The toll and cost of Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup as draw take place on Friday

The football World Cup in Qatar is shaping up to be an event unlike any other.

Organisers say it offers the chance to watch two matches on the same day – at brand new stadiums with inbuilt cooling technology – while still having time to take in some culture and spend a few hours at the beach.

It offers the spectator unbridled luxury, while watching the most popular sport on the planet, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

But has all this come at a price beyond the billions spent on its construction?

This article looks at just how much Qatar 2022 might have cost…

The money

The World Cup in Qatar takes place at eight stadia in November and December. Seven are new and one underwent a huge redevelopment to bring it up to capacity.

Ever since Qatar was controversially awarded the event by world football governing body FIFA in December 2010, the country has been developing an infrastructure that will be able to accommodate an anticipated 1.5 million visitors.

The headline figure of exactly how much money was spent on this varies depending on exactly what is being included.

Qatari officials have offered various figures, for the cost of the stadia and the cost of Qatar’s infrastructure development in the years leading up to the event.

Previous estimates of the total cost – including all the hotels, roads, public spaces and transport, as well as the stadia, have put the figure at around $220bn, but the latest total to come from a Qatari official was around $200bn. That was according to the country’s ambassador to Russia in October, as quoted by Russia’s Tass newsagency.

In any event, that would put the amount many, many times higher than that spent on any similar sporting event, like a previous World Cup or Olympics.

Likewise, the reported cost of the stadia alone has also varied over the years, depending on who has been quoted and when.

The latest figure, from Fatma Al Nuaimi, the Communications Executive Director at the Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy of the World Cup, was that the eight stadia cost $6.5bn. He was quoted in the same October Tass report.

But that figure is significantly down from the $8bn-$10bn the committee’s secretary general Hassan Al Thawadi put forward when he was asked at the Chatham House Policy Institute in London in 2016.

Whatever the stadia actually cost, the figure appears to be significantly more than the $4bn earmarked for what was initially going to be 12 grounds in the original bid.

Qatar maintains that, while much of the infrastructure included in the $200bn figure will be used during the tournament, its construction would have taken place regardless of whether the cup was being held there, so it should not be viewed as the total cost.

What is not clear is how much of that infrastructure would have been finished if Qatar had not been the host country by November 2022 – a timeframe that has placed developers, and potentially their workers, under a strict deadline.

The human toll

It is that pressure to build – and build quickly – that some NGOs say has led to the deaths of a number of migrant labourers and tradespeople working on the projects.

Again, an exact figure is hard to find. They range from a projected figure from the International Trade Union Confederation of 7,000 migrant worker deaths by the first kick off, to three work-related fatalities and 34 non-work-related fatalities in the past 10 years from the Qatari authorities.

Again, what is not clear is what the Qatari figures include. Other figures have put the number of migrant worker deaths so far at 6,000, but this appears to include all deaths – from any cause – and not just those in the construction industry.

Figures registered with the World Health Organisation indicate that Qatar recorded a total of about 1,900-2,200 deaths a year from 2010-17, for a population that has risen in that time from 1.8-2.7 million, according to the World Bank, as hundreds of thousands of migrants moved there for work.

In 2010, the WHO crude death rate from injuries in Qatar was 23/100,000 people and in 2015, it was 15/100,000, with injuries accounting for about a fifth of deaths, and non-communicable disease (such as cancer and heart disease), accounting for about half.

Analysis from Sky News found that in 2019, out of the 3,334 recorded deaths in Qatar in that year (which includes non-work related deaths), according to WHO figures published in The Lancet, the biggest cause of injury-related deaths was from road accidents (673 – some of which may be workplace related), with self-harm second (120). In that year, 97 died from falls and 76 died from exposure to mechanical forces – two causes of death also likely to occur on construction sites.

But on 18 November, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published figures for work-related death in 2020, as collected by the Qatari authorities, and found 50 people had died from occupational injuries across the whole of Qatar (not just construction sites at stadia), 506 had suffered severe injuries in the course of their work and 37,601 had received minor injuries. It found about a quarter of those deaths were from falls and a quarter from road accidents.

NGOs have said that many other deaths have not been attributed to the construction industry when they are in fact linked. There were reports in The Sunday Times in early November of Nepali migrant workers suffering from long-term kidney disease, and sometimes death, from working long hours in high temperatures.

Amnesty International, meanwhile, has claimed that Qatari authorities routinely issue death certificates for migrant workers without conducting adequate investigations – instead attributing deaths to “natural causes” or “vaguely-defined” cardiac failures. It is not normal practice to conduct post-mortems and there is no public inquest system to determine cause of death, as there is in the UK.

In 2021, after years of coverage of the conditions in which migrant workers were expected to toil in temperatures above 40C, Qatar brought in measures to protect workers from heat stress, but Amnesty was among organisations that said the measures did not go far enough.

Chief executive of the tournament Nasser al Khater says many of the numbers published “do not reflect the reality for construction workers on World Cup sites”.

He told Sky News in November: “We have been unfairly treated… it is publicly available information,” as he reiterated the figure of the three work-related fatalities in 10 years at World Cup sites.

Qatar’s government rejected Amnesty’s findings.

Mr Al Khater told Association Press: “There’s work that needs to be done. There is, however, a lot of progress but unfortunately that has not been captured in reports such as Amnesty, Human Rights Watch.”

Here are the eight stadiums that have been built or redeveloped for the tournament:

Philip Acquah

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