Written By Rishikesh Mistry 

The World Cup is right around the corner and that means a month of umms and ahhhs, employees being more relaxed and employers seemingly not caring. The month-long event will conclude a week before Christmas.

Every country had until Monday 14th November to name their 26-man squads with FIFA officially announcing these on the Tuesday, meaning all 32 national squads have been named, including Gareth Southgate’s England selection on Tuesday. The format is fairly familiar with 8 groups of 4 teams who will compete with each other in the group stage with the winners and runners up of the group progressing to the round of 16. 

The England squad featured some new names, with the likes of Reece James and Ben Chilwell ruled out by injury, Southgate had to look for other option in defence like Ben White, who arguably deserves his role. Conor Gallagher and James Maddison (however Maddison picked up an injury in the last PL game week) both made the final 26-man squad in midfield while he opted for Callum Wilson over the inform Ivan Toney and Tammy Abraham. Many didn’t see why Toney wasn’t selected, and he proved himself to late after scoring a brace against Manchester City. However, rather recently it has come to light that Toney has been charged with over 232 breaches of betting rules, which is likely the reason for this.

There has been some controversy regarding the host nation and their strict policies and views regarding some subjects, but the competition will still continue. Peaceful protests to this have been planned by many countries with England captain Harry Kane, and 9 other captains of European teams will be wearing “One Love” armbands to promote diversity and inclusion. Denmark will additionally wear “toned-down” shirts to protest a gains Qatar. Further to this, the USA men’s national team will wear shirts with their badges that have the rainbow on as part of their ‘Be the Change’ initiative.

In regard to the stadiums, there are 8 new stadiums that have been constructed for this event: Al Bayt, Lusail, Ahmad Bin Ali, Al Janoub, Al Thumama, Education City, Khalifa International and Stadium 94. It is evident that some of the workers have not been given adequate rights and to me it seems like slave labour. Qatar has relied on the exploitative kafala system to recruit and sponsor migrant workers for it constant large-scale projects. Workers arrive mainly from Asia and Africa and workers are underpaid or not paid, overworked and housed in frankly disgusting facilities. Don’t worry though only 17000 slaves died (since 2010) in the making of this (only 3 official deaths reported by the Qatari government) so there is nothing to worry about.

On a lighter, but still mind numbly shocking is that Qatar has paid people to act as fans for different countries (see the attached videos). I am not being racist, but it is evident that these people all originate in Asian or African backgrounds and not the ones they claim to support. There are countless videos emerging into social media of these groups of people and it just shows how fake this World Cup is. It’s sad to see that the game so many of us love is slowly being ruined by corruption. This would have been the first time this has happened in Qatar, with migrant workers being paid the equivalent of £3.50 to watch volleyball games and ‘fill up the stadiums’

Despite all this controversy, the World Cup will continue and so my predictions for semi-finalists are as follow: England, Brazil, France, Argentina