John Oliver discusses the Qatar World Cup, the human rights violations happening in the sporting event’s host country, and what perfection really means to David Beckham. 

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Our main story tonight concerns the World Cup.

It's like the Super Bowl, except the rest of the world actually gives a fuck.

A country even qualifying for it is a cause for huge celebration.

Just watch this Australian reporter lose his mind when his nation beat Peru on penalties to make it to the tournament.

From the reporter holding out his microphone to amplify people's joy shrieking, to the guy kissing the camera, to someone stealing his scarf, which sadly, he never got back.

Oh, sure, it used to be your mom's, but now it's all mine.

♪ The World Cup got underway today, and we've talked before about the organization behind it.

FIFA, a cartel-like group of scumbags and assorted criminals who occasionally put on soccer matches.

FIFA has always been terrible, which is what makes it a little hard to hear FIFA's current president claim that their event isn't just about sport, it's a net positive for humanity.

This FIFA World Cup, a tournament of peace and unity, will be the 1 that brings the world together after some difficult times.

We should never underestimate the unifying power that something so unique has.

Well, that is some pretty grandiose talk coming from the star of What the Fuck Are Those Eyebrows, Charlie Brown.

But the truth is a lot more complicated than that, which is not to say that I am not excited about the World Cup, because I am.

It only happens every 4 years, and I look forward to it the way people with leap year birthdays look forward to leap years.

With an enthusiasm somewhere between understandable and honestly, kind of pathetic.

And this World Cup is being hosted for the very first time in the Middle East by the small nation of Qatar, which is going all out to turn it into a major branding event, even signing a massive, multi-million dollar agreement with David Beckham to be an ambassador for the country, which presumably includes getting him to make more videos like this.

I think everyone knows how much I love food, and the food culture is very exciting in Qatar.

This is what I love, you know, I love to go to spice markets, I love to go to fish markets.

But what I love is also we are now in this amazing place.

in the middle of nowhere and talking and eating.

So, by my count, David Beckham lost the following.

Food, food culture, spice markets, fish markets, Murakami, a taco, bike culture, and of course, being in the middle of nowhere, eating and talking.

They really should have just kept taking him to places to see what they could get him to say he loves for money.

The aromas, the atmosphere, I just love them.

Everyone knows how much I love tombstones and grieving families.

♪ The point is, the next month is Qatar's big moment on the world stage.

They're hosting an event expected to attract over a million spectators in person to a country just the size of Connecticut.

But as you may have heard, underneath the fun, pageantry and David Beckham doing bad Anthony Bourdain cosplay is a much darker story.

Small signs of which have leaked out this week, like in this moment from a Danish reporter.

How do you feel about the situation right now?

I can show you what the situation is like right now.

And you can see that we are being stopped from filming.

Mister, You invited the whole world to come here.

But, but, but, but, listen, listen, listen.

So you're threatening us by smashing the camera.

Just a reminder, he was asked, how would you describe working conditions for journalists in Qatar?

And just seconds later, a bunch of golf cart goons showed up to answer that question for him.

Although, credit to this guy for being so excited to appear on Danish TV, that he gave the camera a little wave before presumably smashing the shit out of it.

But harassing journalists is just the tip of the iceberg here.

1 that includes a host of human rights violations.

So given all of that, tonight, let's talk about the Qatar World Cup.

And let's start by going back to the moment back in 2010, when the winner of the bid to host this tournament was announced by the former head of FIFA, Sepp Blatter.

Look, as a general rule, I try not to make fun of old men who don't speak English as a first language, but due to evil, Sepp Blatter is an exception, and him saying, 222 like a vampire telling the time, will just always be funny to me.

But that moment truly stunned people, because the reasons that it turns out FIFA were fully aware of, Qatar was a fundamentally unsound choice for a summer soccer tournament.

FIFA conducted its own objective analysis of the various bids, which found that Qatar was an unsuitable place to host the World Cup and a dangerous place to host the World Cup, that the summer temperatures would be a hazard to the health of the players and the fans, that Doha simply didn't have space for the kind of stadium infrastructure that was gonna be required.

They would have to build 9 new stadiums, and there wasn't enough room for them in Doha, so they would have to kind of create a whole new city.

Yeah, Qatar wasn't just a surprising choice, it was logically inexplicable.

It'd be like if the Westminster Dog Show awarded the Best in Show title to a tortoise.

Nothing against that tortoise, but not only should it not have won, it should have been automatically disqualified.

Now, the first and most obvious problem was that Qatar is notoriously scorching hot in the summer.

That is why FIFA eventually moved the World Cup to November.

But Qatar's initial pitch simply pretended that heat wouldn't be an issue, promising that they'd build air-conditioned outdoor stadiums, while Qatari scientists pitched ideas like a massive remote-control artificial cloud that they could move around to cover stadiums in shade.

Which, A, didn't exist, and B, wouldn't solve your problem anyway.

It's the multi-million dollar equivalent of pulling down the little car flap to keep the sun out of your eyes.

And at this point, you will not be surprised to learn of the many accusations that Qatar won their World Cup bid through bribery, with allegations including that 3 of the officials who agreed to vote for Qatar did so in exchange for a million dollars each.

And I won't say that Qatar definitely got the World Cup through bribery, but I won't say that they didn't, and I will say that they did.

While they deny That there was any misconduct in their bid.

The fact remained, they were gonna need to build not just a bunch of new stadiums, but also a new airport, metro system, roads, and about a hundred new hotels.

They had to build so much new infrastructure, in fact, that even the World Cup's mascot, Laib, doesn't seem to be able to believe what his country has just done.

First thing I want to show you is the stadiums.

8 mind-blowing arenas designed by some of the best architects in the world.

Can you believe it didn't exist 10 years ago?

Now, it's 1 of the city's hosting FIFA World Cup matches.

I can't believe that city wasn't there 10 years ago either, and it's actually a bit alarming.

If you drove by an empty plot of land with a sign reading, -"Coming soon at TGA Fridays." -$30, 000.

And the very next day, drove by and saw the grand opening of it, you'd probably have some questions about how the fuck it happened that fast.

According to 1 estimate, Qatar's government has spent more than $300 billion on infrastructure projects.

They have a lot of money thanks to their huge oil and natural gas reserves.

What they don't have a lot of, though, is Qataris.

Because Qatari nationals only number around 380, 000.

However, the country has an overall population of nearly 3000000.

And that is because 90% of it consists of foreigners and migrant workers.

And it's migrant workers who perform most of the manual labor there.

And those laborers are the ones who've had to build all the new infrastructure for this tournament, which brings us to 1 of the major scandals underlying it.

Qatar recruited hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly from India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, through agencies in their home countries.

Just to secure a job, migrants had little choice but to pay recruitment fees of up to $4, 000 before they left the country.

And once they got to Qatar, they were already in debt and trapped in a system known in the Middle East as Kefala.

The Kefala system can be a form of modern day slavery, and the features of it amount, in some cases, to forced labor.

All the new stadiums and infrastructure were essentially built through modern day slavery.

So we should probably introduce a new collective noun to refer to this group of stadiums.

A gaggle of geese, a pod of whales, an atrocity of stadiums.

The Kavala system exists in some form in several countries in the Middle East.

And under it, in Qatar, workers couldn't switch jobs or leave the country without the explicit permission of their employer.

In some cases, because they might have literally had their passport taken away.

And being so fully dependent on an employer meant that laborers had virtually no rights.

Take Anish, a laborer from Nepal, who maintains that he was routinely underpaid and for doing work in truly brutal conditions.

On the 21st of March, I started working at the Lusail Stadium.

It got up to 52 degrees Celsius the first year I was there.

I used to sweat in the exact way as if it was raining from the sky.

If you build a stadium in that heat, you should get to own it.

That shouldn't be Lusail Stadium, that should be Anish's fucking stadium.

And no 1 should be allowed inside it without saying that out loud.

And there's something pretty fucked up about arguing it's too hot for peak athletes to be outside for 90 minutes.

It's completely fine for people to build stadiums in that heat for hours a day and for months on end.

And that's not even getting into the living conditions that workers there were subjected to.

We drove outside the city to a place the government doesn't want people to see.

The sprawling labor camps where the workers are housed.

Inside, the men were packed wall to wall, 8 to a room.

The beds, they told us, infested with bed bugs.

22-year-old Koum lives here among 150 other men.

Hard to believe, but in these camps, it's routine.

At another camp, the toilets overflowed with sewage and 2 filthy kitchens were being shared by

Just wait until Laib finds out about this.

Yeah, your tournament's built on human suffering, buddy.

And You should know, when that reporter went and talked to the head of 1 of Qatar's leading sports organizations, it didn't go well.

We are living in a very healthy environment, alhamdulillah.

Al-Sulaydin, with all due respect, we have gone to the camps.

Yes, this week in Doha, where you have hundreds of thousands of men living in labor camps.

Some of them packed into small rooms, 8 men to a room, like the 1 we saw.

Have you been to the labor camps yourself, sir?

And with that, we were told the interview was over.

Nothing says workers live in a comfortable and healthy environment quite like leaving the room 30 seconds after you realize that the person you're talking to has actually seen that environment.

A Guardian investigation found that 6, 500 migrant workers died in Qatar from 2010 to 2020.

Now, that number accounts for all migrant worker deaths in Qatar, not just those who worked on stadiums.

But the Qatari government's preferred count states that there have actually only been 37 deaths among laborers at World Cup stadiums, and of those, that only 3 were work-related.

But if that number seems suspiciously low to you, it's because it very much is.

Their preferred count is conveniently limited to the small handful of work sites that were under the highest level of scrutiny and exclude the hundreds of other World Cup-related projects.

What's more, autopsies weren't done on most of these workers, with 1 investigation finding that nearly 70 percent of deaths of Indian, Nepali, and Bangladeshi nationals were attributed simply to natural causes or cardiac arrest, which feels deliberately vague.

Because cardiac arrest just means their heart stopped, which is literally how everybody dies.

I can tell you with full confidence that his heart stopped is how both I and Kid Rock will die.

That doesn't mean that our cardiac arrest will be caused by the same thing, though, does it?

1 of our deaths will likely involve a lot of meth, a monster truck, and a variety of illegal fireworks, and the other death will be Kid Rocks.

And Qatar will argue that they have made some significant labor reforms.

It's something that the head of their World Cup efforts has proudly bragged about.

If we look at the actions that the government has taken so far, laws implemented and being applied as well, the kafala system has been dismantled, both in terms of allowing for workers to change employers, and at the same time, also, there was the, exit permit system.

Look, those reforms sound great, and to an extent, they are, but they also have some major asterisks on them.

Workers in Qatar have said that they are still required to get permission from their current employer before they can move to a new job, and have also experienced retaliation from their employers when they try to leave.

But also, the reforms that he's bragging about there only began to be implemented in 2018, when much of the hard work was already done.

So he is bragging about dismantling the kafala system while sitting in a stadium built using it.

The only way that pat on the back could have been more hypocritical is if he forced a migrant worker to do it for him in 120 degree heat.

But incredibly, it's not just Qatar bragging about the progress that's been made.

FIFA has had the nerve to claim credit for it too.

All the changes that have happened in this country in terms of human rights and workers' rights and so on, human rights would not have happened, or certainly not at the same speed without the projectors of, the World Cup.

Because you cannot possibly argue FIFA deserves credit here.

FIFA's evaluation of Qatar's bid had literally 0 mentions of human rights or demands for labor reforms.

If the country had made no changes to its kafala system in the past few years, and instead had passed a law called the Doubling Down on Slave Labor act of 2019, you know what would have happened?

The World Cup still would have kicked off in Qatar today.

When FIFA awarded Qatar the World Cup, there was only 1 way those stadiums were getting built, and there was only 1 group of people who were going to do it, and they gave them the tournament anyway.

And that is not the only troubling thing that they had to have known back then.

Because let's take a moment to talk about Qatar's human rights situation.

And I recognize, every country has human rights issues, including this 1.

For more on that, see every other story this show has ever done.

They need permission from their male guardians to marry, work in many government jobs, and travel abroad until certain ages.

Also, because sex outside of marriage is illegal, pregnant women have to present a marriage certificate to receive prenatal care, which I hesitate to even tell you about, just in case the Supreme Court is watching this show tonight and getting any new ideas.

As for the LGBT community, sexual conduct between men is criminalized and can result in 7 years in prison.

Sepp Blatter even joked about it just days after Qatar was awarded the tournament, because when he was asked what advice he would give to gay fans who might want to travel to Qatar, this was his fun response.

Then, I would say then that they should refrain from any sexual activities.

-♪ ♪ -♪ You know, they say in comedy, you can either punch up, punch down, or co-sign oppressive governments for a quick laugh while looking like the penguin went to Wharton.

And we all know which option he just chose there.

Get Sepp Blatter a Netflix special, it seems like he's ready.

Now, Qatar has frequently repeated that everyone is welcome at this World Cup, including gay fans.

But as this gay Qatari man, who was granted asylum in the U.S., citing the dangers he faced there, points out, Even if that is the case for the next 4 weeks, it's a hell of a blind eye to turn.

A household with children that are domestically abused.

And now you're gonna have a fancy dinner party.

People can come in, they can bring their kids, their kids can jump on the table, and they can do everything that they want.

The children that live there are going to be in the basement, quiet, behaving, and they can jump on the table like the other kids that visited.

Because they will be punished in that household for doing it.

Well now you know that the children there are abused.

The Qatari government is engaging in some truly horrendous behavior, and we can't just gloss over that and uncritically put it in the spotlight.

It's an authoritarian regime, not Mel fucking Gibson.

Guess how many movies he's been in this year.

And none of this, the working conditions, the oppression of women or gay people, was a deal-breaker for FIFA.

In fact, Qatar's authoritarian tendencies may actually have been a deal sweetener, because FIFA has long had a soft spot for autocrats.

And I'm not just saying that because they gave the World Cup to Russia in 2018, or went ahead with 1 in Argentina in 1978, when it was run by a military dictatorship, or even that they held the second World Cup ever in Mussolini's Italy in 1934.

FIFA's former Secretary General, Jerome Valk, once said, I will say something which is crazy, but less democracy is sometimes better for organizing a World Cup when you have a very strong head of state that is easier for us organizers.

And even for a quote which is prefaced by, I will say something which is crazy, that is fucking nuts!

But authoritarians are good for FIFA, and FIFA is good for authoritarians.

As this critic points out, Russia's World Cup 4 years ago was preceded by a lot of controversy and criticism.

But that's not what people remember about it.

What you saw in the run-up to 2018 was a lot of coverage of what was happening in Russia.

A lot of coverage of the rights abuses, a lot of interest in that, a lot of engagement in it.

And I think what the Qataris will have noticed was how that all vanished as soon as the first whistle blew.

And I think everyone became captivated by the football.

The Catholics know that if they can just get to that first whistle, then they're over the line.

Any memories of controversy are likely to be washed away once it begins, and incidentally, what a VIP box to be a part of there.

If you're gonna make arguments about how your organization is a global force for good, Maybe try not to sit between Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin, because you are the filling in a real shit sandwich there.

--LAUGHTER --And the thing is, that first whistle has now been blown.

Qatar played Ecuador in the opening game of the tournament earlier today.

Well, workers like Anish hope that some of the athletes participating can help shine a light on all the exploitation that went into this event.

My message for Messi, thousands of workers like me have worked on the stadium.

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