At 110 pages long and split into five sections, FIFA’s World Cup Qatar 2022 Sustainability Strategy sums up the contradictions, omissions and paradoxes that define the latest edition of global soccer’s biggest jamboree, which starts on Sunday in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar. The document has a section on human rights and social progress that glosses over the conditions of the migrant workers who have built new stadiums and cities from scratch. Its section on environmental sustainability claims the tournament will be carbon neutral, an assertion that has been called greenwashing by a carbon reduction consultancy. And a section on economic development argues infrastructure creation will catalyse growth without offering evidence to back that up. In bidding for and hosting the World Cup, Qatar has consistently been accused of sportswashing, or using the tournament to launder its reputation on the global stage. For Qatar, though, the World Cup has been a process of nation building — a way of turbocharging economic development, doubling its population and reducing dependency on natural gas reserves that are lucrative, but won’t last forever. 
Much of the talk about the tournament has centred around commercial real estate and construction: of stadiums and surrounding new cities of questionable long-term use, built by workers in conditions that have angered global human rights groups.“Sportswashing is not a term I’m comfortable with,” Skema Business School Professor…  Read the full story here. | 
