FIFA Made $7.5 Billion. The Workers Who Built the Stadiums Are Still Waiting to Find Out How Many of Them Died. | Bonus: Qatar 2022

This is a bonus episode — released because the timing made it impossible not to.The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicked off this week across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Billions of people are about to spend a month watching it. Before they do, this episode goes back to the most recent prior tournament — Qatar, 2022 — and opens the case file on the system that built it.The kafala system is a form of labor sponsorship that has existed across the Gulf states for decades. Under Qatari law as it stood for most of the twelve years between the 2010 award of the World Cup and the 2022 tournament, a migrant worker's legal right to leave the country or change jobs depended on the permission of their employer. Combined with passport confiscation, recruitment debts, and a workforce drawn overwhelmingly from some of the poorest countries in South Asia, this produced — according to multiple human rights organizations, the International Labour Organization, and Qatar's own eventual reform process — conditions that met the legal definition of forced labor.The system was not fully dismantled until 2020 — two years before the tournament it helped build.The death toll connected to that twelve-year construction period is the most disputed number in this story, and this episode does not pretend otherwise. Qatar's own organizing committee has documented 37 deaths connected to stadium construction specifically. A 2021 Guardian investigation, using government mortality data from five South Asian countries, counted 6,500 deaths among migrant workers in Qatar across the same period — a figure Qatari officials have called misleading because it includes all causes of death across the entire migrant workforce, not just construction-related fatalities. In late 2022, Qatar's own World Cup chief gave reporters a third number: "between 400 and 500."Three numbers. Three sources. None of them agree. This episode presents all three, with their sourcing, and lets the disagreement speak for itself.We also examine what FIFA's own commissioned investigation — released in November 2024 — concluded about FIFA's responsibility, and what happened to the $100 million "legacy fund" that was supposed to address it.This is not a comparison to any other tournament. It is the documented record of one.A companion article is available on Medium at medium.com/file-47.Subscribe to File 47: Investigative History for new episodes every week.