His name was Kali. He was 27 years old and from a section of Kathmandu, Nepal, so impossibly poor that there is nothing remotely comparable in the United States. He had a wife. He had two children. He had a willingness and a work ethic to do virtually anything to provide for them.

That included taking out a loan to pay a recruitment company to place him with a job in Qatar, which will host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. It's also a country so wealthy that it has almost no citizens who would ever do the necessary construction work that men from Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and elsewhere will.

Once in Qatar the workers are placed with a construction company. They have to live where they are told. They can't drive a car. Their passports are taken from them, effectively forcing them to remain on the job until their boss says they are done. They can't quit even if they could pay their recruitment loan off. It's called the kafala system.

It's essentially forced labor. In 2014. For a soccer tournament.

The men then often toil in extreme heat, unsafe circumstances and awful conditions. They sleep in filthy, low-budget camps, mostly just squalor stacked on squalor.

The combination is brutal, both physically and mentally. Inhumane.

Kali was one of them, and he became like too many others, a desperate family man from the poorest of the world's poor who went to build unnecessarily opulent stadiums for the richest of the world's rich ... only to return two months later in a cheap coffin.

The official cause of death for a previously strong, healthy man: cardiac arrest.

Kali's story is one of many. It was featured this week on ESPN's E:60, in a powerful, incredibly important investigation into the labor practices of the Qatar World Cup bid from reporter Jeremy Schaap and producer Beein Gim. It featured the filming of Kali's funeral, complete with the sobbing wife, the stunned, now fatherless children, the devastated community and finally the traditional burning of the corpse.

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Death by heart attack is common in the Qatar labor camps. So too are fatal construction accidents and falls. Some just go to sleep and never awake. Others, the Qatari authorities claim, have committed suicide – which is a pass-the-buck way of claiming no responsibility for what was probably something else but, if true, is actually worse.

What would it say about a place when otherwise driven young men, desperate to send a couple bucks back home, instead quickly decide their current fate was so hopeless they kill themselves?

Workers' rights groups and Amnesty International have been shouting about this for a couple years, but Qatar often dismissed the claims, saying things weren't that bad and advocacy groups were overplaying things. Still under international media pressure, led by the relentless Guardian newspaper in London, the government hired a law firm to conduct its own investigation.

It concluded this week that there have been 964 deaths of migrant workers from Nepal, India and Bangladesh in 2012 and 2013 alone.

And that's Qatar's own study. That's the minimum. And that's just so far. There are eight years to go until the World Cup is even staged, with much construction still to come.

So we're on pace for ... 5,000 dead?

For a soccer tournament.

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