Adam Sobel’s documentary joins the crews of men constructing the venues to be used in 2022 and shocks its audience with their tales of modern-day slavery

This feels like a particularly diverse year for the voices being heard in Sundance’s documentary programme, and The Workers Cup fills a welcome niche in being an all too rare documentary about Qatar, with the added bonus of featuring charismatic characters spanning the world. It’s also a very successful film about modern day slavery which avoids pitying or patronising its subjects.



There has been widespread disbelief that Qatar will host the World Cup in 2022, with regular reports of terrible working conditions for the construction staff working on the stadiums, who face potential injury or death in building a footballing infrastructure from scratch. Information coming out of Qatar can be limited and confusing, and the chances for independent journalists or film-makers to report accurately can be slim.

The Workers Cup tackles this head-on, by providing a brave and engrossing look at the 2015 football tournament from the perspective of the stadium construction workers. Embedded with the GCC (Gulf Construction Company) team, director Adam Sobel gets intimate with a merry band of multinational footballers given a brief moment to live their dreams in the midst of lonely and arduous living conditions. The faceless underclass are given real form in a cast of men who seem bewildered at the trap they’ve ended up in.

Like the best football documentaries, the actual football action isn’t the point – a relief as the standard of it is amusingly low. Sobel uses the tournament as an excuse to make an unexpectedly candid film about the real lives of workers who are effectively slaves, unable to leave their camp – let alone the country – without permission or change their jobs. Much of their testimony is shocking: this multinational workforce of Africans, Indians, Bangladeshis and Nepalis speak longingly of freedom but are prisoners of an international economy that gives them no other options.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel and Calton in The Workers Cup

We follow the team’s progress in a tournament that increasingly feels like a PR opportunity for the various construction companies to tout for new business and claim their CSR credentials. The ecosystem of the corporate teams is strangely evocative of the 19th century origins of many treasured football teams: philanthropic companies providing leisure time for their workers to keep them loyal and in line. But in this case, the teams aren’t embedded in any sense of civic pride. It’s clear this is a fake loyalty to a company for whom its workers and players are anonymous and interchangeable.

There’s a bitter melancholy when we see GCC’s “fans” concocting chants for the company, creating bizarre cardboard outfits with the GCC logo, and waving immaculate corporate flags. But even these big corporations are pawns in a bigger game - the ultimate victor is the pompously-named Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy.

Sobel is careful not to intervene or editorialise, although there’s a clear anger at the heart of the film. His worm’s eye tour of Doha’s towers and surreal shots showing the bleakness of its shopping centres are quiet tours de force. The story delivers impressive dignity from our key characters who are three dimensional, speak for themselves and are far from powerless victims. Particularly compelling are Kenneth, the Ghanaian captain and an impressive footballer, wannabe loverboy Paul, who can conduct relationships only in his dreams and on social media and Padam, a podgy Nepalese man who has spent eight years away from his wife and the children he named after Manchester United players.

Sobel’s lack of intrusion means he can capture a perfect discussion scene where some of the men define why they are victims of modern slavery, but equally they’re comfortable enough to relax, cheer and dance without consciousness of the camera after a victory.

This is a film where we only see men: no women speak in the film and very few appear at all. We see mean exploiting other men in the name of good PR and the pretence of offering them a taste of success and liberty. Though there are moments of real joy and liberation during the games, everything outside of the matches is cloaked in a mood of lost dreams and stunted futures.



The film ends with a heartbreaking scene as two of the characters attempt to prolong their footballing lives. But it’s not going to be; they’re pawns in a global sport for whom they’re a means to major profit. Football fans in particular will be confronted with their own ignorance of the labour whose lives are wasted in service of providing us with a brief moment of entertainment in five years time.

