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Soccer

FIFA urged to engage with Qatar's government about impact of kafala system

Dean Mouhtaropoulos / Getty Images Sport / Getty

As the corruption scandal engulfing FIFA hits the courtrooms, the 2022 World Cup is under the microscope.

On Thursday, FIFA’s Human Rights Advisory Board published its first report. In it, the advisory board recommends that FIFA press Qatar’s government about the impact of the kafala system on migrant workers involved in construction for the 2022 World Cup.

The kafala system is regarded as modern slavery, requiring migrant workers to obtain the consent of their employers to terminate their employment contracts. The report recommends that “FIFA actively explore ways to use its leverage to engage with the host government about the impact of the kafala system on migrant workers involved in World Cup-related construction.”

According to the Guardian’s David Conn, the number of workers in Qatar who are brought in from poorer countries – India, Nepal, Bangladesh – and who are employed to build eight stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, is expected to rise from 12,000 to 36,000 over the next year. The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, a quasi-governmental committee organising the tournament, told Human Rights Watch that they expect the number of workers on their projects to peak at around 35,000 by late 2018 or early 2019.

In September, Human Rights Watch said that thousands of migrant workers on construction sites in Qatar, including those building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, are being subjected to “potentially life-threatening heat and humidity.” The Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy classified eight deaths between October 2015 and July 2017 as “non-work-related,” listing seven of them as the result of “cardiac arrest” and “acute respiratory failure.” But, as Human Rights Watch pointed out, the terms “obscure the underlying cause of deaths and make it impossible to determine whether they may be related to working conditions, such as heat stress.”

The advisory board was created in early 2017 to provide “independent advice” on FIFA’s human-rights responsibilities. The expert group is comprised of eight representatives and includes members from the UN System, civil society, trade unions, and FIFA sponsors.

Fatma Samoura, FIFA’s general secretary, said: “This report shows that FIFA is making important progress in integrating respect for human rights throughout its wide range of activities. We are taking a pioneering role in that regard and feel privileged to be able to count on the outstanding support of the advisory board members. They validate the important progress that is taking place and challenge us where more is still to be done.”

Nicholas McGeehan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who sounded the alarm about dangerous conditions in Qatar and the unexplained death of thousands of workers, sees the report as inadequate. He declared that it was “shocking” that explicit and urgent recommendations weren’t made to prevent workers from the dangerous conditions and investigate the unexplained deaths.

The International Trade Union Confederation welcomed a breakthrough to end the kafala system in October, announcing that new guidance and commitments made by Qatar’s government will dismantle the system.

NFL

OTL: Jones threatens to sue NFL over Goodell
5:11 PM ET

  • Don Van Natta Jr.

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    ESPN Senior Writer
    • Member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams for national, explanatory and public service journalism
    • Author of three books, including New York Times best-selling “First Off the Tee: Presidential Hackers, Duffers, and Cheaters from Taft to Bush”
    • 24-year newspaper career at The New York Times and Miami Herald

  • Seth Wickersham

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    ESPN Senior Writer
    • Senior Writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine
    • Joined ESPN The Magazine after graduating from the University of Missouri.
    • Although he primarily covers the NFL, his assignments also have taken him to the Athens Olympics, the World Series, the NCAA tournament and the NHL and NBA playoffs.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has threatened to sue the National Football League if a contract extension for commissioner Roger Goodell is approved by the league’s compensation committee, sources told Outside the Lines.

A team owner and a team executive told Outside the Lines that Jones has hired David Boies, the famed New York lawyer who represented Vice President Al Gore in the deadlocked 2000 presidential election — and who led the NFL’s court case during a dispute over the 2011 Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations. More recently, Boies defended Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein against sexual assault allegations.

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The New York Times first reported the development on Wednesday.

The sources told Outside the Lines that Jones has been exploring the lawsuit option through Boies, if Goodell’s contract is extended after the 2018 season as is being considered. Boies represents DraftKings, the daily fantasy company in which Jones was an early investor.

Jones has not identified the grounds of such a lawsuit, but one source said Jones is exploring whether a requirement that two-thirds of owners must approve a commissioner’s contract could be increased to three-fourths of owners. Another source said that Boies also might be asked by Jones to produce a report showing the negative economic impact that Goodell’s major decisions, including player discipline, have had on clubs.

A lawyer who has close ties to the NFL praised Boies’ skill as a lawyer to OTL but said that his hiring was likely a “scare tactic” because there doesn’t appear to be an obvious legal challenge to Goodell’s contract negotiations, a process that Jones voted in support of earlier in the year. Jones “probably knows he doesn’t have a strong claim,” the lawyer said.

Neither Jones nor Boies could be immediately reached for comment. NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart declined comment.

The Times reported that Jones, in a conference call last week with the six owners on the compensation committee, told them that legal papers were drawn up and would be served Friday if the committee did not scrap its plans to extend Goodell’s contract. The Times also reported that after Jones spoke to the committee, the owners revoked Jones’ status as an ad hoc member of the compensation committee and then spoke to the other 25 owners who are not on the committee to notify them of what Jones had said.

Sources told Outside the Lines that Jones is one of “four or five owners” who believe Goodell should not continue as commissioner. Another half-dozen owners were called “fence-sitters” by one source — the exact group that Jones wants Boies to target.

“If he amasses 12 or 15 people, how does Roger survive something like that?” an executive asked. “I don’t know how he’d be able to continue if that many owners express a lack of confidence in him.”

A person who spoke recently with Goodell said the commissioner is “furious” about Jones’ and other owners’ insistence that his next contract’s compensation should be more performance-based, including incentives that would allow him to be paid at roughly the same level of his current deal. “He feels as if the owners have made a lot of money and he should be compensated accordingly,” the source said. “The incentives thing really angers him.”

Goodell has earned a total of more than $200 million since he was elected commissioner in August 2006, including $44 million in 2014 and $34 million in 2015. At the owners’ meetings in New York last month, Jones told his fellow owners that Goodell’s proposed next contract “is the most one-sided deal ever.”

Through this season, Jones has expressed growing dissatisfaction with Goodell’s job performance and has said in recent weeks that the league needs to hire a new commissioner, sources said. The reasons include Goodell’s handling of the player protests staged during the national anthem; the league’s pending six-game suspension of Cowboys star running back Ezekiel Elliott for violation of the league’s domestic violence policy; and the league’s handling of the relocation of two teams to Los Angeles, which Jones helped engineer. Many owners are also angry with Goodell because they believe that he has given Jones too much power.

“Most owners would admit that Roger has done a terrible job handling the anthem controversy and a terrible job explaining the [TV] ratings declines, a terrible job on any number of other issues,” a long-time team executive said.

Several sources told Outside the Lines that owners believe the NFL league office suffers from “dysfunction,” and at least two owners have said they wouldn’t replace Goodell because they don’t know who they’d replace him with.

A silent majority of owners believe Goodell’s performance has been poor but still support him because they prefer to have Goodell lead the owners’ side in labor negotiations with the players’ union. The current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2021.

“Roger is seen as having done a great job in the labor negotiations last time — that fact alone saves him with some owners,” an executive said.

Jones is not a member of the NFL’s six-member compensation committee, led by Arthur Blank of the Falcons. Jones has called himself the “ombudsman” of the committee and has become a de facto seventh unofficial member who attended a recent conference call of the committee.

If Jones decided to follow through with his threat, it would be the second time he has sued the NFL. In the mid-1990s, Jones filed a $750 million antitrust lawsuit against the NFL over its insistence that teams do not enter into separate sponsorship agreements; Jones and the league later settled that claim.

Sources said, though, that Jones has lost potential support because he has his own candidate to replace Goodell. Sources said they did not know the identity of the candidate.

“Then Jerry will be completely in control of the league,” one source said. “It’s turning off some owners.”

Another executive said he believes that Jones’ insistence to inject himself into the process has increased Goodell’s resolve to sign a long-term deal.

“Well, $45 million a year is a lot to just walk away from,” the executive said.

Boies has come under criticism this week for helping Weinstein use private investigators in an attempt to block a New York Times story about him while at the same time Boies was representing the Times.

In April 2011, Boies represented the NFL in a St. Paul, Minnesota courtroom to present the NFL’s argument against the players’ request for an injunction to stop the league’s lockout of its players.

Soccer

How Pirlo changed football as the playmaker of his generation

It took a brief loan spell at hometown club Brescia for Andrea Pirlo to set in motion the series of events that created the greatest playmaker of his generation. If Roberto Baggio hadn’t already been there, manager Carlo Mazzone may have kept Pirlo in the No. 10 role he’d grown up playing. Instead, Mazzone placed Pirlo in front of the defence, and his arching pass to Baggio against Juventus in April 2001 proved he had found his home.