Wannabe footballers toiling for Qatar 2022 are required viewing | Barry Glendenning
A football team indefinitely cloistered and bored. Often unhappy players pondering the futility of it all. High hopes dashed by the crushing disappointment of exiting a tournament on penalties. Many are the parallels that can be drawn between the team of amateurs featured in The Workers Cup and England football sides of yore, but for all the similarities between these enthusiastic players and their professional counterparts, the modern-day slaves featured in Adam Sobel’s documentary about an annual football championship organised for foreign workers in Qatari migrant labour camps could scarcely be further removed.
Housed in the spartan surrounds of the Umm Salal camp, home to more than 7,000 workers from India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal and Africa, they are among the poorest workers in the world, labouring in its richest country. The myriad hardships these workers are forced to endure on a daily basis have been well documented as they go about the back-breaking, and often deadly, business of building the infrastructure Qatar requires to stage the 2022 World Cup. They work long hours in dangerous, sweltering, dust‑choked conditions for as little as $200 a month.
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