This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/soccer by /u/Sparky-moon on 2026-04-12 11:08:28+00:00.
In 2019, Abdullah Ibhais resigned as communications director for the World Cup organizing committee. He was arrested by Qatari authorities and taken to prison. “If you don’t obey their orders, you become a threat,” he admits in this interview.
Leo Messi raises the World Cup trophy to the sky alongside the Emir of Qatar and FIFA President Gianni Infantino. “It was, without a doubt, my hardest moment in prison,” recalls Abdullah Ibhais (Amman, Jordan; 40 years old), who was the communications director for the tournament’s organizing committee, in an interview with EL PAÍS four years later. “When Messi lifted that trophy, I realized that Qatar had won. They wanted a perfect tournament, and they had it, they’d pulled it off. My story, on the other hand, was buried. And what’s worse, nobody cared.”
They denounced unpaid wages and subhuman working conditions. News of the strike quickly reached the international press and rattled the organizing committee, which ordered Ibhais to deny the workers’ claims. “They wanted to make it seem like everything was false, that they weren’t even workers for the organizing committee, and that it was all an attempt by other countries to tarnish Qatar’s image,” he explains. “I didn’t want to do anything without first verifying the facts with my own eyes. I had the day off, so I got in my car and to the site of the strike.”
What he found was, essentially, what was already circulating on social media around the world. “It wasn’t just a matter of unpaid wages; I saw hundreds of empty plastic bottles there, waiting to be filled with drinking water. They had nothing,” he recalls. “I recorded my conversation with several of them, and they proved to me that they were, in fact, workers from the organizing committee. And they weren’t just being silenced. They had also received threats for calling the strike, something that isn’t recognized as a right in Qatar.”
“There was no way, at that point, that I could issue that statement. They wanted me to make something real disappear. Something I had seen with my own eyes. They wanted, in short, to lie. And I found that intolerable,” he says. “When I refused to do it, I told my superiors that we would first have to resolve the workers’ situation. And of course, they didn’t like that at all. They pressured me in every possible way. Over and over again. Until I decided to resign. I didn’t want to be part of something like that. And I left. My boss told me there would be consequences and that I should be prepared. That’s when I realized that the moment you stop following their orders, you become a threat.”