To host the tournament, Qatar built seven sprawling stadiums, an airport, subway lines and roads connecting the venues. One group made this all possible: migrant workers. And for them, the shiny new venues have come at a great cost.

The Gulf region has long been a destination for South Asian, African and other migrants looking for work, and millions were drawn to Qatar for construction jobs over the past decade. For workers from countries like Nepal and India, these jobs provided relatively lucrative opportunities to support families back home.

However, human rights organizations and journalists have uncovered a litany of abuses in Qatar’s system of migrant work. The trouble starts from the very beginning. Migrant workers find jobs through recruiting agencies, which often require them to pay exorbitant fees to secure positions — fees that are still being levied years after Qatar made them illegal. A 2021 audit found that more than two-thirds of the workers on World Cup sites had paid a recruitment fee at an average of $1,733. That’s a huge sum for migrants, who have to work under tough conditions when they arrive to pay off the loans they took out for the fee. It can take months or even years for them just to break even.

Migrants also need to secure sponsorship, or kafala, from a company to get a work visa. But companies have been known to use the sponsorship as a form of forced labor — sometimes taking workers’ passports to prevent them from switching jobs. Under pressure from the International Trade Union Confederation, Qatar introduced reforms in 2020 that allow migrants to change employers without permission from their bosses, but Human Rights Watch found that the changes haven’t been fully implemented.

Above all, the working conditions themselves have elicited outcry from human rights groups. Migrant workers have had to toil in the blistering heat to ensure the construction schedule was met, and for some migrants, that undertaking was fatal.

In 2021, an investigation by the Guardian found that 6,751 migrants from five South Asian countries had died in Qatar over the prior decade, and deaths were likely far higher because the investigation didn’t cover migrants from other countries. The data didn’t show whether these migrants were working on World Cup projects specifically, but a human rights researcher told the Guardian that the majority of migrants in Qatar were likely employed in the World Cup construction frenzy.

Qatari officials acknowledged the deaths but claimed they were normal given the number of migrants in the country. As for World Cup projects, officials documented only 40 migrant worker fatalities on World Cup projects, with only three listed as the result of workplace accidents. Many of the deaths are due to “natural causes” and “cardiac arrest,” the government reports say, but the Guardian reported that heat stress is likely to be a contributing factor.

For migrant workers harmed in the World Cup preparation, rights groups, football associations participating in the tournament and former players are pushing FIFA and the Qatar government to step up and provide further compensation, but so far, they haven’t budged.

Qatari officials have cited labor reforms they’ve made over the last decade in response to pressure. “We embarked on this journey after we won the World Cup bid. There was an acknowledgment at the time that gaps existed. We have demonstrated through our various ecosystems that meaningful steps can be taken to fill those gaps,” Mahmoud Qutub, who directs the government’s work on labor rights related to the tournament, told a European Council hearing in October.

International human rights organizations have also raised alarm over the treatment of other groups in Qatar. Like other Gulf states, Qatar is ruled by a monarchy, which holds most of the political power, and the Muslim country has tight restrictions on political and civil liberties. Freedom House, a U.S. government-funded nonprofit, gave the country 25 out of a possible 100 points on its Freedom in the World index in 2021, labeling it “not free.”

Alongside the treatment of migrant workers, some of the biggest human rights issues that have drawn criticism leading up to the World Cup are Qatar’s repression of women and LGBTQ people. Under Qatari law, women’s freedom is curtailed. Male guardians are given broad leeway other their lives; they have the power to decide whether their female relatives study abroad, get married, take certain government jobs and access some reproductive health services, according to Human Rights Watch. Sex outside of marriage is criminalized, and women have been prosecuted even when reporting rape.

LGBTQ people have also faced harsh repression. Consensual sexual relationships between men are illegal and carry a punishment of up to seven years in prison. Recently, Human Rights Watch reported that six LGBTQ people had been detained by the government without cause and beaten and sexually assaulted while in prison. Just last week, a Qatari World Cup ambassador told Germany TV station ZDF that homosexuality was “damage in the mind.”

These issues have caused human rights organizations and fans to call for teams and government officials to boycott the games, and some celebrities including Dua Lipa have refused to perform at the tournament in protest. But similar to the Beijing Winter Olympics, which rights organizations and Western officials also campaigned to boycott over the human rights abuses in Xinjiang, it appears that the main show, at least, will go on.

Searing desert heat led to the World Cup shifting to November and December, but players will still face warm temperatures and surprising humidity for what is an arid desert setting in the summer. As Grid noted earlier this year, “the desert nation poking out into the Persian Gulf was never a reasonable choice for a primarily outdoor, summer event.”

November temperatures usually top out in Qatar at around 84 degrees Fahrenheit, far below summer highs, although they have reached up to 100 degrees in that month, with just such a heat wave in the last two weeks setting records. Especially for unacclimated European players currently used to cool, dry winter air, the big adjustment will instead be the humidity from the warm Persian Gulf waters that surround the peninsula, according to University of Pittsburgh sports scientists. They warned that Qatar’s relative average humidity of 71 percent in November could interfere with perspiration cooling players off during games, leading to heat exhaustion.

FIFA and its medical advisers took this into account, and stadium playing fields and stands are being actively cooled with spot air conditioning during games, built in a $7 billion flurry after construction workers suffered heat strokes and other heat-related illnesses. The key to player safety is a week of acclimatization, according to past studies of soccer players in Qatar, to build up a tolerance to the humidity and set expectations of play. During Brazil’s World Cup, players sprinted less and passed more crisply in response to hot weather, for example. During games, keeping players cool and hydrated will matter. The same goes for spectators, although a recent health advisory emphasized getting flu and covid vaccinations ahead of the games as the key health step for visitors.