Why Qatar 2022 is giving me the ick from football

In the last couple of years bridges had finally been built between the football world and the  LGBTQ+ community, but organisers of this year’s World Cup seem intent on burning them all down

For as long as I can remember I’ve loved football. Some of my earliest memories include kicking a ball around friends’ gardens and watching Ronaldinho lob a despairing David Seaman in 2002. Every birthday from the age of 6 to 14 I would receive at least one card describing me as “footy mad”.

But this World Cup feels like a chore. I’m watching games because I feel like I should, not because I’m getting enjoyment from them.

And as an openly queer man, I can’t help but feel this tournament just isn’t for me. What started as a curious aberration has turned into an outright rejection of who I am.

A bleak affair

It was always going to be grim, wasn’t it?

The logistics of a winter World Cup being watched huddled under multiple layers as the long nights draw closer. Wet Monday lunchtimes spent throwing beer in the air at some god-awful Box Park in London. Unsurprisingly it had sapped any of the usual Festival of Football fever out of me.

Add to that the almost undeniable truth that this is a World Cup born out of elitist corruption inside an organisation that cares about as much for its lowest stakeholders as… well, the Qatari regime does (funny how things work) and the unavoidable result is a resounding sense of disenfranchisement.

In a parallel universe it might be laughable. Declaring attendances up to 10% over the actual maximum capacity of a stadium that clearly wasn’t more than two thirds full… LOL! They’ve done it again!

But this isn’t just a farce of a major global sporting event.

The attitude that is leading to the patently incorrect attendances is the exact same attitude that leads to lying about the circumstances of the reported deaths of over 6,500 migrant workers. That’s over 6,500 bereaved families for whom the loss of their loved ones doesn’t even receive the decency of acknowledgement. 

It just isn’t funny, it’s a demonstration of just how little the organisers of this tournament care about you, me or anyone that isn’t able to line their pockets to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

Today I feel like a boring, bald, white, straight, middle-aged man of privilege

The first time I heard Gianni Infantino’s “today I feel gay” speech it made my skin crawl. It is bewildering to me that a man who has more advisers than Qatar has openly gay citizens can make such an ill-advised statement.

In the gulf state, there are widespread reports of LGBTQ+ people being arrested, imprisoned and put through conversion centres. And here is the head of FIFA comparing his experiences of receiving childhood jibes for being ginger and having freckles, to the oppression of gay people around the world.

As a queer cisgender man who is fortunate enough to live in the UK, I was incensed. I simply cannot imagine how it felt for those living under regimes such as Qatar’s.

Yet somehow this still isn’t even the most egregious part of it. Perhaps Infantino could have been genuine. The speech was incredibly distasteful, but if he truly meant it as a show of solidarity with the global LGBTQ+ community then the ham-fistedness might have been almost forgivable. 

But instead FIFA showed their true colours in an aggressive decision that made me regret having ever held the tiniest shred of belief in their reassurances that sexual diversity was welcome at their tournament.

In the end, the combination of the threat to impose sporting sanctions on players wearing OneLove armbands alongside the Q Club killings in Colorado Springs feels like one final, depressing and hateful nail in the coffin for queer acceptance in society in November 2022.

I do still love football and I am sure the drama on the pitch will suck me back in, as it always does.

But the betrayal I have felt this year will leave scars that may never heal.