On 11 December 2024, at a FIFA Extraordinary Congress, the organisation’s 211 member associations voted to award Saudi Arabia the right to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup — the first-ever 48-team World Cup to be hosted by a single country. The vote was conducted by acclamation — no formal ballot, no recorded dissent, no competing bid. FIFA’s Bid Evaluation Report gave Saudi Arabia the highest score in World Cup bidding history: 419.8 out of 500. The rating characterised the Kingdom as a “medium risk” host. The host cities will be Riyadh, Jeddah, Al Khobar, Abha, and NEOM — five cities across a country the size of Western Europe.
Six months earlier, on 5 June 2024, Building and Wood Workers’ International had filed a formal forced labour complaint against Saudi Arabia with the International Labour Organisation under Article 24 of the ILO Constitution. The complaint documented debt bondage, passport confiscation, wage theft, and restrictions on workers’ ability to terminate or leave their employment — conditions that constitute forced labour under the ILO’s own conventions. The complaint was upheld for admissibility in January 2025.
FIFA’s Bid Evaluation Report did not mention the ILO forced labour complaint.
Human Rights Watch wrote formally to FIFA President Gianni Infantino on 4 November 2024, sharing findings from its investigation into Saudi labour conditions and requesting that FIFA conduct genuine human rights due diligence before the vote. FIFA did not respond.
The World Cup will require the construction of 11 new stadiums, 4 refurbished venues, 185,000 new hotel rooms, and substantial airport, road, and rail infrastructure. The construction will be performed by migrant workers operating under the kafala system — the same system documented in the forced labour complaint that FIFA’s evaluation did not acknowledge. One of the proposed stadiums sits 350 metres above ground within the architectural envelope of The Line at NEOM — a structure whose construction workforce has been documented by every major human rights organisation as subject to conditions the ILO is investigating as forced labour.
The sequence — complaint filed, evidence shared, letter sent, vote taken, complaint ignored — is the documentary record of how international football’s governing body sold a World Cup to a forced labour economy while its own human rights policy was in force.
The Bid Evaluation
FIFA’s Bid Evaluation Report is a document that rewards infrastructure investment while treating human rights as a technical input rather than a disqualifying condition. The report’s methodology assigns points for transport capacity, stadium design, accommodation availability, and technical infrastructure. It assesses human rights through what it calls a “Human Rights Context Assessment” — a category that sounds rigorous and operates as a formality.
The 419.8 score — the highest ever — reflected Saudi Arabia’s willingness to spend without constraint. The Kingdom’s sovereign wealth guaranteed infrastructure funding. The stadiums would be built to specification. The hotels would be constructed. The airports would be expanded. The financial capacity was not in question. The human cost of exercising that capacity was treated as a separate matter — one that the evaluation acknowledged in general terms while declining to examine in operational detail.
The rating of “medium risk” merits specific examination. Saudi Arabia, at the time of evaluation, was a country where: independent labour unions are prohibited; press freedom does not exist; women’s rights defenders have been imprisoned; peaceful protesters have been sentenced to death; and the ILO was actively investigating a forced labour complaint filed by an international trade union federation with the support of five major human rights organisations. “Medium risk” is a characterisation that requires either ignorance of these conditions or a definition of “risk” so narrow that it excludes the populations most affected by the project.
The Clifford Chance Assessment
FIFA commissioned an Independent Context Analysis from AS&H Clifford Chance — the Saudi Arabian affiliate of the global law firm — to assess the human rights landscape for the bid. The assessment’s methodology is revealing in what it excluded.
The assessment was criticised formally by 11 organisations — including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, FairSquare, Football Supporters Europe, and the Sport and Rights Alliance — who raised concerns directly with Clifford Chance’s Global Managing Partner in October 2024. The organisations noted that the assessment showed no evidence of consulting credible external stakeholders, excluded analysis of freedom of expression, LGBTI+ discrimination, the prohibition of trade unions, and forced evictions, made “highly selective” use of UN findings while omitting damaging judgments, and contained “no substantive discussion” of documented abuses by multiple human rights organisations and UN bodies. The assessment did not consult migrant workers. It did not consult torture survivors. It did not consult jailed women’s rights defenders. It did not consult Saudi civil society — which, in practical terms, does not exist in a form that could provide independent input, because Saudi Arabia prohibits the independent civil society organisations that would conduct the consultation.
The assessment was conducted by a law firm with commercial interests in Saudi Arabia — a jurisdiction where maintaining government relationships is essential to legal practice. Whether Clifford Chance’s Saudi affiliate could produce an assessment that genuinely challenged the host government’s human rights record while simultaneously maintaining its legal practice in that government’s jurisdiction is a question that the assessment’s methodology answers: it could not, and it did not.
Human Rights Watch’s December 2024 analysis described the assessment as failing to meet the standards FIFA had set for itself. The assessment acknowledged gaps. It recommended mitigation measures. It did not recommend that the bid be rejected, delayed, or conditioned on specific reforms. The gap between the assessment’s findings and its conclusions is the gap between due diligence as a process and due diligence as a performance.
The BWI Complaint
The complaint filed by Building and Wood Workers’ International on 5 June 2024 was not a general criticism of Saudi labour conditions. It was a formal legal instrument submitted under the ILO’s constitutional enforcement mechanism, supported by specific evidence and endorsed by organisations whose credibility is not in dispute.
The complaint was based on three categories of evidence: the documented abuse of 21,000 workers owed unpaid wages by two bankrupt Saudi construction firms (Saudi Oger and Mohammad Al-Mojil Group); a survey of 193 migrant workers conducted in 2024 documenting debt bondage, passport withholding, and contract restrictions; and representative cases from eight individual workers whose experiences illustrated the systemic nature of the conditions.
The survey’s findings were specific: 85 per cent of workers experienced debt bondage; 65 per cent experienced passport or document withholding; 63 per cent experienced restrictions on terminating or leaving their contracts; and 46 per cent experienced wage theft. These percentages describe not isolated incidents but a system — the kafala system — operating as designed.
The complaint was supported by Amnesty International, Equidem, FairSquare, Human Rights Watch, and Solidarity Centre — five organisations whose combined documentation of labour conditions in the Gulf covers decades of research and thousands of individual cases.
The ILO’s Governing Body upheld the complaint for admissibility in January 2025. Admissibility does not determine the merits of the complaint. It determines that the complaint is sufficiently documented and legally grounded to warrant formal examination. The complaint remains active.
FIFA’s evaluation of the Saudi bid was completed after the complaint was filed and before admissibility was determined. The evaluation’s failure to reference the complaint means that either FIFA’s evaluators were unaware of a forced labour complaint filed against the host country by an international trade union federation with the support of five major human rights organisations — which would indicate a failure of basic research — or they were aware and chose not to include it in the evaluation — which would indicate a deliberate decision to exclude disqualifying evidence from the assessment.
The HRW Letter
On 4 November 2024, Human Rights Watch sent a formal letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino. The letter shared HRW’s findings on Saudi labour conditions, drawn from the “Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later” investigation that would be published the following month. The letter documented specific abuses: wage theft affecting the majority of interviewed workers, recruitment fee bondage, passport confiscation, and the classification of workplace deaths as “natural causes.”
HRW requested that FIFA conduct genuine human rights due diligence, including direct consultation with migrant workers, before proceeding with the vote.
FIFA did not respond to the letter. The vote proceeded on 11 December 2024 — five weeks after the letter was sent. The vote was conducted by acclamation, without a recorded ballot, without a competing bid, and without any reference to the evidence HRW had provided.
The non-response is not unusual for FIFA. The organisation has a documented pattern of treating human rights correspondence as public relations input rather than governance input. But the non-response in this instance is particularly notable because FIFA’s own human rights policy — adopted in 2017 — commits the organisation to respecting human rights in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The UNGPs require that entities in FIFA’s position conduct meaningful due diligence, consult affected stakeholders, and ensure that their activities do not contribute to human rights abuses.
HRW’s letter offered FIFA the opportunity to fulfil its own stated commitments before the vote. FIFA declined the opportunity by declining to reply.
The Stadium on The Line
The key venues include the King Salman International Stadium in Riyadh — a 92,760-capacity structure that will host the opening match and the final — and the NEOM Stadium, planned as a 46,010-capacity structure sitting 350 metres above ground within the architectural envelope of The Line, with construction scheduled from 2027 to 2032 and hosting group stage through quarter-final matches. FairSquare has noted that the bid requires a nearly 500 per cent increase in Saudi Arabia’s hotel capacity — a construction programme that dwarfs the stadium requirements.
The venue’s design is architecturally spectacular and operationally paradoxical. It would sit within a structure whose construction was suspended by PIF in September 2025. It would be built by a workforce operating under conditions documented as forced labour. It would serve as a World Cup venue for a tournament awarded after a forced labour complaint was filed and ignored.
FIFA’s deadline forces the construction of at least one section of The Line by 2032 — creating an external timeline that NEOM’s internal ambitions could not sustain. The World Cup has become the construction schedule for a megaproject that could not justify its own construction schedule. The irony is structural: an international sporting event is providing the deadline that drives the construction of a city whose workforce conditions have been reported to the ILO as forced labour by the international trade union that represents construction workers.
The stadium requires the construction of The Line’s first district. The Line’s first district requires migrant labour. The migrant labour operates under the kafala system. The kafala system is the subject of the ILO forced labour complaint. The forced labour complaint was filed before the World Cup was awarded. FIFA awarded it anyway.
The Qatar Comparison
The comparison to Qatar’s 2022 World Cup is instructive because it demonstrates that reform is possible when international pressure is sustained, and that Saudi Arabia has not been subjected to equivalent pressure.
Qatar, facing sustained international scrutiny during its World Cup preparation period, implemented a series of labour reforms: a uniform minimum monthly wage of 1,000 Qatari riyals ($275) effective March 2021; the abolition of the exit permit requirement; the establishment of worker complaint mechanisms that were measurably utilised; the creation of a Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund; increased penalties for wage withholding; and changes to the recruitment system designed to reduce debt bondage. Between November 2020 and August 2022, almost 350,000 workers changed jobs in Qatar — compared to 18,000 in 2019 and 9,000 in 2018. The volume of transfers demonstrated that when reforms are implemented with enforcement mechanisms, workers use them.
The reforms were incomplete. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other organisations documented continuing abuses throughout the construction period. HRW concluded that “feeble enforcement on the ground has meant those reforms often remain theoretical.” Qatar’s advisory Shura Council proposed in 2024 to require employer permission before migrant workers can leave the country — suggesting that even incomplete reforms face rollback pressure from the business interests they constrain. Worker deaths were classified with the same “natural causes” opacity documented in Saudi Arabia. But the reforms were real, measurable, and — critically — implemented before the tournament, not merely promised.
Saudi Arabia has promised reforms. It has not implemented them at a scale or depth comparable to Qatar. The kafala was formally abolished in June 2025, but the BWI survey conducted after the abolition found 85 per cent of workers experiencing debt bondage. The exit permit was reformed, but 99.995 per cent of workers still require employer consent to leave. The Qiwa platform was introduced, but workers in remote construction camps cannot access it.
The difference between Qatar and Saudi Arabia is not the presence or absence of criticism. It is the presence or absence of enforceable conditions. Qatar faced sustained pressure from FIFA, from international federations, from sponsors, and from media that created, however imperfectly, a relationship between hosting rights and labour reform. Saudi Arabia faced no equivalent conditionality. The bid was unopposed. The vote was by acclamation. The evaluation scored the Kingdom highest in history. And the forced labour complaint was not mentioned.
The Construction Ahead
The 2034 World Cup requires construction at a scale that dwarfs Qatar’s experience. Saudi Arabia must build 11 new stadiums and refurbish 4 existing venues. It must construct 73 training facilities. It must add 185,000 hotel rooms to existing capacity — a 500 per cent increase that requires the construction of hundreds of hotels across multiple cities. It must expand airports, build rail connections, and construct the transport infrastructure necessary to move millions of spectators between venues spread across a country the size of Western Europe.
BWI estimates that 70,000 construction workers will be required for stadium development alone. The total construction workforce for all World Cup-related infrastructure — stadiums, hotels, transport, utilities — will be substantially larger.
FairSquare has predicted that the construction surge required for NEOM’s remaining components and the 2034 World Cup will produce “thousands of unexplained deaths.” The prediction is based on the existing death rate among migrant construction workers in Saudi Arabia, the scale of the planned construction, and the absence of structural reforms to the systems — kafala, death classification, recruitment fees — that produce the deaths.
The prediction is not alarmist. It is arithmetic. The current system produces a documented death rate. The World Cup requires a documented expansion of the workforce. The expansion, applied to the rate, produces a number. The number represents human beings who will die building stadiums so that other human beings can watch football. FairSquare’s contribution is to state the number in advance, so that when the deaths occur, they cannot be described as unexpected.
The Sponsors
FIFA’s commercial partners — the corporations whose logos will appear on World Cup broadcasts, in stadiums, and on merchandise — have human rights obligations under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and, increasingly, under mandatory due diligence legislation such as the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.
The legal exposure is real. Companies that profit from an event whose construction is documented as involving forced labour face potential liability in their home jurisdictions — a legal risk that did not exist for Qatar 2022 sponsors but may exist for Saudi Arabia 2034 sponsors, because the EU directive was adopted in the intervening period.
Whether sponsors will exercise due diligence, condition their involvement on labour reforms, or simply proceed with their commercial arrangements will be determined over the next eight years. The precedent from Qatar — where sponsors faced reputational pressure but no legal consequences — suggests that commercial engagement will proceed unless the legal environment forces a different calculation.
The Verdict
FIFA awarded the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia after:
- An ILO forced labour complaint was filed and upheld for admissibility
- Human Rights Watch shared evidence of systematic labour abuse and received no response
- An “independent” assessment acknowledged it had not conducted full due diligence
- Five men had been sentenced to death for opposing a construction project
- 21,000 workers had died across Vision 2030 projects
- The kafala system was documented as producing conditions of forced labour
- The host country’s own CEO had been recorded saying he drove workers “like a slave”
FIFA gave the bid its highest score ever. The vote was by acclamation. No conditions were attached.
The World Cup will be built by workers who cannot leave their employers, who paid thousands in fees to reach jobs they cannot quit, whose deaths will be classified as natural causes, and whose wages may or may not be paid. The stadiums will be spectacular. The tournament will be profitable. And the workers — the men who pour the concrete and weld the steel and die in the heat — will be there because the system that brings them is the same system the ILO is investigating, that HRW documented, that BWI complained about, and that FIFA chose not to mention.
The beautiful game requires ugly construction. FIFA’s contribution to the 2034 World Cup is ensuring that the ugliness remains outside the frame.
This investigation draws on Building and Wood Workers’ International (ILO Article 24 complaint, June 2024); Human Rights Watch (“Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later,” December 2024; “Red Card for FIFA’s Saudi World Cup,” December 2024; letter to FIFA President Infantino, November 2024); FairSquare (migrant worker death predictions); FIFA’s Bid Evaluation Report and vote documentation; AS&H Clifford Chance Independent Context Analysis; the Olympic Council of Asia (Asian Winter Games withdrawal, January 2026); ALQST; Amnesty International; Equidem; Solidarity Centre; the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises; the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive; and reporting by Reuters, Bloomberg, Middle East Eye, and the Guardian. Vision2030.AI is editorially independent and is not affiliated with FIFA, NEOM, PIF, or any official Vision 2030 entity.