The Interview: Jeremy Schaap

In our written Q&A, the acclaimed ESPN investigative reporter discusses "Qatar's World Cup," debuting on ESPN this Sunday at 8:30 pm ET (and thereafter streaming on ESPN+)

ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap went back to report in Qatar earlier this year (Photo by Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images for Invictus Games)

ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap has done a lot of phenomenal investigative journalism over the years, and he succeeds again in “Qatar’s World Cup,” which debuts on ESPN’s E60 this Sunday at 8:30 pm ET. We have an in-depth discussion about it below.

The entirety of the written interview below is reserved for paid subscribers. As always, you can still get the entire free audio version of my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to go for your pods.

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Grant Wahl:

Our guest now is the longtime ESPN reporter Jeremy Schaap. His ESPN E60 episode, “Qatar's World Cup,” on the controversy surrounding the selection of Qatar to host the upcoming World Cup, debuts this Sunday at 8:30 PM ET on ESPN. Produced and directed by Max Brodsky, it will be available for on-demand streaming on ESPN+ after the initial airing. I have seen it, it's extremely well done. Congratulations, Jeremy, and thanks for coming on the show.

Jeremy Schaap:

Oh, it's great to be here, Grant. And thank you so much for the kind words. It means a lot. I know you've been following this story for a very long time as well. And yeah, I'm really appreciative that we have a chance here to talk about it to your audience.

Grant Wahl:

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. This is a sprawling and fearless piece of reporting shot in several different countries, including Qatar. How did you and the people who produced this episode want to approach putting this together?

Jeremy Schaap:

Well, we did a story eight years ago about specifically the issue of who was going to build the World Cup? Who was going to make this project possible in Qatar in 2022? Talking about, as you know, a small country, just a few hundred thousand citizens, 90% of the population is foreign workers. And it was going to take a remarkable amount of work, something really spectacular, to build everything that was necessary to make this World Cup possible. And we did a show, we did an E60 piece in 2014, focusing on the plight of these foreign workers.

And then over the last half-decade, as the World Cup was getting closer and closer, we always had the intention of going back to see the conditions now, to see what has changed, to do an update on the story. Because that became a big issue globally in the sports dialogue and beyond, and there were a lot of journalists who did reporting on it. There were a lot of human rights organizations focused on it, advocacy groups, pressure brought to bear on Qatar, and it seemed natural that we would want to go back and examine the issue again. And this show does examine the issue again. And as you know since you saw it, that is the primary focus, but it also goes to the backstory of how Qatar got the World Cup in the first place.

Would ESPN have done investigative reporting like this on Qatar if ESPN were still the U.S. English-Language World Cup rights holder and not Fox Sports? “My answer to that is yes. And I believe that to the core of my being.” — Jeremy Schaap

Grant Wahl:

A lot of my readers and listeners are going to either watch the World Cup in Qatar or go to the World Cup there. And part of what I think they want to know is: What has Qatar done since getting the World Cup hosting rights in 2010 to improve the conditions of migrant workers there? And has Qatar done enough? How would you answer that question?

Jeremy Schaap:

Well, that's the big question, right? I mean, those are the big questions, and that's what we endeavored to answer, those questions with this show. And it's complicated, right? I mean, I think what we can say, Grant, is that things have improved, especially in the last five years. After Qatar and the International Labour Organization, the ILO, the arm of the United Nations that deals with workers' rights, came to an agreement creating a new framework for workers' rights in Qatar. And that happened after the International Trade Union Confederation put a lot of pressure on Qatar, working with the ILO to bring Qatar to the table to see these changes take effect.

And there have been changes in terms of what we call the kafala system. The kafala system, as I'm sure many in your audience know, is the sponsorship system, that's what they call it, that exists in several Gulf states. Also in Jordan, in Lebanon, for foreign workers, tying workers who come from other countries to their employers. And this was an issue we explored back in 2014, I think at some depth. And part of it is your employer kept your passport, you couldn't change jobs freely. There were limited ways in which workers could bring complaints against employers, etc. Some of the things that have changed, they describe it, human rights activists, people on the ground, advocates, as a dismantling of the kafala system.

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And semantically, you can say, well, there's still kafala, there isn't still kafala. But what has happened is that some of those things that were in place are no longer in place, such as your employer getting your passport. Your employer is not supposed to be able now to prevent you from changing jobs. You're supposed to be able to leave the country when you want to leave the country, regardless of what your employer says. There has been a minimum wage that has been put into effect in Qatar, a minimum wage that essentially amounts to about $275 a month plus money for room and board. So there have been these changes. The issue has been, from the moment that they were announced the issues have been about implementation, about enforcement. And that's a more complicated story.

Grant Wahl:

I mean, what's really struck me in my own reporting, including this year from Qatar, is that some of these union leaders, global trade union leaders, have kind of done a 180 about Qatar in the last eight years or so. And that includes Sharan Burrow, who both you and I interviewed eight years ago when she was saying stuff like Qatar was a slave state and shouldn't host the World Cup. And now when you and I interview her, she's working with the Qatari government and saying very positive things about them. But that's still in contrast to people you and I have spoken to at human rights groups about the situation today on the ground for workers in Qatar. And I'm wondering, what do you make of this near-180 by the union leaders?

Jeremy Schaap:

I mean, that's a very striking element of this story and the story of how things have changed, have evolved in Qatar, what has changed, what has not, which we keep coming back to. And you mentioned Sharan Burrow, and she was the most outspoken, the most vocal critic of Qatar and the kafala system, as the head of the International Trade Union Confederation, representing hundreds of millions of workers around the globe. And she, I would argue more than anyone else, raised the alarms about what was going on and what the human cost of the 2022 World Cup was going to be if change didn't come. And then, well, as we just mentioned, the ILO reached these agreements with Qatar. And since then, the ITUC, under Sharan Burrow, they have said that they are pleased with the reforms.

And then as you said, there are other people, important people in the community who have been dissatisfied with the extent of the reforms. Whether you're talking about Nicholas McGeehan, who's one of the leading researchers on Qatar, people from Human Rights Watch, where he used to work, and I think it's FairSquare is the organization that he runs now, Amnesty. 

And if you read the reports from the most prominent human rights organizations in the world, Grant, what they say is there has been change. There has been change. I think the exact wording maybe in the most recent Amnesty International report is life has improved, work conditions have improved for the 2 million-plus migrant workers in Qatar. But it hasn't gone far enough. There are still too many ways in which they are not able to address their grievances, although there are these labor courts and there's a fund set up to compensate those who aren't being compensated properly, when pay is withheld, etc.

And then there are the questions as well about working conditions and what the law says and what happens in fact. We spoke to Max Tuñón, who is the head of the ILO office in Doha, and you go into their office in Doha and they've got a lot of literature about the ways in which workers are now supposed to be protected from the extreme heat in Doha. And these laws have been put in place, and it's still a hard place to work. These are still very tough conditions. So it's this push and pull between the law and enforcement. Between improved conditions and the scrutiny in particular of workers who are directly working on World Cup projects and those who are not. There are these different cohorts, right? And if you're working on specifically a World Cup project and there's a lot of scrutiny of that, it's under the microscope, it might be different from if you're a foreign worker in Qatar working in something unrelated to the World Cup, if you're in the natural gas industry.

So as you know, these things are complex. I think what it comes down to, there's some big issues still. These foreign workers don't have the right to form unions, basically. The right to unionize is something that is still not available for most workers. The way that people have told us employers have retaliated against workers who protest the conditions in which they're working or when their pay is withheld, what happens there. 

And it's a tough life, right, Grant? I mean, think about what these millions of workers have sacrificed to build better lives for their families, wherever they come from: South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia. And it's not just the workers, right, working on World Cup projects, but all the thousands of domestic workers, primarily women from the Philippines.

And I think the point has always been, right, the world should know how difficult it is for these people, the lives and the work conditions, what it's like for them. And Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world. Qatar, by some measures, by almost any measure, it's one of the richest countries in the world. And the idea's always been that they can do better by these workers.

Grant Wahl:

When I went to Qatar in February to speak to migrant workers, I was glad that I didn't have video cameras with me because it made the workers more comfortable to speak with me. How difficult was it for you to go to Qatar with cameras and a crew and interview migrant workers who could be in danger for speaking honestly to you?

Jeremy Schaap:

Yeah, and it got tougher this time. Last time when we went eight years ago, we were able pretty much to just walk into a labor camp unannounced and to do some spot interviews. We were able to interview people who did conceal their identities on camera. We were able to speak to people on the Corniche there, the waterfront area that's going to be a big central meeting place. And we spoke to workers, to what extent they feel comfortable talking on camera, all that, who said, "Hey, I'm happy here. I made this choice. And I'm making money and I'm able to send it back home. This is why I came here."

And frankly, the extent to which anytime you do ‘man on the street,’ ‘women on the street’ interviews, that they are representative of a larger reality, that's always difficult to determine. But anecdotally, we met more people this time who said their situation is better. And that corresponds with what you would expect. There have been changes. It's about respecting the dignity of these workers, about honoring the language of the law now, about enforcement, about consequences for bad actors among employers who don't treat them well. And those are the issues, as you know, that we really try to explore here and to untangle.

Grant Wahl:

For your episode, ESPN went to speak to workers' families in Bangladesh and Nepal. How do you find these families?

Jeremy Schaap:

Well, in Nepal, Nepal was in 2014. This time the families we spoke to were in Bangladesh, and we worked specifically with a freelance journalist in Bangladesh who has been working on these issues with other news organizations for many years, who's able to identify for us and confirm who these families are, who these workers are, and then help us on the ground arrange interviews with these people, which I conducted from where I'm sitting right now in my home. 

Last time, we physically went. I didn't go to Nepal. Our producer/director eight years ago, she went to Nepal, she spoke to people in Nepal. This time we had a crew with our interview subjects in Bangladesh, but I was sitting here in Connecticut doing these interviews. And that's another interesting way in which the world has changed in the last eight years.

Grant Wahl:

I get this question a fair amount. Would ESPN have done investigative reporting like this on Qatar if ESPN were still the U.S. English-Language World Cup rights holder and not Fox Sports?

Jeremy Schaap:

My answer to that is yes. And I believe that to the core of my being. I mean, all you have to do is look at ESPN and the rights that we do have and the way that we cover the leagues that we do own rights to, whether it's the NFL or NBA or NHL. And you know, Grant, if you talk to people in those leagues, for instance, they are often quite displeased with the journalism that we do at ESPN. I mean, I host Outside the Lines now, and how many segments have we done in the last year and a half about issues with the Washington Commanders? How many segments have we done about the cases against Deshaun Watson? I mean, look at the reporting from so many of my colleagues, Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham and Tisha Thompson on the NFL. From my colleagues Mark Schlabach and Paula Lavigne on college football, which of course we have relationships with.

It's not exactly the same thing, but we basically had everything up through 2014. We went to South Africa, I think one of the most powerful stories we've ever done was about anti-lesbian violence in South Africa.

Grant Wahl:

With soccer players. 

Jeremy Schaap:

And corrective rape, with soccer players. And that's a tough story. And those were some of the toughest interviews in terms of the emotions and what we were asking people to share with us that I've ever been a part of. And that was our big story, frankly, investigative journalism story leading up to the South African World Cup. Was it specifically, I say it's a little bit different because it's not about the South African government per se, right? It's about violence perpetrated by private individuals. But I just don't think we shy away from tough reporting.

Grant Wahl:

Which leads to my last question here. It's not exactly about Qatar, it's more about FIFA. And that question is, you've covered this story for quite a while over the years. Has FIFA changed, in your opinion, after the U.S. Department of Justice investigation? Is today's FIFA any different than Sepp Blatter's FIFA in your opinion?

Jeremy Schaap:

That's a very good question, Grant. And as you know, we did a big kind of exposé on FIFA with all the accusations of vote-buying and all the shenanigans behind the presidential elections, all of that stuff back in 2015. And of course, Blatter was at that point forced out, after having been reelected. You probably remember better than I do the exact sequence of events. And then there are all the arrests, Sam Borden at the Baur au Lac [hotel] in beautiful Zürich and all of the trials and all of the plea bargains and all of that stuff, cleaning house. But I'll tell you the truth, I just haven't covered FIFA as closely the last few years as I did at that time.

I guess most of us in this business are fairly cynical in nature. I guess that's not really fair to say. Let me put it this way. Having not spent as much time concentrating on FIFA, look, I can talk about them in the context of some specific things like Qatar, like the fact that they won't even respond essentially when people say we should create a compensation fund for the workers who have made this event possible where you're going to make a $3.4 billion profit. And they're like, well, what do they say? What do they say, Grant? They don't say anything, right?

Grant Wahl:

Yeah.

Jeremy Schaap:

Infantino, I was at the election where he won back in, I guess that was January '16. I don't know.

Grant Wahl:

Yeah. I mean, that's a fair answer. I mean, I don't totally know either. What I would say from what I do know is I interviewed Infantino around that election back in 2016, and he seemed different a bit from Blatter, but he sort of used the Sepp Blatter playbook to consolidate his power, which is basically give as much money as possible to every national soccer association in the world, especially the smaller ones, and turn that into votes. And he's likely to win another term later this year. I guess we haven't seen another sting operation of arrests since he took over quite like the dramatic one that the U.S. Department of Justice did.

Jeremy Schaap:

Right. But by the way, there wasn't one for the first 20 years of the Sepp Blatter reign either, right? 17 years, right? I don't know. I mean, Gianni Infantino is someone who comes from the world of FIFA, though. I mean, I know he was technically UEFA, but he comes from that world.

Grant Wahl:

Right.

Jeremy Schaap:

And I'm just not qualified to answer the question. I don't want to cast aspersions. But when I think of FIFA still, I think there's still some problematic things going on.

Grant Wahl:

Yeah. After this World Cup, they will have gotten through the Russia World Cup and the Qatar World Cup, and then they will have the shared North American World Cup in '26. And I'm not saying there won't be anything to investigate around that, by the way, either. Maybe there will be. They've picked generally less problematic countries to host women's World Cups, it seems like.

Jeremy Schaap:

Well look, I mean, when you think about Infantino though, I am thinking about what he said a few months ago about the laborers in Qatar, he had that moment. What did he say? Something about, well, I think they're proud of the work that they've done, kind of deflecting questions about the human cost. And I would say he's right. I think they are proud of the work they've done. That's not the point when we're talking about FIFA and its responsibility to them.

And one last thing that I want to emphasize. I'm sorry, I'm running on at the mouth here.

Grant Wahl:

No, go ahead.

Jeremy Schaap:

But yeah, I just think it's important to remember, and I think you know this too, right? When you're there and you meet these workers and you see the conditions in which they live and they work, that these guys, and I don't think I really processed this the last time I was there. This is heroic. You are sacrificing. You are living in these conditions, you're making this choice, you're working in these temperatures because you want to help your family. And you're going away for years, sometimes many, many years away from them. Giving all of that up, giving up your home, giving up your family so that you can make their lives better, provide for them, send your kids to school, feed your family. And they deserve to be treated humanely. That's what we're talking about.

Grant Wahl:

Jeremy Schaap’s ESPN E60 episode, “Qatar's World Cup,” on the controversy surrounding the selection of Qatar to host the upcoming World Cup, debuts this Sunday at 8:30 PM Eastern on ESPN. It will be available for on-demand streaming on ESPN+ after the initial airing. Jeremy, thank you.

Jeremy Schaap:

Thank you, Grant.

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