.

And we were, you know, estimating the number of people who were involved in the construction projects. We were talking about the dire conditions in which they were working. We were talking about kafala and all these things that people suddenly have discovered like one month before the tournament starts. Well, guys, no, you know what? We were talking about it nearly 10 years ago and we were not the only ones, but nobody listened. And FIFA couldn't care less about it. It was not part of the narrative they wanted to sell.

Yeah, I did some kind of back-of-the-napkin maths on some of the worker deaths, actually. And so if reports that over 6,500 people have actually died on these construction sites, the people whose deaths are being reported... Right, yes. If that...

If these so-called, I think some of them are sudden death syndrome or heart failure, various other ailments that they've been attributed to. If you compare that to Britain's HSE, which is its leading health and safety body, that reports a yearly death.

death rate of 36 people in the construction industry. So if you extrapolate that, you'd expect around 400 or so deaths over the course of the construction of these World Cup sites. If it's 13 or 14 times that, then that's

tells his own story, I guess. This figure has been disputed by a number of people, starting with the Qataris, but not just with the Qataris. Quite a few people have disputed that. But I would also point people at another study which has been done by Nick Harris of the Mail on Sunday, which hints at actually a far greater number of deaths than that.

And the thing is that you will say, well, there are bound to be deaths in any community. That's true. But the thing is that this community that we're talking about is overwhelmingly male and young. We're talking about young people here, people who are in their 20s and 30s because they are strong enough, healthy enough to do that kind of work.

And those deaths are, you know, we've got to be absolutely clear about that, include, it's basically the deaths of within the migrant workers. I hate working, using that word, community. It's not a community. But...

for want of a better one, let's use it as a whole, which is colossal, which is absolutely colossal. And it would be very easy for people defending the Qatari influence

side of the narrative to say well you know you're taking in all these people who've got nothing to do with the World Cup and you say well no but the World Cup the interconnection is there you cannot have one without the other when we're talking we're talking about the situation for migrant workers in Qatar if they're there it's for a good reason it's because you need them um to

build whatever you're building and you're building like mad and the reason why you're building like mad is part of a project of which the World Cup is the centerpiece so it's connected come on guys and the thing is that this was barely reported upon until the Guardian came up with that figure which has been criticized which had one merit and

It drew people's attention. It certainly made them wake up. And it's been used and quoted and re-quoted a number of times. And...

So the Guardian perhaps was a little bit sensationalist in its headlining. But I think it's one of those cases, and there are not many of them, where selling the story, so to speak, to your readers like that was justified because nobody was paying attention. Because as well, some of the people who had been some of the harshest critics of Qatar had turned their coat.

had turned their coat. And I mean by that, the ILO... I was going to mention them, but... The ILO, who have been... I think shameful is right. They've become propagandists for the Qatari regime when they were...

incredibly, until 2018, they were incredibly critical and suddenly they changed their tune almost completely. And now, in fact, it goes to the point that when the Qataris have a question to answer about migrant workers or human rights, or migrant workers in this case, they will tell you quite happily, well, we're not to talk to the ILO. They've got people there, they've got inspectors in place, talk to them.

And the same goes for the ITUC, which is supposedly the largest labor confederation in the world. Ahead of it is Sharon Burrow. I remember talking to Sharon back in 2013. She was telling me those stadiums will be built with the blood of migrant workers. And then suddenly the same person is now saying more progress has been done in terms of human rights for migrant workers in Qatar than almost anybody else in the history of the world. I mean, I

hardly exaggerate what Rich is saying. So two organizations are now working hand in hand with the Qataris. I don't mind that if they're doing their job properly. But I cannot but notice that they switch their position not a bit but 180 degrees almost from one day to the next. And that to me is something that should be questioned.

And it's a question that I would love to put to them. And I hope to get an opportunity someday because, to be honest, I can't think of any reason. Or rather, the only reason I can think of is not something I can talk to you about now.

Yeah, it's pretty shocking, actually, how these labor organizations have just done an about turn. Actually, there was some great work by Sumindra Kunti in Yosemite as well recently about a construction firm, one particular construction firm that was blackmailing its workers to the tune of $1,200.

to switch employers which according to qatar's own so-called laws that they denacted two years ago um that's illegal even by qatar standards now so whatever's being said out loud isn't being enforced and what's not being enforced is causing more deaths and and i mean twelve hundred dollars is is an astronomical sum of money for people who are earning maybe two or three hundred a month

Well, if they're on the minimum wage, it's less than that. If they're on the minimum wage, that would be about five to six months of their work. So, yes, that is absolutely shocking. And Sami, by the way, has been to Qatar probably more often than any journalist that I know. And his reporting has been absolutely top-notch on this. But...

the problem, one of the major problems with Qatar addressing it. And I'll try to be as nuanced as I possibly can be. That I do not deny and I'm absolutely, actually I'm sure that within Qatar, there are people who genuinely would like to see reform happen. Genuinely. Particularly amongst the women.

and who would be very happy for these paper reforms to actually be implemented. But the huge problem is implementation. It's the same problem with FIFA. FIFA has got an arsenal of regulations and statuses which are absolutely wonderful if they were to be implemented properly, but they are not. It's paying lip service. So what you're doing is that you're

You're just giving to your critics. You're saying, oh, look, we've done this. We've done that. Well, yes, you've signed a piece of paper. You've written a text. But this text is not applied. What's the point about it? We have to judge on what's happening on the ground. And what's happening on the ground has got nothing to do with what you're saying. The fact that some workers, for example, at the moment, there is another shocking thing which is happening, that work has been kicked out.

Yeah, just before window dressing, by kicking out undesirables, essentially. And making room. And making room for visitors and tourists. I've even heard of Qatari families who were kicked out of their own homes, which they had been renting for a while, so that the landlord could rent it to visitors at a huge price during the World Cup. What happens afterwards is anybody's guess.

Because an important thing, and I think I need to say that, is that in some countries, some GCC countries, popular assent is gained by giving people money. As in, everybody who is born Qatari or born Emirati or born Saudi is somebody who is going to have free healthcare, free education, free this, free this, free that, guaranteed income. It's not the case in Qatar.

Not many people know that. It's not the case in Qatar. In Qatar you've got royal family and a few families which are linked to the royal family. These people are wealthy beyond your wildest imagination. Then you've got a middle class.

And then you've got a lower middle class. You don't really have a working class as such because the working class is the migrant workers, but you have a lower middle class. People who do not have this help and who are not that wealthy. So it really is, it's so tiny. We're talking about a few thousand people who basically control absolutely everything. And of course, they're absolutely shit scared of losing that control.

So therefore, what do you do? It's a police state. It's a surveillance state. And using methods that, to be honest, are so objectionable and objectionable to their own citizens because we should never, there is always a tendency or an impulse perhaps to treat all of Qatar as

the oppressor, and then the migrant workers as the oppressed. You have to see that in Qatar, the oppressed include a large part of the Qatari population. I think it's something which was worth reminding people of. Yeah, certainly. And that's a kind of false fallacy that the Qatari committee has also used against critical journalism, right? There's some form of racism or anti-Qatari...

that's against various things, obviously, you know, smoke screens. But, yeah, we did an episode of the pod recently about people who are being human trafficked into work in Cambodia, various cyber scam operations. The definition of human trafficking absolutely applies to many of the situations going on in Qatar. Organized crime definitely could be applied to this. Yeah.

I guess to finish this part of our discussion, can you see any optimism? I mean, you say, I think your Twitter handle to paraphrase is, I'd hate football if I didn't love it. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, a little bit more explicit. A little bit more expletive, yeah. Maybe write for a few hours' time in this pub, but... Not quite, no. Yeah. Are you going to watch it? What's going to happen? Yeah, I'm going to watch it. I've been thinking about it. I mean, I've been thinking about it for a very long time, and perhaps for longer than most of my colleagues, because I've been involved in that story almost from the very beginning.

I'm going to watch it, I'm going to report on it, and I am reporting on it right now. But I do think that it's totally possible to do this and be... Because I know there are a few people who are quite fundamentalist about it, saying, I'm not going to watch it, I am not going to even report on it, I'm going to live my life as if it was not happening. Well, I think, no, no, no, you should live your life as if it were happening because it's bloody happening and it's important.

to report on it. That means that I might talk about some of the football

And is it a kind of cognitive dissonance? I don't think so. It's more... And the reason why I say that is because I'm old enough to remember Argentina in 1978. Now, the World Cup was given to Argentina when at the helm was a dictatorship that makes the Argentine rural family look like great democrats, right? Right.

they were serial murderers responsible directly for the summary execution torture of tens of thousands of people in Argentina. A World Cup took place. Argentina won it in controversial circumstances, let's put it that way. Now, my point would be,

A, there was a real debate about going to Argentina at the time. And a proper debate, which involved actually some national team coaches and players. In the case of France, Michel Hidalgo, our national team manager, Dominique Rocheteau, one of our star players, talked openly about it, the problem that it was giving them. But they said, no, we're going to do it. And one of the reasons they said, we shouldn't get these guys win,

Because if you don't go, you don't talk about it. In a way, you let them win. I think you're actually quite right there. And it's a bit like leaving Richard Wagner to the anti-Semites. That's not helping. That's not helpful at all. It's far more helpful to cover what's going on there and using the football as a means to do that.

And also the other thing I'm thinking, did the World Cup in Argentina 1978, which Argentina won, and Qatar certainly won't win the 2022 World Cup, did it in any way prop up the Argentinian regime? It had the opposite effect. And in fact, what's happening with Qatar, which is one of the reasons why I've got a big problem with people saying that Qatar is in it for the soft power, they're not. Or reputation building, they're not. It's got nothing to do with that.

Because what's happened to their reputation is awful. Getting the World Cup has been the worst own goal in terms of image and reputation that I can think of. Their aim is different. Their aim is to establish and to guarantee national security, which is completely different. To make sure that Qatar is known of, that Qatar is a voice that is listened to, that it's an important voice in the concert of nations, you know, name it as you wish. And they will take a lot of criticism. They're not too happy about it.

Many people are not happy about it. And in fact, some Qataris were objected to the World Cup precisely because of that. But they have got that presence now. When people talk about Qatar, we know what we're talking about. Well, we think we know what we're talking about. And not reporting on that and taking this kind of holier-than-thou, righteous point of view, I think would be quite hypocritical in a way.

It's a bit too easy as well. There's no reason why you can't say, oh, that was a lovely goal by Sadio Mane and point out the fact, oh, look at the stadium, it's empty. Or look at the stadium, oh, who are these people coming from? They've been busted. Or telling on, you know...

you know, explaining precisely, oh, these fans, you know what? They've been taken in by, you know, a jet from a man this morning. You can do both. I think that was a good example. I was told it was an exemplary, actually, of what NBC did with the Olympic Games in China. As I've been told by American friends, they said they didn't miss one chance of telling the truth. And they still covered the competition, but they found the right balance.

And also, I do not want to fall in this appalling, and I have to say Western-centered point of view of Qatar and the Arab and the Muslim world in general. I want no part in that. That's really not, I'm really not into that. Actually, I absolutely hate it. So be fair, the same way we went to Russia four years after their annexed Crimea. Yeah.

We went to Russia after what they did in Chechnya, right? And did anybody at the time say, oh, we shouldn't go to Russia? Very few people did. I mean, and Putin's regime is a hundred times more evil than the Altanis, a hundred times. So I find it

hypocritical and I'm probably going to get flack for that because if I report on it which I intend to do people say well why are you talking about I don't know Antoine Griezmann not being in the starting line I don't want them to win it's it's if you if you are totally if the voices which matter in terms of

shedding light on what's going on are kept silent what are you going to achieve with that? nothing, zilch

you're going to erase yourself from the narrative, from the script, for no other reason than to feel good about yourself. That's rubbish. It's a bit like people, and apologies for that, some people won't like that, it's people from the LGBTQI plus community in the West who are going there, who want to go there, and wave rainbow flags in the stadiums. Knobheads. Knobheads.

You don't risk anything. What you risk is being arrested, being put on the flight, that's it. End of story. For the people who are gay, trans, in Qatar, what you're going to do is going to be the worst possible thing. And I know that because I do work on that subject, you know, a lot. And that's the message I'm getting from every single one of my Qatari friends. So I think I'd rather take my cue from them

than from the people who are selling values in the Western world. Well, that's a good note to end this part of our discussion. No, absolutely. And I'm glad you went there because I wanted to mention LGBTQI plus issues. I mean, obviously one should when mentioning the World Cup, but it...

I think similar to some stuff that we've covered even with the war in Ukraine which Danny my co-host has been covering there's a lot of virtue signaling outside of the country and a big dearth of people actually speaking to folks who are in that place and I think that's really important we'll take a quick break we'll get a pint and then we'll talk about some other crypto gangsters maybe yeah

Thank you.