Not long after the Gulf nation of Qatar was awarded the rights to host the 2022 World Cup soccer championships, Surendra Tamang hatched a plan to go.
He had heard that Qatar was recruiting many other Nepali laborers to work in Doha building the stadiums and related infrastructure projects. So in 2015 he took out a loan to cover the recruitment agency’s fees and applied for a construction job. He figured he would work up until the World Cup, sending his earnings back home while putting enough aside to buy a ticket to the final match. Only then would he go back to Nepal, triumphant, rich (or at least richer than his neighbors), and with a World Cup T-shirt featuring Argentina’s Lionel Messi, his favorite player.
Instead, in October 2021, he was sent home with a mysterious, crippling ailment that his employers dismissed as gastritis—chronic indigestion—and claimed had nothing to do with the arduous conditions at his work site. By the time he arrived at a Kathmandu hospital in debilitating pain, both his kidneys had given out, wrecked by working long hours of hard labor in punishing heat, according to his doctor. “I used to have dreams,” Tamang says from his hospital bed at the dialysis clinic of Nepal’s National Kidney Center. Now 31 and with no potential kidney donors on the horizon, he will likely be on dialysis for the rest of his life, forced to watch the World Cup on his phone.
Every four years, for four weeks, World Cup host countries open their doors to millions of fans, investing national pride in ever more fantastic stadiums purpose-built for the world’s most popular sport. Qatar has spent more than $200 billion on construction that offers a preview of future technologies, from outdoor air-conditioning to retractable roofs. But these games also offer a sobering preview of another future, one in which the kinds of record-breaking heat waves that roasted Asia, Europe, and North America this summer are no longer extreme events but seasonal norms brought about by a changing climate. Those rising temperatures will change the future of work, making outdoor labor increasingly dangerous to human health in the hottest parts of the year, across most of the globe.
This year, the World Cup will start on Nov. 20, five months later than usual, to spare players and
