BOSTON — Soccer’s embattled world governing body must make human rights one of its primary goals, on a par with promoting the sport and making money, according to recommendations by a former top U.N. official released on Thursday.

FIFA should be prepared to use its negotiating leverage to ensure that countries bidding for its World Cup championship protect the rights of people who build stadiums, John Ruggie, the U.N. secretary-general’s former special representative for business and human rights, wrote in the 42-page report.

“What is required is a cultural shift that must affect everything FIFA does and how it does it,” said the report, made at the request of the 112-year-old group of 209 national member associations. “This includes … building and using its leverage to address these risks as determinedly as it does to pursue its commercial interests.”

The Switzerland-based federation has been thrown into turmoil in the past year with criminal investigations into corruption in the sport under way in the United States, where several dozen former soccer officials have been indicted, and Switzerland.

The recommendations come two weeks after Amnesty International described rights abuses in Qatar’s preparations for the 2022 World Cup, including construction workers from Nepal and India being charged recruitment fees and housed in squalid conditions. Qatari officials said they were working to resolve those issues.

“It is not FIFA trying to transform the country but it is trying to transform what the county does in relation to the tournament,” said Ruggie, a professor at Harvard University.

Amnesty said it hoped the report would prompt FIFA to take a harder line on conditions in Qatar.

“Only concerted FIFA action to prevent abuses on World Cup sites will save the soul of the 2022 World Cup,” said Mustafa Qadri, an Amnesty International researcher.