Amnesty International criticized, on Wednesday, the decision of the International Football Association (FIFA) to grant Saudi Arabia the honor of organizing the FIFA Club World Cup, scheduled for the end of this year, due to the Kingdom’s record in the field of human rights.
And “FIFA” announced, on Tuesday, the appointment of “the Saudi Football Association as the host of the tournament from December 12 to 22, 2023,” noting that the decision was unanimously approved by the International Federation Council.
In response to the decision, Steve Cockburn, Head of Economic and Social Justice at Amnesty International, said FIFA had “once once more ignored Saudi Arabia’s atrocious human rights record”.
“FIFA has once once more abandoned its human rights policy and is blatantly complicit in sports laundering,” he added.
The previous decision of “FIFA” to grant sponsorship of the Women’s World Cup, which will be hosted by New Zealand and Australia next July, to the “Visit Saudi” body, also sparked widespread criticism.
And the star of the US soccer team, Alex Morgan, described this sponsorship deal as:weird“.
As for Cockburn, he said in particular: “In the wake of granting Visit Saudi tourism as a sponsor of the Women’s World Cup, it was announced that the Kingdom would host the Club World Cup without any regard for freedom of expression, discrimination or workers’ rights.”
The global rights group also said that in recent months, Saudi authorities have stepped up their brutal crackdown on freedom of expression, sentencing people to prison terms ranging from 10 to 45 years simply for their peaceful expression online.
The authorities also continue, according to the organization’s statement, to execute people for a number of crimes. “On one day last year, 81 people were executed, many of whom were tried in unfair trials,” according to Amnesty’s description.
The statement criticized FIFA by saying that although it announced achieving $7.5 billion in revenue during 2019-2022, and is expected to achieve $11 billion over the next four years, “it has not yet approved a compensation fund for migrant workers in Qatar.”
Saudi Arabia’s hosting of the Club World Cup is the latest step for the Kingdom to storm the sports scene strongly recently, with its entry into the Formula One racing calendar, hosting the “Live Golf” tournaments, the Spanish Super Cup and the Italian Super Cup, and strengthening its football league with international stars, most notably the Portuguese star Cristiano Ronaldo, who moved From Manchester United to Al-Nasr Club, with a contract until 2025, in a fictional deal estimated at more than 200 million euros.
Saudi Arabia was chosen early this month to host the 2027 AFC Asian Cup for men, while it also submitted a file to host the 2026 AFC Asian Cup for women, and it may consider submitting a joint candidacy with Egypt and Greece to host the 2030 World Cup.
In the coming years, the Kingdom, which witnessed Qatar hosting the first World Cup in the Middle East and an Arab country in late 2022, will host the 2034 Asian Games, and even the 2029 Asian Winter Games on artificial snow in the giant futuristic city of Neom.
