From Dreaming of Football to Labouring Behind the World Cup
Memoir
Date : August 28, 2026
Saikou Colley is a 20-year-old emerging journalist from Brikama, The Gambia. As a teenager, he travelled to Qatar as one of the thousands of migrant workers whose labour helped make the 2022 FIFA World Cup possible. He worked long hours in harsh conditions, helping to build accommodation and temporary facilities for the tournament, before later working as a security guard at one of the World Cup sites. In this personal essay, Saikou reflects on the promises that drew him to Qatar, the hardships he endured there, and how those experiences changed his relationship with football, a game that he once loved.
The first football World Cups I knew came to my village through a car battery.
I grew up in Brikama, in The Gambia, in a close-knit community where most families had very limited means and depended heavily on one another. We did not have electricity at home, and neither did many of the families around us. But there was one compound in the village with a car battery powerful enough to run a small television. Whenever a game was on, children and adults crowded inside, sitting shoulder to shoulder around the screen. Every goal sent a burst of joy through one part of the compound and groans through another, while every near miss drew the same collective gasp from all of us.
The first World Cup I remember clearly was in 2014, when I was 8 years old. I watched Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi represent their countries in front of millions of people. I saw young African players, some of whom had risen from very modest beginnings, carrying the hopes of their families and nations onto the pitch. To me, they represented possibility. They made me believe that perseverance could transform not only one person’s life, but the future of an entire family.
For me, football was more than just a game. It was part of the rhythm of our community. It brought generations together and gave children like me a way to imagine a life beyond the boundaries of our small village.
Football became the bridge between Brikama and a world that otherwise felt impossibly far away.
Little did I imagine that 12 years later, as the world gathered once again to watch the 2026 FIFA World Cup, I would not even want to look at the television screen. The game that had once filled me with such joy now just reminded me of the long days, exhaustion, and hardship I endured while helping build the facilities that made the previous FIFA World Cup in Qatar possible.
Becoming responsible
My father died when I was 8 years old. After that, my mother became the person holding our family together. She sold fruit and cooked food at the local market, continuing to work even as she struggled with high blood pressure. As I grew older, I began to see the toll this was taking on her. I also had younger sisters who looked to me for support, and I felt an increasing responsibility to protect them and lighten the burden my mother was carrying.
This eventually led me to leave school at the age of 12. It was one of the most painful decisions I had made. I believed that education offered me the best chance of building a different life, but the pressures at home could not wait for me to finish school.
Soon after dropping out, I found work at a Chinese-owned timber company in our village. However, when President Yahya Jammeh’s long rule ended in 2017 and a new government took office, the company’s operations were shut down. Hundreds of us lost our jobs without warning or severance pay. There were few other formal jobs available to people like us, yet remaining unemployed was not really an option. For a family like ours, who were living hand to mouth, even a single day without work could mean going without food.
It was during this period of uncertainty that I first heard about the possibility of going to Qatar for work.
The promise
As Qatar prepared to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, recruiters were working in The Gambia, seeking people willing to travel for service sector jobs linked to the tournament. My family first heard about these opportunities through friends whose relatives had already travelled to Qatar and found work as cleaners, security guards, and delivery riders. Among the opportunities we heard about, the offer that drew me the most promised more than employment: I was told that I would be able to continue my education after working hours.
I had just turned 16, two years below the minimum recruitment age. The recruiter told me that my documents could be edited to show that I was older.
The job described to me was cleaning in a restaurant that was expected to become busier during the World Cup. I was promised eight-hour shifts, a monthly salary of QAR1,200 (USD330), accommodation shared with only one other worker, and the chance to attend school after work.
For someone who had been forced to leave school at 12, it felt like being offered a second chance. As the opportunity was connected to the World Cup, it carried an even deeper meaning for me. Football had once taught me to believe that a boy from a small place like Brikama could reach a much bigger world. Now, the Qatar World Cup seemed to be offering me my own way into that world – not as a footballer on the pitch, but as a young worker helping to make the tournament possible while building a better future for my family.
Everything sounded like the beginning of a new life.
But reaching Qatar required more money than my family had ever seen. The recruitment fee, visa, flight, and processing costs came to GMD150,000 (USD2,850). The recruiters presented this enormous sum as an investment: a painful sacrifice made now in exchange for security later. I began imagining everything the job might make possible – that my sisters could continue their education, that my mother could finally live more comfortably, and that I might even have the chance to see some footballers, perhaps even watch a World Cup match with my own eyes.
To pay the fee, my family sold the only piece of land my father had left us. Selling it meant letting go of the place that held some of my happiest childhood memories – where I had run barefoot, where we grew cassava and pumpkins, and where my father’s presence still seemed to linger long after his death.
Selling the land also meant moving into a much smaller rented place, with peeling paint and a roof that leaked whenever it rained. We told ourselves the arrangement would be temporary. I would work hard in Qatar, send money home monthly, and eventually buy another piece of land – perhaps even build my family a better house than the one we had lost.
We placed our home, our savings, and all our hopes into the promise that the opportunities created by the Qatar World Cup would give our family a more secure future.
Building the World Cup
The promises made by the recruiters to me in The Gambia disappeared almost as soon as I landed in Doha. I was taken to an overcrowded room where 11 other Gambian workers were already living among cockroaches, rats, and piles of belongings, with every three workers forced to share two small dirty mattresses. The floor looked as though it had not been cleaned for months, yet people were so exhausted that they just slept on it. The smell of sweat, damp clothes, and unwashed bodies hung heavily in the air. Then an agent acting on behalf of my employer took my passport from me.
There was no restaurant job and no opportunity to attend school. Instead, I was sent to construction sites through my sponsor’s company. Although it publicly presented itself as a delivery service, in practice it appeared to earn much of its income by supplying workers like me to different companies and worksites.
The day after I arrived, I was sent to work as a mason’s helper. I carried water, bricks, tiles, and whatever else was needed by the mason.
Working between 12 and 14 hours a day, I helped build accommodation for visitors expected during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. I later worked at Stadium 974, putting up tents and other temporary facilities used during the tournament.
Back in Brikama, watching the World Cup on a small television had filled me with excitement. The stadiums, the players, and the crowds seemed to belong to a world overflowing with joy and excitement. Now, being closer to that world than I ever imagined to be, I only felt anger, exhaustion, and a deep sadness I struggled to put into words. More than anything, I felt terribly alone and desperately wanted to be back home with my mother and sisters.
Although my contract promised a monthly salary of QAR1,200 (USD330), I was not paid at all. In place of wages, my sponsor provided the filthy accommodation we lived in and, each month, one bag of rice with some potatoes and onions for 12 workers to share.
The heat, which regularly rose above 40°C, was one of the hardest parts of the job. On one occasion, I began to lose consciousness and felt my body giving up. A friend caught my arm before I fell, led me into the shade and gave me water.
Managers often responded to injured or exhausted workers not with concern, but with abuse, calling us “donkeys” and “limbless dogs”. I saw young workers collapse on several occasions. Some appeared to be around my age, 16 or even younger. Once they were taken away from the site, we rarely learned what happened to them. Some workers said they had been sent back to their countries; others said they had been taken to hospital. I never knew for certain.
When our food ran out, it was not always replaced until the first week of the following month. Sometimes we had to ask our families – the same families we had travelled abroad to support – to send us money so that we could eat.
Those calls home were some of the hardest moments of my life. I tried to hide the worst of what I was going through from my mother, but sometimes I could not. I would break down in tears, overwhelmed by shame, fear, and helplessness, and she would comfort me as though I were a small child again. She would tell me not to worry, that she would somehow find money so I could eat, and that one day I would come home and she would hold me again.
At night, when the fear and hopelessness became too much, I tried to take myself back to Brikama in my mind. I pictured the fields of millet, groundnuts, and vegetables, the chickens I used to chase around our land, and the stillness of the village after dark, when all you could see was the moon. Many nights, I would fall asleep holding on to those memories, with tears still in my eyes.
Before I travelled to Qatar, I had never thought about the people, especially the child labourers behind that spectacle – carrying bricks, putting up tents, cleaning facilities, and guarding entrances.
In Qatar, I became one of them.
So close to the game
As the tournament approached, some of my friends and I were offered jobs as security guards at World Cup sites. The contract was supposed to last nine months and promised a monthly salary of QAR2,700 (USD742). But accepting the job required permission from the sponsor-employer who still held our passports and, in practice, controlled our immigration status and ability to work elsewhere. In exchange for that permission, we agreed to pay him QAR13,000 (USD3,570) in installments.
It was another enormous cost, but by then the construction work had left me physically exhausted and mentally worn down. My fingers were constantly swollen, my knees felt unsteady, and persistent pain had settled into my shoulders and back. I was still only 16, but after six months of that work, I felt as though I had aged 20 years. I wanted to escape so badly that freedom seemed worth buying, whatever the price.
During the tournament, I once again found myself watching football on a television screen. But this screen was much larger than the small one I had crowded around as a child in Brikama. It stood inside the accommodation for security guards, close to the stadiums, media centres, and celebrations that had once seemed impossibly far away. I had finally reached the world I used to watch on television. Yet now, I could barely bring myself to watch the game.
On match days, I even saw famous footballers, including Eden Hazard and Son Heung-min. As a boy in Brikama, seeing players like them in person would have felt like a dream come true.
But when it finally happened, I felt almost nothing. If anything, I felt anger. I wondered whether the players and the millions of people watching around the world had any idea what workers like me had endured to make this tournament possible. I was closer to the World Cup than the boy in Brikama could ever have imagined, yet I had started to resent the very game that had once given me so much joy.
After the final whistle
The contract as a security guard was supposed to give us some stability. Instead, after six months, it was terminated without notice. Overnight, many of us were left without work or income.
The tournament had not yet ended on television, but for us, it felt as though the final whistle had already blown.
In less than a year, every promise made to us had been broken. We had been deceived about the jobs we were coming to do, made to work without pay, forced to pay our sponsor simply for permission to change jobs, and then discarded without severance when we were no longer needed.
Many of us were barely 18 – young, inexperienced, and on our first journey beyond the villages we had grown up in. We had little power and even less idea of what confronting such a cruel regime might bring. But we knew that what was happening to us was wrong, and we decided to stand up together.
We called the FIFA hotline that workers had been given to report problems such as unpaid wages and workplace violence. We were told that the matter would be resolved, but no meaningful help followed. When the hotline failed us, we tried to bring complaints against the security company and FIFA through the Qatari labour courts.
We knew that reaching out to the courts could expose us to further retaliation, detention, or even deportation, consequences we had seen migrant workers face too many times before. Many of us had borrowed enormous sums or sold everything our families owned to reach Qatar, and being deported would mean returning home empty-handed to the people who had sacrificed so much for us – a prospect that felt almost unbearable.
But by then, desperation and anger had overtaken our fear, and we decided to use the courts to confront the company together.
Soon after we complained, the employer instructed us to travel to the city centre for what we understood would be a meeting to resolve the dispute. I did not go that day, as I had to choose between spending the little money I had on the transport fee or on food, and I had barely eaten the day before.
My colleagues who went expecting a meeting were arrested and accused of taking part in an unauthorised protest.
They later told me that the police interrogated them, searched the phones of workers who had been leading the complaint, and accused them of trying to damage Qatar’s international reputation. These were young men who had already given their labour to a tournament worth billions, yet when they asked for what should never have been denied to them in the first place – the wages they had earned, the compensation they were owed, and some measure of justice for what had happened to them – they were treated like criminals.
The arrests and police interrogation terrified many workers, including me. Some withdrew from the complaint because they feared what might happen to them if they too were detained.
Those of us who continued did so partly out of desperation and, perhaps, partly out of the belief that if we kept pushing, someone would eventually listen. Instead, the consequences of speaking out came almost immediately.
Within days, the owner of our accommodation arrived and told us to leave our room immediately. We were informed that the company was no longer responsible for us and that we could not stay there.
Sleeping outside was not really an option; we feared being picked up by the police. A Gambian friend let me stay temporarily in an already overcrowded apartment shared by eight other migrant workers from Africa. In some ways, the conditions there were even worse than the accommodation I had first been staying in. There was barely any ventilation and I slept on a dirty floor, pressed between other bodies.
Even there, other migrant workers, some much older than me, shared what little food they had and cared for me in ways that no employer or government official in Qatar ever had. In a place where so much had been taken from us, it was these workers who reaffirmed our humanity and reminded us that even in the darkest places, kindness could still survive.
After a few days, with the help of a journalist and a human rights researcher who had contacted me about our legal case, I eventually secured a room in a government-run shelter. It was cleaner and safer than the places where I had previously stayed, but my freedom remained severely restricted.
I spent more than a year and a half there. I was watched around the clock like a criminal and could not leave without supervision. The only times I was permitted outside were to attend the labour court with a supervisor, after which I was taken back to my room directly.
The shelter was supposed to protect us, but it felt like another prison. The months passed, my loneliness deepened and my anxiety grew. I kept wondering whether I would ever see my mother again, whether I would ever feel her arms around me, or if I would ever hear my sisters laugh. Some nights, home felt so far away that I was afraid I might never make it back.
After many months, the judge eventually ruled in our favour and ordered the original sponsor to compensate us. But the court did not accept our complaint against FIFA and the security company over their alleged failure to prevent or remedy the abuses we had faced, including unpaid wages and severance, the fees we were forced to pay to change jobs, and the conditions that had left many of us trapped in forced labour. Even after the judgment, we waited several more months to receive the compensation.
The compensation acknowledged some of the harm done to me, but it could not amount to full justice. One employer was held responsible, while the much larger network of recruiters, labour suppliers, contractors, and powerful organisations behind the World Cup – including FIFA – remained beyond the reach of law.
What I brought home
After nearly two years in Qatar, I finally returned to The Gambia. My mother came to meet me at the airport. When we saw each other, we held each another and cried for a long time.
But I did not return as the person I had imagined I would be when I left. I did not come home with the money I had hoped to earn, or build the house I had promised my family. My mother’s health had worsened and so had my own. I lived with chronic pain in my back, shoulders, and knees – constant reminders of how much those two years had taken from me.
Coming home forced me to think again about the future I had abandoned when I left school. With the compensation I was granted and the support of friends I made while in Qatar, I returned to my studies and completed Grade 12. Slowly, I began to understand that education was not a dream I had lost forever. I could still go to university. I could still build a life beyond what had happened to me.
But football no longer feels the same.
When friends in The Gambia ask me to join them for a match, I can no longer lose myself in the game the way I once did. Sometimes football is enough to carry me straight back to Qatar, to memories I would rather leave behind.
I also find myself constantly wondering how many other workers, young boys and girls from Africa, are still paying the price of these enormous sporting spectacles.
So when the 2026 FIFA World Cup began and my sister asked whether I wanted to watch it, I said no. Once, I would have crowded around any television I could find just to catch a glimpse of the game. Now, watching the beautiful game just felt painful.