The Washington Post has put together a chart illustrating the body counts of workers involved in construction for the last four Olympics and two World Cups, and compared them to the reported death toll for the 2022 Qatar World Cup.


[Update: The Washington Post has revised their story with this correction:

This story has been updated to reflect the fact that figures include total migrant worker deaths in Qatar, not just World Cup-related deaths.


Our original post is as follows.]

(The numbers are necessarily incomplete, coming as they do from different sources and suffering from a lack of accurate self-reporting. But even if it’s an order of magnitude off, it’s overwhelming.)

Don’t let the sheer scale of the chart shroud the fact that these are real people. That’s not just 1,200 faceless men; it’s 1,200 migrant workers who traveled far from home and their families, were forced to surrender their passports and live in squalid conditions for subsistence-level wages, until their untimely deaths. Meanwhile, FIFA executives have allegedly pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to make sure Qatar received the honor of hosting the World Cup.


The International Trade Union Confederation estimates that 4,000 workers will die in Qatar by the time 2022 arrives. FIFA corruption doesn’t even rate among legitimate reasons to boycott the World Cup.


[Washington Post]