Life after building Qatar’s World Cup, told by shattered survivors and devastated families

Life after building Qatar’s World Cup, told by shattered survivors and devastated families

Simon Hughes
Nov 20, 2022

Next to Punit Mahara’s home in Dhanusha, southern Nepal, are trees filled with mangoes and some of the sweetest bananas you could ever taste. It is harvest season and the yellow of the surrounding rice fields invites promise for the winter. Yet as Punit offers a guided tour of the land he shares with as many as 25 family members, his mind is clearly elsewhere. He should not be here. He should not be unemployed and wondering when the loan sharks will come for him. He is furious, humiliated and concerned.

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Punit is wary of saying too much because he has lost faith in the world beyond Dhanusha. It is possible for us to speak to him only because of reassurance from a local fixer. This partly explains why he is accompanied by other men from the village, one of whom he begins an argument with about the causes of his position.

They glare at one another and the tone of the conversation becomes sharper, with fingers pointed. When he is among others who were more fortunate in Qatar, a shame hangs heavily on Punit’s shoulders, having returned home from the 2022 World Cup’s host country in July in significant debt after his job as a labourer disappeared.

A year ago, he was preparing to leave for Qatar for a second stint, with a period working in Saudi Arabia in-between. Punit had loathed both experiences but the birth of his second son meant he had to try again.

Dhanusha is one of the poorest regions in Nepal and the only available work is casual. While the same job in Qatar did not necessarily pay better, it in theory offered more security because contract terms dictate that income is supposedly reliable. This promise led to Punit taking out a credit line of about £1,400 to pay a recruitment agent. Like so many migrant workers, he arrived in Qatar saddled with a debt that would take the entirety of his two-year indenture to pay off. He was working to live rather than to save and prosper.

“If I stayed, I risked being detained at any time. Everyone I knew decided to return to their country” says Punit (Photo: Simon Hughes)

He knew life in Qatar would be a perpetual sequence of bunkbed, bus, building site. He woke at 4am each day and left camp half an hour later. As the heat began to rise through the morning, the work became a lot harder. A lunch break provided an opportunity to rest but he was not paid for that hour.

Punit says during a previous term in Qatar, the temperature would regularly hit 50C (122F) in the summer. Even though laws prohibited working in such conditions and safety assistants would tell him to leave his tools, a building supervisor would sometimes intervene and insist that the labourers continue. The supervisor would also scold workers if he saw any of them taking a breather in the shade.

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“It felt like someone was always watching,” says Punit, who would find the strength to push on even if he was feeling faint. “I was there to make money, so I did not have the option to stop,” he reasons. “The World Cup was coming, and everyone was feeling pressure, especially the workers in the stadiums.”

There was limited access to cold water at his worksite. At a cooler, hundreds of workers would queue, but he was conscious of the supervisor and did not want to get on the wrong side of him. There were stories of workers disappearing from Qatar after feeling his wrath. It was much easier for workers to find warm water from street taps but by the afternoon, the temperature was boiling. “I wanted to drink cold water but I didn’t have the money to buy it. I would often drink hot water instead.”

Punit was seven months into that second spell in Qatar and the World Cup was looming on the horizon when government agents entered his camp and told him, along with as many as 6,000 other workers, that his company was in trouble.

For 15 days, workers were locked up inside the camp. Punit says nobody knew for certain what the future held. Amid boredom and fear, rumours began to spread: one was about a building collapsing and workers dying, another related to some of those allegedly responsible facing jail time. It was also suggested that the company had simply oversubscribed its labour force in the rush to be ready for the World Cup’s November start date.

Al Bandary Engineering Trading And Contracting in Doha did not respond to The Athletic’s request for clarification about what happened. A Qatar government official, however, confirmed that the Al Bandary closed in May after “violation reports” were issued. With the company referred for prosecution, arrest warrants were issued against “those authorised to sign” on behalf of the firm.

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Punit was desperate to stay in Qatar. Returning to Dhanusha early would bring financial peril because he could not afford to repay what he had borrowed to pay the recruitment agent. While some of the men in his village blame the company, Punit’s grievance is with the state, which he says started deporting workers over the next six weeks.

Qatar is adamant that it did only what any other country would do, stepping in when a big company was in trouble and trying to settle cases by government tribunal. It suggests that before its closure, Al Bandary invited any employee who wished to transfer to another company to submit a request form. The government says workers who did this were transferred and continue to be employed in Qatar. “Over 400,000 workers have successfully changed employer in Qatar since a new law removing barriers to change jobs were removed in 2020,” said a spokesman.

Punit, however, suggests Qatar may have been overwhelmed by the problems facing Al Bandary. Due to the absence of trade union representation, there was a lack of trust in the information he was receiving, a lot of which was second-hand. He was not alone in wanting to stay in Qatar, and the government there, potentially, was faced with hundreds if not thousands of labourers looking for new work at the same time.

The scale of redevelopment and construction in Qatar has been immense and goes far beyond just the World Cup stadiums (Photo: Getty Images)

Punit says the full range of options was never explained to him. Instead, he was strongly advised that working for another company would be risky — the punishment for working illegally was a fine of up to 5,000 riyals (about £1,100) and imprisonment for six months. Meanwhile, Qatar was willing to pay for the cost of a flight to Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

“I was afraid,” he says. “If I stayed, I risked being detained at any time. Everyone I knew decided to return to their country. I feel like I have been forcibly sent home.”

A spokesman for Qatar says access to unpaid wages is a “critical part” of the country’s labour rights framework, which over the “past two decades has been transformed”. In 2022 alone, an insurance fund has allegedly paid out $350million. The government confirmed that during its investigations of Al Bandary it discovered missing data from the company’s employment list and it “encourages employees whose financial dues remain unpaid to come forward to claim their compensation from the fund by submitting a complaint online or in person”.

Upon returning to Nepal, Punit received an end-of-service gratuity of 1,000 riyals (about £230), which roughly equates to a month’s salary. Yet he says he has not been paid for the near eight weeks he spent in that labour camp waiting for answers — or for the rest of his contract. It means that in total, he has only received seven months’ pay from a deal that was supposed to last for two years.

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In Dhanusha, the countryside is idyllic and there is a sense of community. Punit’s family is preparing for the Chhath religious festival. There is the sound of roti hitting hot stone. Excitement is in the air. I ask myself why anyone would want to leave such a beautiful, friendly place for an existence of continual toil in the dust.

Yet many men like Punit have to, because of unemployment and poverty. Such decisions also come with a risk. It is against the law here to charge more than 10,000 Nepalese rupees (about £64) in recruitment fees, but workers, if desperate enough, will fork out a lot more to move their name further up any priority list. When they are asked at passport control how much they have paid to leave the country, they lie.

Punit’s interest rate with the moneylender is 36 per cent, and he currently has no income. He cannot submit a complaint form in person as he is in Nepal, a five-hour flight from Qatar, and he wasn’t aware of any online application process. I ask whether it feels impossible. He says he does not believe the online system will help him. “I have no hopes,” he says.

At the age of 34, the only way out of this debt spiral, he says, is to go abroad again. It won’t be back to Qatar, though. “Even if they promised me 50,000 rupees a month (about £320), what has happened is too much. I cannot tolerate it anymore.”

He pauses, reconsidering what he has just said amid the sound of crying nearby. In one of the darker rooms at his mud home, pinned together by bamboo, his one-year-old son is coughing badly. Punit thinks he’s got pneumonia but can’t afford medical treatment.

I look into his worried eyes and without saying anything, we both acknowledge where all of this might lead.


There are so many labourers like Punit, without whom the 2022 World Cup simply would not be happening. He helped build a six-storey army barracks in Qatar. Before that, he worked on hotels.

Much of the coverage highlighting the injustices suffered by workers over the past 12 years has focused on the creation of the new stadiums. Yet the scale of development in Qatar is much greater than that.

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Without the basics of roads, irrigation systems and accommodation, it would be impossible to host the most famous football tournament on the planet.

Qatar, then, would not be in this position without the commitment of migrant workers, who constitute 90 per cent of the workforce.

In the south of Nepal alone, almost half of all households have either a family member working overseas or one who has recently returned. Excluding India, with which Nepal has an open border, last year Qatar was the second most popular destination among migrant workers, behind only Saudi Arabia.

They come not from the Himalayan mountains, but the southern plains, which fewer visitors are familiar with.

Here, most of the land is owned by a minority of rich families from the high castes. The majority have no land and big families to support. There is social pressure to leave. If a father sees someone return from Qatar with enough money to purchase a parcel of countryside, he may ask his son to consider doing the same, if he hasn’t left already.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino told the European Parliament at the start of this year that only three migrant workers had died building the World Cup stadiums in Qatar — based on numbers supplied by Qatar. However, Nicholas McGeehan of human rights organisation FairSquare called that figure a “wilful attempt to mislead” as the eight stadiums only account for about one per cent of World Cup-related construction.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned the correct number will never be known because “Qatari authorities have failed to investigate the causes of deaths of thousands of migrant workers, many of which are attributed to ‘natural causes’.” Nepal’s labour ministry says 2,100 of its citizens have died in Qatar of all causes since 2010, the year this World Cup was initially awarded.

HRW also say many more workers have returned to Nepal and other countries with injuries or illnesses that now render them unemployable.

And yet in Nepal there is very little mention of this suffering in the national conversation. Perhaps this is because migrant work props up more than a quarter of the economy, sending a trillion Nepalese rupees back each year to a country which has a debt of 5million rupees (about £32,000) for every person living there.

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During an eight-day stay in Nepal, everyone The Athletic speaks to who has a connection to migrant work has lost something. Each of them uses a derivative of the word “compulsion” when describing why Qatar, any of the other Gulf States, or Malaysia was or continues to be viewed as the only way out of problems.


Qatar was chosen to host the World Cup in 2010, but it was only in a position to do so because of the sacrifices of workers like Lekhnath Khatiwada.

Aged 28, he left Jhapa, in south eastern Nepal in 1999 because there was “no work at home” and went to Qatar. He was unmarried. His parents had no income. His father was unwell. This meant any initial savings accrued working in Qatar contributed towards the dowry payments for each of his three sisters.

It was Lekhnath’s first international trip and he remembers landing in Doha when the doors at the airport were manually opened rather than automatic. Outside, the country was a desert. Buildings were so scarce that he would take photographs whenever he saw one.

“I’d never even heard of Qatar,” he says. “I only knew that I was going to an Arabic country.”

The recruitment fees were a lot lower then, but an agent persuaded him to part with more money so he could miss out on orientation training, which did not seem that important to his younger mind. The same agent promised Lekhnath that he’d be working as a driver for Coca-Cola, but when he arrived in Qatar, he had only a small van and spent his days ferrying goods between convenience stores. “I felt cheated,“ he says.

At the start of each shift, he’d lift more than 450 sacks onto his van, which he later also had to unload. Every day, seven days a week, he would repeat the process. If he missed delivery slots, he was warned he would lose his job. He despised the work and wanted to leave but could not because the government had taken his passport. A return to Nepal would only ever be on Qatar’s terms. “It felt like imprisonment,“ he says.

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Lekhnath believes the work and the system equated to “modern slavery”. There was no way out of Qatar unless the contract was over. Despite the strength of his feelings, he went back to the country for a second time in 2005. Like Punit, there had been no opportunity to save some money. His salary merely paid for essentials. He wanted to buy some land in Jhapa and build a house, but six years after he left the region, his money situation was roughly the same.

This time, he worked as a machine operator at the Khalifa International Stadium, a venue which he helped rebuild. He also steamrollered the Salwa Road, which cuts through the country, connecting its remoter parts to Doha, the capital. He had another job at a gas plant, “the safest place” of the three because security measures were followed more closely there. He dreaded the Salwa Road job. “It was in the middle of the desert and we had to take our lunch on the tarmac without the protection of shade,“ he says. ”It was extremely hot. People collapsed regularly. Many died.”

At one site he worked on, he remembers one colleague taking a rest in the shadow of a digger. The driver of the digger wasn’t aware someone was lying there. It was only because of Lekhnath’s quick thinking that the man wasn’t crushed.

He says there was a temperature alarm that rang whenever it became too hot.

Workers were also given whistles which they could blow in case of emergency. “But who hears when a worker blows it from the 20-metre-deep ditch? Nobody really cared about the labourers,” he says. “The work was torture. Some died in the ditches because of a lack of oxygen.”

Between 1999 and 2012, migrant workers in Qatar such as Lekhnath could do little to improve their working conditions. Trade unions were banned and protest was often met with arrest. When workers in his camp complained about wages, the police arrived, took the ringleaders away and sent them home. “After that, everyone remained silent,” he says. “Each of the workers had paid money to go to Qatar and they were afraid of being deported.”

Lekhnath had returned to Qatar as a married man. His wife had given birth to a daughter and he missed them terribly. The labour, however, was so intensive that it had a soothing effect. It was only when he returned to his bunk at night that he had time to think. Yet he was so tired he’d often fall into a deep sleep. Then at 4am, he’d wake and do the whole thing all over again.

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He becomes emotional when asked about mental health challenges. He knows workers who killed themselves, he thinks because of conditions and loneliness. During that second spell in Qatar, Lekhnath’s wife left him. Fifteen years later, he is estranged from his first daughter, who now lives in Kathmandu. Though he has remarried and has three other children, the memory is still painful and he quietens his voice so his new family across the hallway can’t hear.

Lekhnath says he “lost the prime of my life” by working in Qatar (Photo: Simon Hughes)

“If I didn’t have to go to Qatar, I would still have a relationship with my daughter,” he says. “It broke up my family. There are thousands of families who disintegrate because of this migration. It has a negative impact on every family in some way. I lost most of my savings in the divorce. This left me with very little money. I worked from 28 years to 40 in Qatar. I lost the prime of my life.”

Lekhnath now tries to assist other Nepalese migrant workers via an online forum. He says that despite reforms in Qatar since 2014, lots of the problems for workers remain the same as in his day. They still sometimes work in extreme heat and they cannot easily change their jobs if they want to. Though workers can now access a labour court, he says there are many cases of Nepalese migrants being deported for standing up for themselves.

“Qatar has been built on the blood and sweat of Nepalis,” he says. “What has happened there will benefit generation after generation of Qataris and the country will grow economically for centuries. Meanwhile, the situation remains the same for Nepalis.

“We have sacrificed the golden years of our lives but we are still struggling to survive because we did not earn a fair salary. There was never enough money to save. When we return to Nepal, we are still in the same situation. For Nepal, nothing has changed for 25 years.”


Near the city of Ithari, Lekhnath now runs a motel which is attached to a petrol station serving wagons entering the country on its bumpy roads from the Indian state of West Bengal.

He is a formidable-looking man, with broad shoulders and strong arms. Qatar might have broken his family but it did not break him.

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It has been different for others. In Chitwan, an eight-hour drive to the west, Surya Badadur Tamang is battling kidney failure. Though at 50 he is roughly the same age as Lekhnath, he looks like he could be 20 years older.

“Doctors have said that seven years of labour in Qatar did this to me,” he says, as he hunches over his walking stick. Surya comes from an indigenous ethnic tribe native to Nepal, but the pallor of his skin is lighter than the rest of his family because he is unwell. His face is a limey colour, with a warm-looking film. His arms and legs are stick-thin. 

Surya helped lay the foundations for Qatar’s successful World Cup bid but suffered kidney failure (Photo: Simon Hughes)

He entered Qatar in 2002 as a carpenter, but was soon working as an electrician and a pipe fitter. He was always willing to do extra work because the money helped his family. His original basic salary was 600 riyals a month (about £140). Only after five years of service in Qatar was there a rise to 1,000 riyals (about £230).

Surya says that working abroad was viewed as prestigious in Chitwan, a region known for its national park. His efforts meant his wife and two children received extra care from other villagers. Again, he lives in magnificent countryside dominated by rice fields and the sound of roosters. Yet off he went, to Kathmandu initially, which was an ordeal in itself because of conflict between the Nepalese state and Maoist rebels. There was checkpoint after checkpoint during the 12-hour bus journey. If he had lost his documents, he risked being tortured or killed.

Three years on from Lekhnath’s arrival, Qatar was still underdeveloped when Surya got there. He worked in a mobile camp that travelled around the country. That made him realise that, outside of Doha, there wasn’t much going on.

Only when the temperature exceeded 52C (126F) did the site close. In the summer, Surya can remember the gauge hitting 48C (118F) and whenever he removed his work boots, they were filled with sweat. PPE masks and suits made the conditions even more unbearable.

“Many people died on the construction sites. Pipe fitting was dangerous because it involved ditches, where it was even warmer and there was less oxygen. Even when the heat crossed the 52-degree threshold, we felt under pressure to return to work,” he says. “Everybody thought that the sooner you returned, the better you’d be viewed by the company.”

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Surya says 50 or 60 workers would share a small tank of water each day. After two trips per person, all of it was gone, after which the workers had to source their own. Though what came from the taps on the street was very hot, they had to drink it to survive. If he was working for a particularly demanding supervisor, he would go thirsty and spend the night looking around the mosques for water to bring to work the next day. This meant missing out on rest.

His duties varied, but Surya says the shifts were never shorter than 16 hours long. Sometimes, he would spray new roads with water to stop them melting. The roads, he thought, received better care than the workers. Yet he feared working in the ditches most, due to the reduced oxygen and danger of machines or boulders falling in on top of him.

His room was infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes, although it did have air conditioning. But this caused problems with his nose and throat because of the contrast with the severe heat outside. After seven years in Qatar, his legs began to swell regularly and he’d sweat excessively. A doctor suggested he had a liver problem that could be fixed by rest and a regular pattern of work.

Yet he carried on for another two years before his company recognised he was unfit for work. Once back in Kathmandu, he was hospitalised for six weeks. Only then did he find out he had kidney failure.

Qatar had been more lucrative for him than more-recent workers because he was not paying off recruitment charges for long. With this money, he was able to buy some land, but his condition and the demands of the care meant he had to sell it.

Though the Nepalese state provides dialysis treatment, he has to pay for medicine and travel. He takes a bus twice a week to a hospital two hours away. After four hours attached to a machine, he returns by bus.

Surya left Qatar in 2010, the year it won the right to host the World Cup.

“There will have been a lot of human sacrifice,” he says.


A few days before we arrived in Kathmandu, Pramod Acharya was filming from a rooftop near the city’s airport when a plane from Doha landed on the runway. Porters started removing a procession of stretchers and body bags.

Pramod, a human rights journalist, arranged a meeting with Anupa Hamal in Chitwan. Last year, the mangled body of Anupa’s husband, Dinesh, was returned to Nepal in the same lifeless manner.

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Dinesh’s story is slightly different to others in this piece because he did not work as a manual labourer. Instead, he had a relatively safe job as a driver, transporting security staff between camp and work site, seven days a week.

Previously, he had driven lorries across the Himalayas, but that work was irregular. In 2013, with a child on the way, he wanted more guarantees.

Anupa would be woken by the work alarm on her husband’s phone, which was returned to her along with his body (Photo: Simon Hughes)

This meant Anupa was alone, just four months after getting married. She and her daughter, Divya, became accustomed to the “helplessness” of being away from Dinesh. It became especially hard at the height of the pandemic when he was due to return to Nepal only for Qatar to enter a strict lockdown.

For Divya, video calls became important because they meant she and her mother would not forget his face. During seven years of marriage, the family lived together for only four months, but the money Dinesh was paid helped buy a piece of land where they built a small house.

In 2018, Dinesh was commended for his driving skills. Anupa still has the certificate, which recognised his “tremendous effort (…) dedication and exceptional work.”

He rarely complained about anything in Qatar — “maybe to try and reassure me” — but he did find his work schedule punishing because of the lack of days off.

In the summer of 2021, he was issued a new bus to drive. Anupa says her husband told her that the steering was “quite tight”. She says Dinesh told the company about the problem, but as far as she is aware, nothing happened. “Now, I wonder whether he could have been saved if the bus was serviced.”

On August 30, the couple spoke for the last time: a regular sort of chat, where he seemed happy and focused. Dinesh asked Anupa to send him a video of their home and the surrounding rice fields. Right at the end of the conversation, Divya said: “Daddy, take care on your duty.”

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He had promised Anupa that he would contact her again that day, once his shift was over, but a call never came. Though she sent messages to him, they went unread. “We were in contact frequently and it was very unusual that he had not seen my message for many hours. I thought about different things. Had he simply lost his mobile phone? I then called his room-mate, but he did not answer.”

At 10pm the next day, a Qatari number that she did not recognise flashed up on her phone. She thought Dinesh was using a friend’s SIM card. “As soon as I answered, I said, ‘Dinesh, why haven’t you called me for so many hours?’. The guy on the line was a supervisor from Eastern Nepal. Bluntly, he said, ‘Your husband has passed away because he had an accident’.”

Dinesh was only two months away from returning to Nepal for good. The couple were looking forward to buying a van and running a company that would deliver dairy products to homes and shops in Chitwan.

That dream disappeared in the haze of Doha.

It has since been explained to Anupa’s father, Rudra Bahadur, that visibility on that day was bad. Other workers have told him there was another bus from the same company parked in the middle of a road bridge, close to one of the city’s stadiums, without its hazard warning lights on.

On collision, the impact was so intense that it is claimed Dinesh’s bus, carrying 35 workers, was cut in half through the middle. Passengers on the same side of the bus as Dinesh lost body parts and seven of them died.

Dinesh, who had been praised for his work, was killed in a horrific accident

Dinesh’s mobile phone and glasses remained intact. They were returned to Nepal, where his phone’s alarm would ring every morning. Anupa did not know the password to change the setting. Thirteen months on, Divya, now eight years old, becomes upset whenever she enters the room where Anupa keeps her husband’s clothes.

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As the accident happened at the end of a month, Dinesh was due his salary, which arrived at the same time as his body. Anupa received 700,000 Nepali rupees (about £4,500) from her country’s foreign employment board and a further 1.4million rupees (about £9,000) from a Nepalese incident insurance scheme. The total roughly equates to a three-year contract for a well-paid labourer in Qatar. Anupa is yet to be told what will happen to an insurance payment from the company Dinesh worked for.

European Guarding and Security Services did not respond to The Athletic when it was asked for clarity about the circumstances of the crash or to questions relating to what has happened to any subsequent pay-out. The Nepalese embassy in Doha also did not respond to a request for information.

Anupa says she was able to get through to the embassy in September, when she was told that the insurance case was under review, with money likely to be deposited within a week. “Since, I have called again and again but nobody answers,” she says, as Divya, with quiet energy, skirts around her garden in the gentle warmth.


The further east in Nepal you go, the more rivers there are. Nearly all of them are as dry as a bone. The rainy season has passed but the impact of global warming becomes increasingly visible the closer you get to the Indian border.

This has impacted on seasonal employment opportunities; thrusting more workers into a pattern of migration, taking them away from the southern plains of regions such as Jhapa, which is a 12-hour drive from Kathmandu.

The tarmac here is better than in other parts of the country, but any route back to the capital involves roads that are still being built and in parts disappear into rocky moonscapes. Jhapa feels far away from everywhere. Many of the people are unskilled and uneducated. They are unaffected by the scandals of Qatar, a country they are often instead grateful to for giving them a chance to survive.

When I visited Puran Rajbansi and his daughter in-law, Rina, he had spent the previous morning using a rock to catch fish. The bounty from the stream, unless used for their supper that night, was sold to other villagers.

Rina, her daughter and her father-in-law Puran (Photo: Simon Hughes)

Puran has worked in Qatar, but at 54 says manual labour is beyond him now, so he does his best to get by. He does it without his son, Mahalal, who fell from scaffolding in Doha when it collapsed in August 2021, sending him and three other Nepalese workers to their deaths.

Weeks earlier, Mahalal had told his wife he was working on a hotel where international visitors would stay during the World Cup. The couple communicated via video-call every other day. Rina would see him sweating during his lunch breaks. During one conversation, he told her, “It’s too hot here. I won’t come back again once I come home.”

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Mahalal is now only photographs in her mobile phone. One of his previous jobs was at the famous Pearl apartment block in Lusail, Qatar’s second-biggest city. In the photo, Mahalal is wearing a yellow hard hat and a hi-vis jacket. There is a more recent snap of him standing on scaffolding. Rina wonders whether it is the one that collapsed and killed him, aged 28.

Mahalal exists now only in photographs

He only had a fortnight to go before he was due to return to Nepal. After his fall, the company he worked for paid the family 50,000 riyals (about £11,500) in compensation and said, verbally, it will send 30,000 rupees every month for the next 10 years (about £190), though neither Rina nor Puran have received this promise in writing.

With nearly every death, there is a woman like Rina and a son or a daughter. Mahalal’s daughter is five years old and she will grow up without her father. Rina is surrounded by family members in the yard outside her home when we talk and I sense it is hard for her to open up about her true feelings.

It was different for Renuka Chaudhary when I met her on the outskirts of Ithari, two hours closer to Kathmandu, later that day. Her husband, Tej Narayan Tharu, died at the Al Wakrah stadium — now called the Al Janoub stadium — in 2018. Like Mahalal, he fell from a height.

The completed stadium will host eight games at a World Cup that is expected to be watched by billions globally and generate billions financially, but which has already devastated the lives of people like Renuka.

She remains uncertain of the exact circumstances of her husband’s death but the company acted quickly to process compensation. She received six million rupees (about £39,000). That was when Tej’s family got involved and, having asked for all of the money from Qatar, locked Renuka and her daughter out of the family home.

There are days when Renuka’s daughter wishes to go to work with her dad (Photo: Simon Hughes)

To settle the dispute, she gave them 600,000 rupees (about £39,000) and abandoned the house, resettling with her mother.

Tej was 24 years old when he died. Since then, Renuka has noticed neighbours gossiping about her whenever she speaks to men. It has prompted her to lead a more reclusive existence in a small tenement block in front of another rice field on the edge of town, where she still lives with her now eight-year-old daughter.

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“Four years later, it’s still difficult to live a life without him,” she says. “Sometimes my daughter gets upset, especially when she sees other children with their dads. She says to me, ‘I would go to work with my daddy if he was still alive’.”

(Top image: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic, pictures: Simon Hughes)

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Simon Hughes

Simon Hughes joined from The Independent in 2019. He is the author of seven books about Liverpool FC as well as There She Goes, a modern social history of Liverpool as a city. He writes about football on Merseyside and beyond for The Athletic.