Saudi Arabia’s World Cup: how close could Fifa get to corporate manslaughter?

“People will die.”
Amnesty International

“You can never say again that you did not know.”
William Wilberforce

We are at least approaching a decisive crossroads on this journey. Fifa is due to announce the winning bids for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups live from Zurich on 11 December via an “extraordinary virtual congress”, which certainly sounds like an exciting kind of congress.

In reality this process is extraordinary in one specific sense. The candidates to stage the 2034 edition of the grandest and most lucrative entertainment event on the planet line up as follows. Favourites: Saudi Arabia. Shortlisted: Saudi Arabia. Dark horses: Saudi Arabia. Chief sponsor of Fifa: Saudi Arabia. Only bid not eliminated by a gathering sense of inevitability: Saudi Arabia.

In the past few weeks the governing body and its chosen surrogate have engaged in a self-described “inspection” process, the results of which will shortly be announced, and which will at least provide a chimera of due process.

And so football finds itself standing at the way point, placing its Gibson flat-top down in the dust, running a hand over its gleaming bald pate, listening for the clop of approaching hooves on the express route to Neom and all points south.

For now, perhaps the most startling aspect is the silence around this process and its likely consequences from almost every national football association. Although not everyone is taking it lying down.

On Monday, Amnesty International published High Stakes Bids, a report that concludes Saudi’s staging of the 2034 tournament should be immediately halted to avoid the abuses and deaths that seem inevitable under the current set of practices.

Two weeks ago, FairSquare published its comprehensive study of Fifa’s activities, concluding that football’s governing body is playing a part in “a wide range of social harms, not least very serious and systematic human rights abuses”. Or in other words, that Fifa is not just muddled and misled but an active source of harm, that people are in effect being oppressed, enslaved and killed in its name.

The most startling aspect to these notes of warning is still how un-startling they seem to be. It is no secret there is a general sense of drift around these issues, a conviction that nothing can be done, despite hard, visceral evidence of the likely outcomes.

And make no mistake, these are stark. The recent ITV documentary, Kingdom Uncovered, gave us another number to go with the World Cup bid book’s excitable talk of 11 new stadiums, 185,000 new hotel rooms and Fifa’s estimated $1bn sponsorship deal with Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company.

That number is 21,000, or the total of Nepali, Bangladeshi and Indian workers reported to have died since the launch of the Vision 2030 programme in April 2016, a process hardly likely to be halted by a World Cup green light.

Death is not a distant hypothetical at this stage. It’s here in the room with us. We have data from Qatar. We can even make a fair estimate of the total deaths a Saudi tournament will leave in its wake without serious reforms, a calculation presumably factored somewhere into Fifa’s planning, just another part of the bidding algorithm under Gianni Infantino.

This is something new. Qatar 2022 was at least awarded via a full voting process (stop laughing) to the extent the result went against what the executive wanted at the time, with Sepp Blatter forced to hiss “Smile!” at Jérôme Valcke as they stood on stage at Fifa House looking doomed. For most people the initial response was a baffled shrug. There was nothing like the evidence we have now of what its construction would entail.

By contrast, Infantino has both executive control and full knowledge of the possible consequences. This isn’t a hijacking. It is instead a considered and managed process. Let us sponsor the building of your hardline leisure state. Let us take the rewards, nourish ourselves on suffering in plain sight, while pretending to an almost satirical degree that it is all for love of the game, that this one’s for the children.

At which point two things can be said. First, this will stand as surely the most wretched, bloody, damaging act in the history of global organised sport. If not causing death were your starting point, your one non-negotiable, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t even be on the table. And yet Infantino appears to have actively sought this outcome, aligning his Fifa with the world’s most ruthlessly ambitious carbon power; and as a consequence taking choices that will, it can be assumed, cause demonstrable death and suffering.

This is a structural failing, fruit of Fifa’s laughably antiquated man-from-Del-Monte style of governance. It is also the result of decision-making by a very small circle of people. Never mind the gleamingly messianic persona, the cult-like inner circle (it is always a shock to notice even minor Fifa wonks will go with The Gianni: navy suit, white trainers, weird glassy look). None of this has to happen. Infantino remains, as Miguel Delaney writes in States of Play, “a more or less random man” elevated to a position of ludicrously overblown power without oversight.

Put like this, a second possibility suggests itself. How close, in choosing this path, in failing so far to mitigate the most likely negative outcomes, could Fifa get to committing an act of corporate manslaughter?

What we have here is a course of action that will in all probability be associated at one remove with death. The world may have been beaten into a state of apathy. But to what, if any, degree do we have the elements of an actual legal offence here, criminal or civil?

Hugh Southey KC, a human rights barrister at Matrix Chambers, says that while the risks of a workable criminal prosecution are “very low”, the issues raised “ought to be a legitimate concern for Fifa”.

As Southey says, the components of any hypothetical criminal prosecution would be highly specific and necessarily difficult to establish. “There needs to be a gross breach of the duty of care. That is a high threshold. However, in this case there could be an argument made that the threshold was crossed because there are so many red flags and they have been ignored.

“There may be causation issues; for example it may be necessary for a prosecutor to prove that Saudi would not have got the World Cup without the Fifa failings. There will also be jurisdiction issues.”

To date the prospect remains very distant. No one has stuck a World Cup spade in the ground. There is a great deal of fine Fifa talk about enforcing human rights obligations. And yet, to the layman, it may be hard to avoid the sense of dots waiting to be joined.

As Stephen Cockburn of Amnesty International says: “Fifa knows that workers are likely to die if they hand the World Cup to Saudi Arabia without putting proper protections in place. They will never be able to say that they were not warned, never be able to say that they did not have a chance to prevent it. As demands for justice and accountability inevitably grow, perhaps one day this fact will become important.”

In other words, this remains a hypothetical exercise. But how would that hypothesis run exactly? Under UK law the relevant criminal offence must involve the following elements: duty of care to the deceased; a breach of this duty; a chain of causation between breach and harm; and a conclusion that the negligence was “gross”, that it showed such disregard for the life and safety of others that it merits punishment. So what do we know?

A duty of care

In a non-legal sense it isn’t hard to make the argument Fifa owes a duty of care to those affected by the construction and staging of its events. Infantino himself needs very little excuse to puff his plumage and get messianic on a dais somewhere, to talk about Fifa’s sacred calling, its role as Mother Football.

“We have a responsibility to help tackle global challenges … Whether we speak about human rights … We’ll play our part in the team, in respect of the fact that we are 211 countries, representing the entire world.” This was Infantino’s re-election speech in March 2023, shot through with the usual self-encomium about saving the planet, teaching the world to sing and similar.

Fifa’s human rights policy from 2017 has explicit boasts about the duty to care for those in its orbit. “With such a great impact comes responsibility. Fifa recognises its obligation to uphold the inherent dignity and equal rights of everyone affected by its activities.”

The 2022 Fifa Statutes describe an obligation to “respect all internationally recognised human rights”, refined in the 2034 bidding regulations with the line: “Where international human rights standards and national laws and regulations conflict, Fifa must follow the higher standard.”

The temptation is always there to glaze over at this stuff, to assume it is simply puff and hot air. But Fifa is also telling us that it assumes an explicit moral duty, presumably as justification for its excess profits and self-aggrandisement. Could this rhetoric become relevant?

Contrast it with Amnesty’s conclusion in High Stakes Bids that “given the scale of Saudi Arabia’s plans for the World Cup … it is clear that the 2034 tournament is highly likely be tarnished by exploitation, discrimination and repression”. How does this add up? How do you look at both of these things simultaneously and think, nope, not our problem. It is at the very least a hugely uncomfortable position for any organisation.

A breach

If a duty does exist, it would be necessary to show that Fifa breached it, while also identifying some entity capable of being responsible for this. The World Cup host decision may be dressed up as a vote, but it is of course a solo coronation. In the leadup Infantino and his executive have taken direct steps widely seen as opening the door for Saudi to succeed. Hosting 2030 over three continents meant 2034 was restricted to Asia or Oceania. Possible hosts had only 25 days to express their intent. Only Saudi came forward. The Norwegian FA has called this “not transparent”. Fifa insists that it was.

Beyond this there is a suggestion bid requirements have been tailored to the sole party. The number of existing stadiums required has dropped from seven to four. Fifa has endorsed a human rights review of Saudi Arabia described in the Amnesty report as part of “an elaborate facade”. AS&H Clifford Chance, the author, has a lucrative business acting for Saudi government ministries, the country’s Public Investment Fund and the Saudi Pro League. Fifa signed this company off as a fittingly independent assessor of the Saudis’ bid. A coalition of 11 human rights organisations has described it as “fatally flawed”. Something is being breached here, legal or otherwise.

Elsewhere it has been suggested Fifa has watered down its human rights requirements, another move that would facilitate a Saudi bid. These were explicit at all stages of the 2026 bidding process. The 2034 requirements feel like thin gruel by contrast.

As Amnesty’s report states: “Fifa undermined its leverage by pursuing a selection process without competitive bids or separate votes. It has also severely limited the scope of the human rights assessment in Saudi Arabia, in contravention of its own human rights policies and responsibilities.”

It is hard to avoid a sense of a tournament being tailored to its lone suitor. And this comes with consequences.

Causation

“Without a shadow of doubt, workers will die.” It isn’t hard for Amnesty International to draw this conclusion. We have some basic evidence to support it. We have the numbers from Qatar. We have the fact Saudi’s bid book (Growing. Together) basically describes endless construction, with the super-city Neom the giga-project at its centre. Saudi is planning to give us a World Cup stadium 350m above ground. OK. Who will build it?

The workforce is heavily reliant on migrants. Saudi operates a sponsorship, or kafala, system, with workers tied to a single employer. Saudi will point out that reforms were made to this system in 2021. These have been described by Human Rights Watch as “limited, problematic, and by no means dismantle the kafala system”.

For now we have evidence such as ITV’s Kingdom Uncovered, which presents a nightmarish world of Indian and Pakistani migrant workers in camps without food or proper healthcare, deaths without inquests or proper death certificates. According to ITV’s film, more than 2,000 Nepalese have died working in Saudi since 2016. A third of these can be classified as unexplained. Over the same period 19,000 Bangladeshis and Indians have died.

Workers on the construction of the super-city section known as The Line are said to be doing 15-hour days, 12 of those underground, with little rest and complaints about anxiety and fatigue ignored. One clip shows workers who say they haven’t been paid for 10 months. “We feel trapped like slaves,” one says. This is not a complex equation. Without proper, strictly enforced reforms, Fifa’s 2034 World Cup venues will be shadowed once again by ghosts.

Negligent, gross and punishable

Even if all of the above could be established, the offence of corporate manslaughter would require something else to be proved. The lack of care needs to be extreme and obvious. This, should anyone ever get here, isn’t perhaps quite so daunting a prospect. What else could it be given the constant warnings, the trail of bones and bodies from Qatar 2022?

This isn’t building an undersea oil platform or colonising the moon. Football can take place anywhere. And yet Fifa seems happy to stage its global festival in a nation ranked fourth in the world on highest estimated prevalence of modern slavery, where women can be sentenced to 10 years for their choice of clothes and having opinions on their rights, where executions have doubled since 2015. A World Cup empowers and legitimises all of this.

For now it is simply necessary to keep talking about this, to fight against a path paved with whataboutery, moral relativism, and the difficulty of sustaining the required level of outrage in a world increasingly ordered along these vertical lines.

Saudi will remain impervious to political pressure because of its carbon power and dictatorial structure. But it is always vital to remember that Fifa has not earned its power, and has no justification for wielding its brutally punitive free hand. And beyond this, that the World Cup isn’t solely a Fifa issue, that all national FAs have human rights responsibilities; and that every vote for this outcome is a cross drawn in the blood of those who will build it.