“The decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar was not, to say the least, a popular one. The objections can generally be split into two categories. One is the moral argument, the idea that the World Cup should not be played in a country with an abominable human rights record and in which an estimated 6,500 migrant workers have died in the last decade, a number of them while constructing stadia for the tournament. The second was that this was a country with no football heritage, that the hosts of the World Cup would be a terrible team who had no sporting place being there. This will, after all, be the first World Cup to be hosted by a country that had never qualified for one before since Italy staged it in 1934. The first argument still stands. The second, not so much. …”
The Athletic