In Qatar, migrants flocked to watch the World Cup

For its last public release before the tournament (November 21 to December 18), the trophy was placed in a parking lot near Doha’s main cricket stadium in Asian Town.

Each person has approximately 15 seconds to take their photo along with the trophy, which was won in 2018 by France.

A Bangladeshi pop group and Indian drummers waited in the crowd.

Failing to buy tickets to attend the 2022 World Cup matches, Azam Rashid, a carpenter who worked at two stadiums, wanted to see the statue up close.

The wait was long, but it was worth it, he told AFP. Tickets may be too expensive, but Qatar and the World Cup gave me a chanceHe added.

A number of affordable tickets, sold for 40 rials, or just over 10 euros (13 Canadian dollars), are reserved for 2.8 million residents of the country, including 2.5 million foreigners.

Nasim, who works at a depot in the industrial zone, was one of the beneficiaries. Anyone can afford the price I paidhe said.

But many of those in line said they were not so lucky because tickets ran out quickly.

However, the following categories of tickets, whose price starts at 95 Canadian dollars, are not reachable by workers who are usually paid the minimum wage, i.e., 370 Canadian dollars per month.

The World Cup was exciting, but it was clearly too (expensive) for mesaid Tarir, an administrative employee.

For Ahmed Kareem, a construction worker who has lived in Qatar for ten years, most migrants only watch matches on television.

This trophy is a big event. For most of us, this is the closest thing to the World Cup he concludes.

South Asia provides most of the workers who built seven new stadiums and renovated the eighth, for the first World Cup organized in an Arab country.

Qatar has been widely criticized for the rights of foreign workers, but it said it has introduced significant changes in recent years, making it the Gulf state’s most progressive state in this regard.