The 2017 FIFA World Cup is scheduled to begin on June 14^th of next year. Reports are now confirmed by FIFA itself that slave labor is being extensively used to build the stadiums for the next two World Cup sites in Russia and Qatar.

Russia is in the process of building 12 venues in 11 cities for the tournament, while Qatar’s proposal has a range of 8-12 venues. Slave labor is not the only controversial subject about these proposed sites. Even one death in creating these spectacles is tragic, but many are plugging the number for these events in the thousands.

As with the 2014 Winter Olympics, held in Sochi, Russia, the choice of host has been incessantly challenged. Controversial issues include the level of racism in Russian soccer and Russia’s discrimination against LGBT people in their society, which now includes the beating and torture of gays in Chechnya, something President Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump have refused to act against, condemn, or even acknowledge. Russia’s involvement in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has also caused calls by some US and UK politicians for the tournament to be moved, particularly following the inhumane annexation of Crimea. Not to mention Russian soccer fans imminent need for violence.

To say Qatar, just like Russia, and the Kafala system was a controversial selection would be quite the understatement, as you can see from ESPN's "A 21st Century Slave State."

"I don't think they view them as human."

Kafala system is one in which the laborer is literally owned. Everything they do is at the will of their owner and usually is binding for several years. Laborers excitedly sign a contract in hopes to make money to send home to their family. More often than not, those contracts are torn up in front of their faces and the laborers are then at the will of their "owners." Modern day slavery is being used in both Qatar and Russia to build for their upcoming World Cup Games.

It seems as if the Olympics and World Cup have become a stomping-ground for the world’s most corrupt, greedy, materialistic, self-centered people in the world. Many people enjoyed the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janiero, Brazil. However, the corruption and greed of those in power in Brazil and the Olympic Committee allowed Rio to use $11 billion to build stadiums instead of helping their own people as seen in the video below. World games are situations in which the rich get richer and the poor get abused.

The 2016 Rio Olympics weren’t as beautiful as you thought, huh?

In late 2016, the building of Zenit Arena in St. Petersburg, Russia needed to be sped up. Between August and December, there were four documented deaths from falling from harrowing heights and electrocution after Putin demanded the stadium to be open. Qatari government also confirmed that 964 workers from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh died in 2012 and 2013, but many believe the number could be ten times higher today. Russia has never put out figures on deaths from labor, but estimates from former and current workers suggest that the Qatari estimate accurately depicts Russia’s problem as well. Not to mention Russian soccer fans incessant need for violence as shown by CNN's "Russia 2018: A look from within." It's rather difficult to find information on the Russian World Cup, perhaps because of the state's constant propaganda machine (not surprisingly).

Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter said, “The World Cup has been given and voted to Russia and we are going forward with our work.”

Allegations of corruption in the bidding process for both the 2018 and 2022 tournaments have caused threats from countries to boycott the games. It is known that Blatter and the FIFA Committee, those who vote to choose the venues of the World Cup, are corrupt and known to take bribes from countries to secure votes, also known as politics. Much of the world was shocked when Qatar was named the 2022 host and many started a set of investigations into misconduct, including the F.B.I.

In an article published by The Guardian on May 25^th titled, “World Cup 2018: FIFA admits workers have suffered human rights abuses,” FIFA President, Gianni Infantino, admitted there have been human rights abuses of workers involved in the construction of the arena in St. Petersburg and acknowledged that some men from North Korea, whose working conditions are often appalling, were deployed to work at the Zenit Arena, which has cost $1.5 billion and 11 years to build and is still not finished. This comes after a devastating account of the St. Petersburg site from the eye-opening article, “The Slaves of St. Petersburg,” written by the Norwegian soccer magazine, Josimar, who highlighted the dreadful conditions for workers.

“It has been a site of systemic abuse of migrant workers, slave-like conditions, corruption, and death,” says Josimar. Workers have no autonomy to quit their job where often times their exit visa, a document allowing them to leave the country, is destroyed by their employer and they are forced to continue to work at the sites as they hold the laborer's passports, and ultimately them, hostage.

The Zenit Arena project originally began in 2006 and had an estimated price of $220 million. “The only explanation for the dramatic increase in spending, is corruption,” according to Josimar. “How many millions of dollars that have disappeared through corruption, probably nobody knows. Whilst a few have enriched themselves along the way, tens of thousands of workers are yet to be paid what they were promised.”

Nearly every day between 2006 until this very moment, thousands of people have been carrying out work on the stadium and surrounding infrastructure. The majority of workers hail from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, other former Soviet republics, and North Korea. A minimum of 1,500 workers have been on-site every day since 2009.

“Many of them are migrant workers. Similar to practices on other construction sites in Russia, it is highly unlikely they have been treated properly. Nobody cares about the law, about contracts. Migrant workers have no rights,” says Dimitry Sukharev of the St. Petersburg Transparency International office who told this to Josimar.

Men live in old shipping containers in a barbed-wire enclosure under constant surveillance. Many of the men will never get paid. Sounds more like a prison camp than a work site.

The United Nations and many other countries condemn the human rights violations in Russia, including “the exploitation of workers sent abroad from [Korea] to work under conditions that amount to forced labor.” Many nations, people, and teams condemn the acts, but at the end of the day, they will all be at those venues to happily play in front of hundreds of millions of people globally while the world ignores just exactly how those stadiums came to be. The only way corruption ends, is with action. Major nations must withhold from participating, otherwise these atrocities will continue to happen year after year after year.

Tens of thousands dead and billions of dollars spent on aesthetics rather than solving humanitarian crises in the country. Slave labor, corruption at the highest levels, and death: not exactly what one thinks about when envisioning the Olympics or World Cup.