You can. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm just watching the the last of the crowd making their way into the lecture theatre.
Take your time. Take your time and slow with my introductions. It's a pleasure to welcome you all to the Tuesday night seminar.
The seminar series where we are opportunistically taking advantage of new authors who
have been bringing out the books that have been defining the debate in our field.
And tonight is no exception, as we are on the eve of the World Cup in Doha, Qatar.
We find that there has been no shortage of debate. More smoke, perhaps, than light.
And so when given the opportunity to welcome John McManus, whose new book Inside Qatar has only just appeared,
I am told, not coincidentally timed to when there might be new interest in Qatar.
It's true to examine the state of the society that's going to be the first Arab country to host a World Cup football tournament,
an event that I'm sure has brought each of you. And one would expect the international community at large a great deal of joy and
satisfaction to see the beautiful game being brought to a whole new corner of the globe.
But then I watch television and I read my newspapers,
and I find that the attitude that people bring to the discussion on Qatar hosting the World Cup is somehow
different for that celebration of the sharing of the beautiful game in a whole new part of the globe.
In some ways, of course, Qatar has brought this criticism onto itself,
and in some ways, perhaps there is an unfairness to the criticisms being levelled.
What I would say, having read through John's book, is that while he is in no sense trying to propagandise for the country of Qatar,
far from it, that in his study up close of the country, there is a degree of engagement, of sympathy and of honesty.
That leaves you with a much better sense of what hosting the World Cup means for
Qatar and what Qatar's experience of this year means for the future of the country.
So who is John McManus? Well, John McManus is no stranger to this community and fills in the audience.
Take note that after a decade from completing your degree, you should be a famous author invited back here to speak to our audience.
John came to do the M Phil in what year was a John 2008.
2008. In the course of which, he managed to get by with a passably good degree,
wrote a thesis that Walter Argus and I both thought was probably one of the best you've ever read.
Says that to all of you. I say that for all of my students not served on the support network for the best touch football team in Turkey.
It was just such a joy to read that. Have you ever published a part of that?
The book before this was on Turkish football, so thesis made its way in part and partly into a book.
So I should have it on hand to like recommend to you to read. But yeah, it's a good read.
So after which John stayed on and altered for his sins to do a doctorate in anthropology.
And if there's more to the John McManus story than that, I'm sure it'll come up in the course of this conversation.
From my perspective, it's just a joy after many, many years to get to welcome you back, John,
to congratulate you on writing a book that I found absolutely compelling from beginning to end,
and to invite you to address this audience with some reflections on Inside John, because.
Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Jim. I'm blushing a bit now for that very, very wholesome introduction.
Yes, the Middle East centre is holds a very fond place in my heart.
I didn't really know very much about the Middle East at all. Before I started on the Masters.
So those of you that I should know.
But I'm not it's not a it's not an exaggeration to say that kind of the touch paper,
which very much led many years later to this book and to set me on a course which I'm very grateful for.
So, yeah, my thanks to Jane and the staff for that. So we're 12 days away from the start of this FIFA World Cup.
And as Eugene kind of said himself, it's safe to say that it's it's been one of the most ambitious and controversial of any so far.
Qatar, the host, has come in for sustained criticism on topics such as workers, welfare, freedom of speech and treatment of LGBT people.
And the authorities and organisers have pushed back with equal force hiring PR companies,
spending money to influence fans and accusing their critics of racism.
But what of the country that's hosting the tournament? What are the lives of real people like in Qatar?
That for me was the starting premise of this book.
So as you mentioned, these in anthropology.
I'm neither an Arabic speaker nor a Gulf specialist. My research is focussed mostly on sport and migration.
And as I mentioned before, Turkey has been my main focus and the language I speak where I've been living aside from Qatar for the last seven years.
But as the clock ticked down towards 2022, the topics and issues coalescing in Qatar just pulled me in.
You know, the first World Cup in the Middle East, a country defined by migration.
89% of the population of migrants and the current literature on Qatar is dominated by political science and economic takes.
You know, it's all rentier states and soft power initiatives and global hydrocarbon markets.
You know, this is a time and place for that. But the anthropologist in me was kind of crying out for the voices of ordinary people.
And so the context of the book is based largely on ethnographic research,
which I conducted mostly in 2019 and 2020 when I was a visiting scholar at Qatar University.
And yes, I recognise the nice audience has probably more than passing knowledge of the Gulf and the Middle East.
So I'm not going to try and out expert the experts.
But at the same time I do feel intense frustration, academia's inability often to convey information to non-experts.
I think there's a place for a beginner's eye and a simple turn of phrase,
a more important space in the overall conversation for more of the voices of those actually living and working in the region.
So the book itself is not, as the cover might suggest,
it's not an academic book saying to a general audience, you know nothing about the Middle East or cuts up.
I've tried to make my tours equally accessible. If you want more information on certain elements, feel free to ask in the Q&A.
So I've structured it around five anthropological vignettes,
which I think provide interesting glimpses into life in Qatar just before beginning the first one.
I feel I should say that I'm using pseudonyms throughout. Apart from on one occasion, which I will make clear when I'm not.
So without further ado, this is Ali.
So in Qatar, when you need to buy a cricket bat, everybody tells you the same thing.
Call Ali a diminutive, polite with a thick ish beard and messy hair.
Ali works primarily in accounts for a tourism agency,
but his real passion is designing and setting cricket products from his apartment, a small room in a villa on the outskirts of Doha.
So as those of you familiar with the Gulf will know, the countries of the region are hubs of migration.
Qatar's population is 89% migrants.
Substantial numbers of those come from the rest of the Arab world and a lot from the Philippines.
But the largest proportion by far are migrants from South Asia, India, Pakistan.
Sri Lanka. Bangladesh. Nepal. Some 1.8 million or 55% of the population.
And as anybody who has visited South Asia will know within 5 minutes, people that love cricket.
And so through migration, their most popular sport has also become Qatar's.
So, you know, for the last 12 years,
we've been hearing those of us following it anyway as the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been spent getting Qatar ready for the World Cup.
You know, and this tournament is the crown jewel of a wider strategy by Qatar to become globally recognised for sport.
Other elements include the purchasing of the French football team, Paris Saint-Germain,
hosting of other sporting events from Formula One to tennis tournaments.
Despite this clear interest in sport, cricket in Qatar remains a relatively low key affair.
So the Catalogue Cricket Association, the body that runs the game in the country, has an annual budget of mere hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So compare that to the cost of the World Cup, if you will. There are no professional cricketers in Qatar.
The players on the national team hold down day jobs. And as some of these pictures will show, there are only a handful of proper facilities,
meaning most cricketers are forced to play on carparks, building sites and other rudimentary areas.
So why is this? I mean, firstly, Qataris are not including cricket for the most part, nor do they need to be.
But I do think that cricket speaks to a wider ambivalence in Qatar towards people from the Asian subcontinent.
Again, as those of you who are scholars in the region know, the Gulf and India have been intimately entwined for millennia.
And for a lot of that time, it was India that was the wealthy powerhouse.
You know, India supplied the words used for building golf boats. Then the cloth in which golfers dressed India moneylenders financed golf projects.
And as late as the 1960s, the main currency of the region was not the pound of the dino, the real, but the rupee.
And in recent years, the economic miracle of the Gulf has been generated on the back of millions of people,
mostly men migrating from South Asia to the region, to stuff everything from oil rigs and gas pipelines to hotels and shopping malls.
The South Asians like the migrant population more broadly.
Frequently, in transactional terms, it seems to me, you know, they hate to make the country grow and in return to make money for themselves,
but not really to settle down or call the place home, despite many doing exactly that over many decades.
And there's a term I love which captures this paradox, and it coined by the anthropologist Neha Vohra.
South Asians in the Gulf, she says, are impossible citizens essential to the workings of the state and economy,
but never afforded the protections or full benefits of official belonging.
But beyond the cricket encounter reveals the resourcefulness in the face of this of of South Asians in the country.
To me is a great example of how people just roll up their sleeves and get on with it and the lack of support they're given.
And a good example is some of these pictures are showing is that exists version of the game in Qatar played with tennis balls.
So rather than the hard core and never ball of the official version which requires parts and equipment and a proper pitch,
a tennis ball just requires a short, flat expanse of land and back.
And they also start games at six in the morning just to avoid the heat.
And yeah, many, many of the car parks in the country turn into cricket pitches for a few hours on a Friday morning.
From the outside, it often looks like these are quite low fi affairs.
But games are. There are lots of leagues and most of the games are actually electronically scored.
So people have apps on their phones and they're feeding scores into live updates on league websites.
You know, like baseball, if there are any Americans. Cricket is a game that like loves it stats.
So players have access to huge databases of batter,
strike rates and wickets taken and run rates of different sites which they love to share and boast about.
So this is a hobby in contrast to the World Cup, which is very much a top down initiative.
Cricket in Qatar, for the most part, is bottom up, formed and organised by enthusiasts,
financed in large part by local South Asian businesses, and from the sponsorship and displays a real sense of pan-Asian solidarity.
And even without state support, cricket ism will remain the backbone of life for thousands of South Asians living in Qatar.
I'm with you. This is Nasser A in his fifties with his falcon.
I had the good fortune of being taken out by Nasser to watch him train his birds.
So falconry has a long history in the Middle East, going back centuries.
But falconry in today's Qatar is a far cry from early hunting trips.
It takes place with lots of technological equipment, such as four by four long cruises radio antenna.
The birds themselves cost a lot of money. This one, shown in this picture, was $35,000.
If Nasser is to be believed, he has five birds.
Falcon is race the best specimens in competitions where the prizes can be brand new cars.
And when they're when they are on, well, there's even a state subsidised Falcon Hospital that they can handle a thousand birds a week.
So these birds of prey have become a hobby and a status symbol in today's cats are
a source of bonding amongst men and women are conspicuously absent in falconry,
love and even totems for the nation. I think why was the first question that's come to my mind?
And I think to understand the importance of falconry, you have to bear in mind the size and the speed of the change that the country has undergone.
You know, in the 1950s, Qatar was one of the poorest places on the planet.
The economy was based around pearl diving, which collapsed as a result of the Wall Street crash and the development of cultivated pearls in Japan.
So this is a country where the population dwindled to mere tens of thousands before
geologists working for the Anglo Persian oil company discovered oil in 1939 1949,
the oil exports began and cattle started to grow. 1970s, one of the largest gas fields in the world, was discovered off Qatar's coast.
And since the 1990s, it's become one of the biggest exporters of liquid liquefied natural gas.
And so profitable is the income from hydrocarbons today.
The Qatari government has no need to tax individual citizens.
Their wealth is protected by making citizenship by birth or naturalisation next to impossible to obtain,
and mechanisms have been generated for distributing the largesse in the form of free university education,
generous gifts of land, and well-paid jobs in the state sector.
Politically, the wealth is seen to have tempered demands for democracy socially.
Changes in lifestyles have been destabilising.
You have elderly katsaris you remember having no running water and their grandsons racing sports cars down Doha streets.
And of course, this led to a huge influx of migrants. Population in Qatar is roughly doubled every decade.
Slowing down a bit more recently. Today, it's close to 3 million, of which Katsaris believed to be around about 350,000.
So it's a bit of a cliche to roll out pops forms and arranges inventive concepts of invented tradition.
But, you know, we falconry in Qatar, it fits so perfectly to this schema.
So for those of you not aware of it, it's their idea that if you pay beyond many traditions that appear to be old,
you realise that they are in fact recently manufactured and they're being put to
work to establish social cohesion or inculcate sets and beliefs and value systems.
So the way I think about falconry today in Qatar, these people are less direct descendants of people roaming the peninsula.
Millennia ago are more the proponents of new traditions,
of displays of status linked to consumption of a class of people divorced from worries about income,
wondering instead what to do with their leisure time.
And crucially, Hobsbawm Rangers suggest that such inventive traditions occur more readily in societies undergoing great social flux and change.
And that's certainly the case for Cantor,
where every day a battle is being waged within a small community of nationals over the question Who are categories and what do they stand for?
I mean, that's the case for all countries, of course, but it felt particularly fierce in Qatar.
Falconry, its proponents argue, is one of the few shared cultural touchstones.
This can be a thread linking us to our past and consequently an important way of the pressing on Qatar's traditional values of thrift,
self-denial and egalitarianism. So the pride that most of these falcons catch the pigeons, but that's only due to their abundance.
What most countries like to catch is poop, but are some coloured mustard a bit like a pheasant?
So Hooper, a native to the Gulf, but they no longer live in the wild due to overhunting.
And so queen of many golf fees to hunt these birds that they organise hawking trips to lands where they're more plentiful,
such as Azerbaijan, Iraq and Pakistan.
And they can often take on lavish proportions, costing millions of dollars and involving hundreds of people camped out in a mini city of tents.
Calgary can even have geopolitical implications. During the 2014 hunts in Pakistan.
Saudi Prince Fahad bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz killed 2100 kuber over 21 days,
about 20 times more than his allocated quota, sparking a diplomatic incident the following year,
2015, nine members of the country royal family were kidnapped by Iranian militias while hunting in Iraq to get the hostages released.
The country state is reported to have paid $360 million in cash and forced the proxies
they were supporting in the Syrian civil war to make several battlefield concessions.
So as just a glimpse into next, this is far more than flying birds.
As we drove back from the afternoon of Falcon training, Nasser talked to me about his 14 year old son.
He was so different in mentality and outlook from himself. When he sitting with you, he speaks with you about the politics.
He speaks of you about business all the time. The child, he said to me, he likes business.
As he contrasted their lives, Nasser sounded rueful. It's a different life.
Different 100%. Part three.
This is wrecker Barbados tsunami. That's his real name, he told me.
Whenever I present or write, he wanted me to use his full name.
So Raka is from Nepal. And 47 years old.
He went to Qatar in 2009 to work to support his wife and six children.
So on the 12th of November 2018, while erecting scaffolding in a petrochemical plant,
he was badly burned in a work accident, suffering life changing injuries.
Three of the workers died, but he survived, thanks in part to wearing the correct protective clothing.
The photograph is, needless to say, before the accident.
So his employer initially responded well, providing him with his salary and arranging transport for him to attend his daily doctor appointments.
But on a trip home to Nepal in 2020, Ricky told me that it changed.
The company began laying off staff due to a lack of work, and despite wanting to return to Doha to finish his treatment,
Ricky found himself pressured into signing papers, terminating his contract.
He now sits at home. His injuries have not healed properly, and he's reliant on his adult children who work in agriculture in his village.
So in recent years, the main thing outsiders have come to learn about Qatar is that it has come in
for fierce criticism for the way low income workers in the country are treated.
A lot of the issues stemmed from the system of sponsorship based employment the country uses, known by the Arabic name of Kafala under kafala.
Every non-citizen in Qatar, from an American PR consultant to a South Asian labourer, needs a sponsor in order to be resident in the country.
And this means that private individuals arriving in the states have the responsibility for worker status.
Private individuals or companies and workers are bound to their sponsors in
arrangements that often make it difficult to raise complaints or change jobs.
So there have been moves to change elements of the system, which I will speak about in due course.
But the capitalist system is the underpinning structural factor in the exploitation and abuse faced by many workers in Qatar.
From there, the injustices leak out and suffuse the entire arc of migration to the Gulf.
So to go to the beginning to work in Qatar, most workers pay fees to a recruiter, despite laws that prohibit charging individuals in this way.
These fees are usually around 1000 to $1500.
Many workers can't pay that kind of cash upfront, and so take out loans or arrange for the amount to be attracted from their wages.
Raqqa, incidentally, borrowed ₹200,000, about $1,600 from people in this village.
Most banks in Nepal do not lend to people like him without credit rating.
When they arrive, workers sometimes find their passports are confiscated despite laws prohibiting this.
Many workers are also subjected to contract substitution,
where the contract that they signed in their home country has disappeared and is replaced by a new agreement with less favourable terms,
often in Arabic, which most workers don't know. Labour camps.
Most industrial, most low income workers live in labour camps, which are securitised self-contained compounds on the outskirts of Doha.
Some of this accommodation is in a really poor state, overcrowded and dirty, and there is a big issue with late or non-payment of wages.
Now, Rector was paid all the money owed him by his company, but many of us aren't.
And I lost count of the number of people I spoke with who had not been paid on time.
Some backlogs of over half a year salary.
Most workers in Qatar are not there for a jolly or just on their own.
They are the sole source of income for their families.
So this link or non-payment of wages doesn't just affect them.
It results in missed meals and unpaid school fees half a world away and under pressure from the International Labour Organisation,
various media organisations and NGOs.
Qatar has opened its labour rules, is introduced, electronic oversight of salary payments, increased accommodation and worksite inspections.
It introduced the minimum wage and removed the requirement to get permission from an employer before changing jobs.
The problem isn't the substance of the laws. The laws are pretty decent compared to many other countries in the region.
The problem is with their enforcement. NGOs are still reporting problems of unpaid wages.
Difficulty in changing jobs. And that seems to be growing pushback from employers against the rules.
You know, some employers even go as far as to use other mechanisms, such as filing false charges of absconding to stop workers moving jobs.
So what this means is the situation on the ground for many hasn't substantially improved despite the new laws.
And I think it's important to realise that this precarity surrounding labour is not limited to male construction workers.
They receive the attention, perhaps because they're the ones building stadiums and out in the sun,
but is even worse off than for other groupings in Qatar, particularly domestic workers.
So domestic work is actually governed by separate laws. So when laws are being changed in that sort of general labour contract,
domestic workers are often left outside the scope of improvements because they mostly work alone.
They face a high risk of exploitation and a triple whammy of discrimination as low income workers as people of colour and as women.
So government spokespeople in Qatar display increasing frustration with what they see as an unrelenting focus by Western media on workers welfare.
There's a suggestion that Qatar isn't being treated fairly, and it's important.
We must acknowledge that as Eugene kind of flagged a bit in the introduction, some of the criticism absolutely carries the width of Orientalism.
Nearly all of it is also missing an awareness of the longer histories of colonial involvement in the region,
especially the complicity of the British in the capitalist system.
And Westerners frequently inveigh against injustice in the region with an anger that is rarely present when talking about injustices elsewhere,
particularly at home. Nevertheless, with that aside, as late as last year,
workers in Qatar were telling me personally stories that suggest that there are still substantial issues and
therefore I think it's completely incitement to talk about it until those issues are systematically resolved.
I'll finish this section with a quote from one domestic worker, a man called Maggie,
who was from Kenya, who articulated the situation most powerfully.
Here you are, caged. You are being told to do this and that.
You see yourself like you are no good. She told me we lost self.
Most domestic work is always stressed and always depressed.
Four. In October 2019, I attended a forum on labour in Qatar.
So I watched as a government minister took the microphone.
He told the audience the raft of new laws which seemed to come into operation, they would transform the situation of workers in the country.
Quite. There were red lines in the past in the state of Qatar.
We have undoubtedly made a quantum leap in this regard. He said.
It is impossible for us to go back. The microphone was then passed to another category and the audience sat dumbfounded
as he launched into a repudiation of everything the first speaker did just praised.
If you completely abolish exit permits, he told us what would stop the employee going to the bank,
withdrawing $1 million in cash from the government company account and leaving the country.
Qatar was a unique case. We in the audience were told, quote, My community, my society is different.
We need time to adapt anyway.
So what was so unusual for me about this exchange was that it made public what everybody knew was happening behind closed doors.
That is extreme battles amongst katsaris about how far to go in labour reforms.
So as I briefly touched upon with the [INAUDIBLE], even though there are only 350,000 country citizens, it's a mistake to view them as monolithic.
The division in opinion speaks to more profound fissures about the country's direction of travel.
Countries on the whole are often small c conservative in outlook.
A large importance is placed on the family structures of power.
A very paternalistic A men and women are largely encouraged to subscribe to traditional gender roles.
Life in Katsaris, punctuated by visible displays of Islam, radio broadcasts and music in shopping malls is interrupted broadcasts.
The call to prayer, for instance. And one 2011 study said that only 61% of married country women were in favour of contraception.
At the same time, there are sizeable numbers, especially amongst the young whose outlook has been shaped by the country's recent modernisation drive.
You katsaris can go to university for free. Many have received education campuses of US universities in Doha.
Many study abroad. Three times as many country women as men graduate from university.
Women are very much encouraged by the state to work.
I think it's wrong to assume that the younger generation are, quote unquote, more liberal than for fathers.
I think that's the case everywhere around the world. And Qatar is no different.
For instance, there was a survey by the anthropologist Miriam Cooke,
who I think taught in Doha in 2010 of university students showing that many
considered tribal identity to be really important when considering a life partner,
they would not want their own children to marry into a, quote, unquote, lower tribe.
And so, you know, the rulers of Qatar are trying to steer a ship on which there are people pulling in very different directions.
And that's an incredibly difficult thing to do. And the result is, you know, policy, which often seems quite schizophrenic, or at least,
you know, from from a zoom perspective, doesn't always make a lot of sense.
And labour laws are a great example. So you pass new labour laws, which make it easier for workers to leave their jobs.
But then the government looks the other way if sponsors prohibit the movement of employees by other means.
A church was opened in Doha in 2008, I think for foreigners to worship.
But then the main mosque is named after the Saudi founder of the Islamic Doctrine that Wahhabism and trying to keep
on board all these sections at the same time and living in that to me to my eyes and the countries who I spoke to,
it's very difficult. On the one hand, you're inheriting a set of cultural traditions forged in circumstances of poverty,
but living in a world of fast cars, international travel and government handouts.
How do young people in Qatar personally shape the country's future?
Many were talking about this before that.
I think that Qatar is very much not a gentle Kristie, and I think that's really important in a lot of prominent roles,
including the head of the organisation organising the World Cup.
You have young people in their late, late thirties and forties and that's to be commended.
But at the same time, you know,
you can't vote for political parties with a different vision for the country and also for all the high number of women in education.
Women are rarely the heads of businesses or government departments.
And it's probably unfashionable to feel sorry for young Katsaris.
Given all the material wealth they have at their disposal. But by the end of my stay, that was the point I'd reached.
And I remember one conversation very vividly with a young Katsura adventurer.
He is a motorcyclist who travels the globe on his bike.
And I asked him what had been the most formative takeaway from his travels.
Well, he said, and paused for a second. I've met lots of happier people than us in Qatar.
Okay. So this is the fifth and final section. This is Kumar or more accurately, Kumar's car.
Kumar worked in cattle for ten years. The last two and a half as a taxi driver.
A week before he was due to leave Doha for his home in Sri Lanka, he talked to me.
The main reason for people coming to Qatar is that their country is not developed much.
He told me it is quite frustrated speaking. They don't have any jobs in their country.
They cannot earn money in their country. Even me. We can earn money.
But it's not enough. It's not enough for our family maintenance.
I find his words are a good intro to my final point,
which is that the situation in Qatar cannot be understood outside the context of wider global trends in migration inequality.
You know, a lot of the criticism of Qatar often sort of separates out some place that is completely detached from anywhere else.
And that's frustrating because when you speak to migrant workers like Kumar or Raqqa,
I was often struck by the sense of inevitability about their decision to move to the Gulf for work.
They didn't really have any regrets. Even Raqqa, you know, was suffered life changing injuries as a result of going because.
Why is that? The wholly uneven,
uneven pattern of global development meant that they felt they have no other option but to leave their home country in search of better paying work.
And it needs saying that for all the stories of worker exploitation in Qatar,
there are many thousands from the world's poorest regions who make the country work for them.
They are the ones fortunate enough to avoid the charlatan brokers.
Perhaps they're blessed with a sponsor who pays them on time.
They work, they save, and as a result, they transform their own lives and those of their families and then further up the hierarchy.
Qatar offers many perks a higher wage than you might get in Europe or America.
A mortgage paid off more quickly, a great professional opportunity.
So, yes, Qatar is a stark example of the pernicious illness of global contemporary capitalism, but it is far from the only one.
Some of the same problems and systems that bring workers to CATA also compel people to
take rickety boats across the Mediterranean or change their luck through the desert.
Border guards at the US-Mexico Frontier. And sometimes I wonder if, on the subject of labour exploitation and inequality, Doha is weirdly more honest.
So the world is divided into two distinct spheres, separate and unequal.
You might come to understand very well the inequality within a particular society or country,
but especially in Europe, that pales in comparison to inequality globally.
You can't see the global stratification with own eyes.
There is no personal interaction with the Bangladeshi women.
Pay pennies to make your T-shirt or the Congolese mining cobalt for your battery and your phone.
But when you're in Qatar, it often feels like the extreme wealth and poverty coexist.
The inequity has no place to hide. That said, the dynamics in Qatar,
particularly laissez faire when the reality of this global inequality interacts with an immigration system that hands too much power to an employer.
The result is a situation that can be easily exploited.
And even those who believe they are safe from abusive practices can suddenly find
themselves ensnared and in wrestling with the situation of workers in Qatar.
I kept coming back to the memory of Stephen, and this is the final anecdote on which I'll finish.
So in October 2020, I met Stephen, who is originally from the Philippines in his flat in Doha, say.
He told me he worked as a mechanical engineer for a construction company.
But actually his main passion was serving as a community volunteer, helping Filipinos with work troubles in Qatar.
For months after we met. I heard from a mutual friend that Stephen himself is in trouble.
His company haven't paid his salary for five months. He had been taken to court by his landlord for the unpaid rent on his flat,
and while waiting for the court date, a travel ban had been issued against him.
I just pray in the corner and cry, he wrote to me on WhatsApp.
Why suffer like this? I'm working hard with my heart.
I'm the community leader. Helping others for how many years?
But now here I am, facing the same difficulties. And this is the human impact of Qatar's Wild West labour market.
You can be sitting pretty and then through no fault of your own, find yourself destitute, penniless or deported.
And I think that precarity and the fear that stems from it was the most abiding memory from my time researching the book.
And I will finish on that note. Well, I'm going to start with a conversation with you,
because the things that come out of the book that you didn't get a chance to talk about in what is it, 11 days time?
1212. We're going to have the first match and it's the host country club kicking off against Ecuador.
I think so, yeah. Sounds like a really one sided match because we all know that there is no football in Qatar.
If there's a team in Qatar, they must have hired them all in from abroad.
And it's one of the reasons why everyone thinks Qatar hosting this tournament is a total joke.
I mean, I'm sure I read that you book somewhere or maybe I got it wrong.
Maybe you talk us through the Asian Cup experience and what this has been for
Qatar in trying to actually have a team to play when the World Cup comes to town.
Yes, thanks. So, you know, there are many criticisms of Qatar which are perfectly valid and have been aired over the past 12 years.
But one which is definitely unfair is that it's a country that doesn't like football,
has no interest in the game, has no desire or passion in terms of watching the game.
People love it. In terms of also playing the game is huge and is kind of alluding to over the past decade or so,
Qatar has put in place like an incredibly ambitious strategy to develop a good football team,
basically in part to ensure that they're not going to be embarrassed in 12 days time.
And this has worked. So, yes, in 2005, the country national team was was mostly kind of naturalised foreigners.
And it came in for a lot of ridicule.
FIFA, in fact, changed the eligibility requirements as a result, a direct result of an attempt by Katsav to naturalise three Brazilians in one game.
But in 2005, so way before the World Cup, the World Cup was awarded in 2010.
So this this predates the World Cup in 2005.
Qatar decided to build their own talent academy in the country.
And this was an to marry decree.
The emir's brother, Sheikh Jassim, was put in charge of it, which, you know, means that you got a line right to the top.
Billions of dollars are spent on it.
Coaches were recruited from around the world and they embarked on the most astonishing talent search within Qatar.
Now, as you see, there's not a lot of people in Qatar, so there's only something like 7000 registered footballers,
which I think is probably, you know, more than that in Oxford.
I mean, not perhaps not, but certainly more in a large city. So Qatar has to really basically anybody any man who, you know,
could halfway run kick a football was already they're interested you know come along let's try.
And from that they whittle it down and Winslet down and they come up with they recruit kind of 15
or so boys every year and they they dump them into this academy and they provide accommodation,
education and of course, loads of coaching.
And by generating this kind of collegiate atmosphere and by having good coaches, giving them time,
you actually can generate a decent team like football is ultimately despite the
Messi's and Ronaldo's of this world is very much a team sport and a well-organised,
decent team will often beat a mediocre team with like one star player.
So they put a lot of effort and time into developing this team.
And then in 2019, against everyone's expectations, including even the coaches.
I know this first because I spoke to some of them. They went and won the Asian Cup, which is the equivalent of the European Championships.
So for the region of Asia, it's the biggest prize you can get.
And they won it in 2019 and did so quite handsomely.
Yeah. And so what are we expecting to happen in the opening match? Well, they're going to be in with a team that can actually compete.
I mean, on that stage, yeah, I do want it to turn into sounds like a like a match of the day conversation.
But I've been dying for this match all my life.
I mean, since that 2019 victory, they their fortunes have kind of waxed and waned a bit.
And the World Cup is obviously you can't really prepare people for like that stage.
It's the biggest stage for most footballers and is home World Cup.
The pressure is just going to be insane. The season, the domestic season in Qatar finished in September.
And these players have just been in, I think, in Spain or Switzerland for two months,
just essentially cut off from the world playing some friendly matches here and there.
But they're just kind of just keeping them trying to just I don't know,
I guess keep them in like some sort of cryogenic status and then they'll just buzz them in and hope that they do.
All right. And I just don't know. I mean, I hope that they do alright because I think it's really the tournament's a better when the hosts do well.
But I also think it's a good example of an institute in Qatar which is actually engaged in long term planning and has empowered its employees.
You know, I came across quite a lot of short term thinking in a lot of institutions,
both public and private, and especially amongst knowledge workers.
You know, just you're not doing the job will sack you, get someone else and you're not that important.
And that's not really a recipe for success in, you know, for anything that involves, you know, hard things that take time.
But I want to keep pushing you on this coterie team. So do they have a name and face recognition at home?
I say they're local heroes. People will talk about Jassim.
This is Mahmoud that. Yeah, yeah. Always. Ali is like one of the.
Yeah. And Akram Afif. Yeah, they're absolutely known throughout the country.
And the interesting thing is that and I mentioned it in passing, but 11% of the population of Qatar are citizens and 89% of residents.
But so most of the football team actually come from that 89%, obviously not immediately, because that's where most of the population is.
But from what I can see, katsaris really like, you know, doesn't really make any distinction.
It's not like they're just cheering for the two in the team who are actually, quote unquote,
like proper katsaris or whatever they seem to be get behind the wall, really, and a very proud of them and get really excited by them.
And why not? I mean, these if these if the same dynamics are in the UK or whatever, these people would be British citizens or American citizens.
It's just because of this quite old, very strict citizenship law that they're not necessarily considered citizens.
Although by the way, after the 2019 success, I think that the IMMI granted citizenship to the non citizens team,
although it's such a touchy subject, that it's very hard to find definitive proof of what's going on in those results.
Yeah, and the blockade was seen as being something that was really a regional wrench being thrown in Qatar was planning the lifting of the blockade.
Has that had any impact on the way in which Qatar's hosting of this event allows it to be absorbed in the broader GCC?
Absolutely. And I would not be surprised if the World Cup was a significant factor in the end of the blockade.
So I actually spoke last month to the head of accommodation services, so the person in charge of accommodation, the organisers.
And he told me that the second largest nationality to book accommodation in Qatar Saudis.
So you know, that obviously wouldn't have happened before 2021.
And I think that a lot of the countries in the region, if you have a if you have entry to Qatar via a match ticket,
all the other countries are dropping their visa requirements. So you can go to Iran for free, you can go to Saudi for free.
And I think that they already a lot of funds are going to stay in Dubai and fly in because Dubai
obviously has far more infrastructure in terms of hotels and also is just more well known.
So the region has really since the blockade has ended,
it's really stepped up its game in terms of trying to and I think it's driven by wanting to piggyback off the back of it.
I spoke to a hotel manager in Qatar who said that Dubai is the main winner of this actually because Qatar hasn't.
Qatar's been quite slow in providing non expensive accommodation options and by the by the time they have the now,
but the funds already make their plans and a lot of them have basically said, stop this,
I'll stay in Dubai, I'll fly in for the games that is County Dubai at work yet again.
They're always able to take advantage of whatever opportunity comes their way.
Okay. John McCain's.