Culture
FIFA report: Saudi 2034 World Cup bid has ‘medium’ human rights risk
FIFA, the world governing body for football, released on Friday night its evaluation report for Saudi Arabia’s bid to host the men’s World Cup in 2034, awarding the nation a higher score for bidding requirements than it granted the successful Canadian, American and Mexican joint bid for the 2026 edition, while declaring the risk assessment for human rights to be “medium”.
FIFA also claim in their report that there is “good potential” for the competition to act as a “catalyst” for reforms within Saudi Arabia, saying it will “contribute to positive human rights outcomes”. Amnesty International described FIFA’s observations as “an astonishing whitewash” of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
The bid report also declared the bid by oil-rich Saudi to have demonstrated a “good commitment to sustainability” while FIFA acknowledges that the Saudi bid presents an “elevated risk” in terms of timing due to the climate of the country.
FIFA, which ordinarily holds men’s World Cups in June and July, says the bidder did not stipulate a proposed window for the tournament but pledged to collaborate to “ensure the tournament’s success”, implying we may see a repeat of the 2022 edition in Qatar which was shifted to the winter months to allow for the safety of participants and supporters.
FIFA ranks its World Cup bids out of five and awarded the Saudi bid a score of 4.2, higher than the so-called United bid for 2026, which was rated 4.0. For the Women’s World Cup in 2027, Brazil’s successful bid was ranked 4.0, while the defeated joint bid of Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany was given a score of 3.7.
FIFA released its report in an email to media at 12.33am Central European Time on Saturday morning. Almost immediately, reports emerged in Middle Eastern English-speaking outlets such as the Saudi Gazette, declaring that the Saudi bid had received the highest ever score from FIFA when bidding for a World Cup.
The Saudi bid for the 2034 World Cup had already been considered a nigh-on inevitability because it was the only bidder for the tournament. This outcome developed after FIFA announced a mega-edition bid for the 2030 World Cup, which would be hosted across three continents (Africa, Europe and South America) and six countries (Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay).
This ruled those three continents out of bidding for the following World Cup in 2034, while the joint U.S., Canada and Mexico event for 2026 ruled out a return to North America due to FIFA’s principle of confederation rotation.
This left the Saudis with a clear run in the absence of a rival from elsewhere in Asia or Oceania, subject to a vote of member nations at the FIFA Congress on December 11, which was widely seen as a formality.
FIFA’s report say their evaluation “consulted various sources, including the bidder’s human rights strategy, the mandated context assessment, as well as direct commitments from the host country and host cities, together with all contractual hosting documents, all of which notably contain provisions relating to respecting human rights in connection with the competition”.
Tennis stars Ons Jabeur (far left) and Aryna Sabalenka tour the Saudi 2034 bid exhibition in October (Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images for WTA)
However, The Athletic revealed last month how 11 organisations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, a Saudi Arabian diaspora organisation and human rights groups specialising in the Gulf region — raised major concerns about the credibility of a report for FIFA entitled “Independent Context Assessment Prepared for the Saudi Arabian Football Federation in relation to the FIFA World Cup 2034”.
The independent context assessment, produced by the Saudi arm of global law firm Clifford Chance, excluded a large number of internationally recognised human rights from its assessment, saying this was because “either Saudi Arabia has not ratified the relevant treaties or because the Saudi Football Federation did not recognise them as ‘applying’ to the assessment”.
This meant it avoided delving into matters many would consider pertinent to Saudi, notably relating to freedom of expression, association and assembly, as well as LGBTQI+ discrimination, the prohibition of trade unions, the right to freedom of religion and forced evictions.
The report said that the scope of its assessment was “determined by the Saudi Arabian Football Federation in agreement with FIFA”, suggesting that FIFA itself approved the omissions. Both the Saudi Football Association and FIFA did not respond when approached by The Athletic at the time.
In a press release by the rights groups, they claimed that “Saudi Arabia’s already dire human rights record has deteriorated under the de facto rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman” and cited a “soaring number of mass executions, torture, enforced disappearance, severe restrictions on free expression, repression of women’s rights under the male guardianship system, LGBTI+ discrimination, and the killing of hundreds of migrants at the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border”.
“As expected, FIFA’s evaluation of Saudi Arabia’s World Cup bid is an astonishing whitewash of the country’s atrocious human rights record,” added Steve Cockburn, Amnesty International’s head of labour rights and sport. “There are no meaningful commitments that will prevent workers from being exploited, residents from being evicted or activists from being arrested.
“By ignoring the clear evidence of severe human rights risks, FIFA is likely to bear much responsibility for the violations and abuses that will take place over the coming decade. Fundamental human rights reforms are urgently required in Saudi Arabia, or the 2034 World Cup will be inevitably tarnished by exploitation, discrimination and repression.”
The FIFA bid evaluation, published on Saturday morning, leans heavily on the Clifford Chance report. It does not make any references to the terms “LGBTQI+”, “sexuality” or “sexual orientation”, while the only mention of women’s rights within Saudi Arabia can be found with references to the growth of the women’s game and women’s participation in football within Saudi.
The bid evaluation says that Saudi “has made significant strides in developing interest and grassroots participation for women and girls, and at the elite level”.
A model of Jeddah Central Development at the Saudi 2034 World Cup exhibition in Riyadh (Fayez Nureldine/AFP via Getty Images)
The bid, which ranks by low, medium or high, also gives a medium level of risk to stadiums, transport and accommodation, as well as the previously explained “event timing”. Stadiums are awarded a 4.1 rating out of five, despite eight of the proposed 15 stadiums for the tournament being new-builds. FIFA said this presented a “slightly elevated” risk profile.
The bid evaluation says the Saudi bid submitted commitments from the government to “respect, protect and fulfil internationally recognised human rights in connection with the competition, including in the areas of safety and security, labour rights (in particular fundamental labour rights and those of migrant workers), rights of children, gender equality and non-discrimination, as well as freedom of expression (including press freedom)”.
FIFA says the Saudis have committed to “equitable wages”, as well as “decent working and living conditions for all individuals involved in the preparation and delivery of the FIFA World Cup, including through the establishment of a workers’ welfare system to monitor compliance with labour rights standards for tournament-related workers”.
They also say the Saudis will “engage with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in relation to its commitment to upholding international labour standards in all activities associated with the competition.” The treatment and rights of migrant workers were among the biggest talking points before and during the 2022 World Cup, staged in neighbouring Qatar.
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FIFA simultaneously released its report for the sole bid for the 2030 World Cup, which will be held in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay. The 2030 bid, which does not have a rival, will also be voted on by the member nations on December 11. It also received a rating of 4.2 out of 5, with the only medium risk factors judged to be stadiums, accommodation, transport, and the legal framework of the tournament.
The “sustainable event management” and “environmental protection” of a competition held across three continents was judged to be a “low” risk.
The report says that the “environmental impact assessment and initial carbon footprint assessment by the bidder, together with the commitments, objectives and mitigation actions outlined, provide a good foundation for the development of effective strategies towards managing the negative impacts of the tournament on the planet and protecting the environment”.
(Top photo: Christopher Pike/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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