Football is not merely sport and entertainment; it’s always been big money and great public relations, too. Adam Sobel’s documentary The Workers Cup is another subtle testament to this argument. Sobel’s film has football at its core, literally and thematically, and yet it is not merely about football. Football is a pretext and context. It is about what football meant to a few young African and Asian migrant labourers who were recruited to build the massive infrastructural facilities, including stadiums, for Qatar’s prestigious 2022 FIFA World Cup. The film, released in 2017, follows the journey of a few migrant labourers through a football tournament that Qatar officially organised for the workers as part of its welfare activities for the thousands of labourers who built the stadiums and other facilities for the World Cup.
With unprecedented access to the labour camps and reported “blessings” from top Qatari officials, the film documents the lives of a group of migrant labourers from Africa and Asia over several months: their routine construction work, leisure time conversations, backstories, dreams, and lost dreams – all of this set against the backdrop of a football tournament in which they participate. The film, though never preachy, is critical of the labour conditions that prevailed during those years: restricted movement, long working hours, low wages and difficult living conditions. Although the film doesn’t launch a crusading critique of labour rights, its deeply empathetic tone towards the poor migrant workers becomes a critique in itself – a critique of our systemic inability to see them, serve them and save them from our own pathological apathy.
It’s almost an open secret that the region’s labour camps are hardly habitable, many of them more akin to prisons than homes, according to multiple accounts. The labour camps are intentionally kept away from residential and commercial hotspots. The principle seems simple: once out of sight, always out of mind. Umm Salal camp in the movie is also hidden between a highway and a remote stretch of desert, effectively away from the city’s glitz. However, making people invisible does not make them non-existent. They breathe, work, dream and sleep with the same vigour and dignity as anyone else, as they are as human as we are. They build our infrastructure, facilitate our entertainment, and sometimes die a hundred unsung deaths while constructing the pompous structures that serve as the backdrop to our urban utopia.
It’s a relief to see that the migrant labourers often address the aching absurdity of their lives with humour. Resilience has many forms, and sarcasm is at times the brightest. The workers miss their hometowns, families, girlfriends and women in general. It is an overwhelmingly male world. Masculinity in multiple forms is unmissable. They often fantasise about going to shopping malls and meeting their female friends from social media. They also know that these educated young women, coming from their own faraway communities, might stay away if they discovered that the young men came from “the camps.”
“In Kenya, we also have camps,” says David, one of the workers, “but they are refugee camps – tents with ‘UN’ written over them.” He laughs at the possibility that the girls might mistake them for refugees and flee.
There is a particularly poignant moment when a young African worker reflects on his labour. He imagines telling his grandchild someday that he was also part of building these enormous stadiums. The child would probably look at him and say: “You don’t even own a thatched house. What was the point of building a stadium? You’re useless.” Beneath the humour, alongside his innumerable colleagues, he also dreams of becoming useful to his family: paying off the debts, educating kids, and building homes back in their hometowns.
Kenneth, a Ghanaian labourer who is also the captain of the workers’ team representing the Gulf Contracting Company, was tricked into taking the job. He had always wanted to become a footballer, and an agent in Ghana lied to him, offering him a job related to football. Kenneth paid him $1,500 – a huge sum in Ghana – only to realise soon that his job had nothing to do with football. In the movie, he remains an aspiring footballer and repeatedly asks the management for more time and resources to train during the Workers Cup tournament.
One of the interesting discussions among the African workers takes place in their canteen and revolves around their notion of freedom. Different workers have different opinions and perspectives. One even quotes Jamaican singer Bob Marley. At one point, one of them asks why the question of freedom has been raised. He then reveals that a white woman had recently asked him the same question. Race is highly visible and audible in this setting. During a post-match meeting, an African player breaks down, saying that he feels bad when his Nepali teammate calls him a “forest-dweller.” The workers themselves are not immune to the prejudices and hierarchies of the societies they come from and inhabit.
Once a labourer arrives on a company visa, at least when the movie was produced, he cannot simply quit his job, change employers, or leave the country without the company’s permission. How does that sound? Imprisonment? Slavery? Bonded labour? However, the reassuring update is that those rules were scrapped later; in 2020, Qatar abolished the requirement for migrant workers to obtain an employer’s NOC to change jobs.
The labour itself is not easy. Nor is the weather kind in the desert. It is heavy physical labour, often involving significant safety risks and leading to health issues. Working hours can extend to 12 hours or more, and many labourers work throughout the week, although the law entitles them to one day off.
The players and their bosses eventually realise that the Workers Cup tournament was neither entirely about the workers nor about football. In effect, it was about big companies using the tournament as a public relations exercise: demonstrating to potential clients that they cared about the welfare of their workers and were efficient in what they did. In short, it was about spending money to make more money.
At one point, we eavesdrop on a tense telephone conversation between a Nepali player and his wife. It felt almost like an unethical breach of privacy. As a viewer, I was also left wondering what happened to these workers after the documentary was completed. Fortunately, they appear to be doing relatively well. The film’s dedicated official website provides updated information about each of the players, and even includes ways to contact them and contribute to their lives.
[Muhammed Noushad is a writer, educator, and documentary filmmaker based in Calicut. One of his writing interests is the intersection of football, film, and society.]
Read more – Remembering Escobar for a Reason After Three Decades
Also see – Football’s Selective Conscience: A World Cup Indictment
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