Dua Lipa denies rumors about World Cup performance in Qatar, calls out human rights issues

The 2022 FIFA World Cup will kick off (get it?) next week in Qatar, but one rumored participant—who is not a soccer player—will very much not be attending. Somehow, rumors have been going around that Dua Lipa would be performing during the opening ceremony of the world’s biggest soccer tournament (which is apparently a normal thing, since Jung Kook from BTS will be performing during the event and will appear on the World Cup’s official soundtrack), but as reported by Variety, she recently posted on her Instagram story that the rumors are definitely not true.

Dua Lipa explained that she will not be performing during the World Cup and that she was never even involved in “any negotiation to perform,” and in case that’s not strong enough, she casually noted that she’s looking forward to visiting Qatar someday “when it has fulfilled all the human rights pledges it made when it won the right to host the World Cup.”

Not to further dash the hopes of any Dua Lipa fans in Qatar, but that seems pretty unlikely: Not only is homosexuality explicitly illegal in the country, but there are concerns that female World Cup fans could get punished if they report any sort of sexual assault that might happen while they’re in the country. Also, the country brought in migrant workers from nearby countries to build the World Cup stadium, and Amnesty International says some of the construction companies don’t pay them enough (if at all), don’t provide required ID cards which prevents the workers from leaving their work site or a camp set up for workers, some of their passports have been confiscated so they can’t leave the country, and some of the companies are actively engaging in forced labor. Also, as of 2021 (so wildly out of date at this point), 6,500 migrant workers had reportedly died in Qatar since it was awarded the 2022 World Cup—though not all of those were necessarily working on World Cup projects.

Variety’s report quotes Gareth Southgate, manager for the England team, as saying that the World Cup is “the thing you work for your whole life and you don’t want that to be diminished by everything else that is going on around it currently. But we recognize we are going to be in that situation, we’ve got to accept and deal with it.” So this is all pretty awful, and good on Dua Lipa for taking a moment to call it out.