In November 2021, partway through a hunger strike that ran 30 days, an officer came into my cell in Doha to take away my salt. The one thing that was keeping me alive besides water. As he pocketed it, he delivered a chilling message: "Our orders are to silence you, not to keep you alive," he said. "You can drop dead right now for all I care."
This week, I am again being silenced. I should have been in Oslo, Norway, speaking at a major human rights forum and giving a sworn deposition in a U.S. federal trafficking case tied to the 2022 World Cup tournament. Instead, I am stuck in Jordan, with my passport in the hands of the authorities, unable to travel – just days before the next World Cup kicks off in America.
I am better off than the last time the World Cup came around. I watched those games from a mess hall of a cell block in Doha, Qatar. I ended up in a Qatari prison because I refused to cover up for the appalling workers’ conditions and human rights abuses that I had seen as a media manager for Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy. The Qatari dictatorship kept me hidden until the World Cup passed and then added a little bit extra – for a total of more than three years – to teach me a lesson. It did not matter that a U.N. panel examined my case and called my detention arbitrary. I was sharing a very inconvenient truth, and I needed to be silenced.
It is happening again. Just days ago, officers at the General Intelligence Directorate in Amman, Jordan, demanded that I stop telling my story if I wanted to keep my freedom. They told me I can’t have my passport back until I agree to this. I feel confident they are doing this at Qatar’s behest.
From my experience with the Qatari regime, I believe the main reason behind this new round of intimidation is a desire to prevent me from testifying in the U.S. court case. They want to do everything they can to preserve a narrative built to bury the truth beneath the spectacle of an amazing fan experience in 2022: state-of-the-art infrastructure, great football, and genuine hospitality.
This narrative has worked exceptionally well. Qatar got its historic World Cup tournament, and FIFA walked away with 7.5 billion dollars of income from that cycle. The cost was only three lives, or so the organizers claimed before kickoff. But as soon as the cameras left, Hassan Al Thawadi, who ran the Supreme Committee that delivered the tournament, told British television that the real figure was somewhere between 400 and 500. He admitted he did not have an exact number because no real count had been kept.
If we accept three deaths, why not 400? Why not 500? Or the 6,500 figure recorded by the Guardian investigation? If the argument revolves around haggling over the death toll, we have already conceded a far more dangerous reality: that it is acceptable for human beings to die so we can enjoy a month of football.
The man at the top of FIFA, President Gianni Infantino, does not seem troubled by any of this. He called the Qatar tournament the “best World Cup ever” repeatedly, and just over a week ago, he suggested that he would have liked to organize the next 10 editions of the World Cup in Qatar. I wonder if that means he would have willingly sacrificed 10 times as many lives.
How does FIFA get away with this behavior, posing as a non-profit, human rights-respecting organization while ignoring the blatant human rights violations taking place under its nose?
The answer lies in Switzerland, the country that hosts FIFA and provides the legal framework that guarantees impunity, and in the sponsors that enrich FIFA. As I have learned over the past year since my release from a Qatari cell, FIFA’s billions matter much more than accountability or justice. I have sought justice from Swiss authorities. I have sought accountability from FIFA sponsors. I have not succeeded on either count.
So here I am, unable to travel and under serious threat of detention, taking my case to the fans, to politicians and advocates, to football associations, players, sponsors, broadcasters, and every person who believes that entertainment should not come at the cost of human suffering or human lives.
I ask you to demand total, uncompromising accountability for every entity that profits from hosting a World Cup or a FIFA event. Such accountability can only be reached by dragging the institution behind this machine in front of a court or a parliament that it cannot buy off or outlast.
The United States is co-hosting the 2026 tournament with Canada and Mexico; Britain, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden have football associations with massive geopolitical weight. These sovereign states must strip FIFA of its exceptionalist status and treat it as the multinational conglomerate it is. Tax it. Hold it to the strict human rights standards that bind other major corporations. Make the next hosting deal contingent on independent monitoring that a host nation cannot switch off once play begins.
My voice alone cannot force this reckoning. Yours can. If you refuse to look away, if you demand that your football associations and your representatives force FIFA to abide by the laws of the nations where it operates, the impunity will begin to crack.
When the whistle blows in North America in a few days, the world will have to decide whether the beautiful game is worth the ugliest cost.
Abdullah Ibhais was FIFA World Cup 2022 whistleblower and former media manager, Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy
