The Workers Cup review: if you’re building stadiums for Qatar 2022, someone else wins
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…
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