This year’s World Cup has been a bizarre and unsettling spectacle for lovers of what romantics still call “the beautiful game.” An extraordinary number of the people who voted for Qatar to be host back in 2010 later ended up in handcuffs as part of a massive corruption scandal in 2015.

Many had accepted payments from Qatari football official Mohammed bin Hammam, a member of FIFA’s powerful Executive Committee. The Qatar 2022 bid chairman Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani once described bin Hammam as the bid’s “biggest asset.” However, when he was eventually banned from the sport for life, the bid committee suddenly claimed that he had played “no official or unofficial role” in their success.

Human rights groups have documented the inhumane treatment of migrant workers in Qatar, who did most of the work constructing new stadiums for the tournament. The kafala system of work permits means that they can be treated in the most brazenly exploitative manner. The authorities routinely presented the deaths of workers as resulting from “natural causes” without proper postmortems.