World Cup column: Abandonment of OneLove armband another grim moment in tournament of shame
It has taken just two days of tournament football for a World Cup lathered in shame to produce yet another miserable subplot. With the captains of seven sides competing at the tournament set to wear ‘OneLove’ armbands in support of the LGBTQ+ community, the threat of ‘sporting sanctions’ saw every last one perform an about turn and abandon the idea.
The English FA, amongst others, expressed frustration and disappointment at the ominously vague threat on FIFA’s end. But if they were truly in support of LGBTQ+ people, to an extent that a simple armband could never capably convey, then the threat of a single player receiving a single yellow card – or, heaven forbid, a one-match suspension – would not have deterred them from following through but instead encouraged them to double down.
Even Gareth Southgate, a football personality who has regularly proven himself to be an eloquent speaker on issues of inequality and discrimination, pointed to a lack of clarity from FIFA and a desire to focus on football as justifiable reasoning for backing down.
We were already fully aware that Qatar is an oppressive surveillance state that shows no respect for citizens nor visitors who in anyway offend their singular view of personhood. FIFA have shown on countless occasions that it is incapable of forcing its member nations to abide by a basic policy of not acting in discriminatory ways. As small a gesture as national associations stating their captains would wear an armband was, it still inspired some speck of belief that someone, somewhere within the broken process of international football cared.
This was the most recent, and perhaps most blatant example of football’s sense of self-importance gorging on its own meaty, financially lucrative flesh. Standing with the oppressed is paramount – until it has the potential to impact the outcome of a game. How could Gareth Bale being shown a yellow card possibly prove to be as important as supporting an entire community of people? Being suspended for a crucial group stage decider or winner-takes-all knockout game is decidedly lacking significance when individuals are being tortured or worse simply for being who they are back in the real world.
A rainbow armband was never going to be a meaningful resolution for human rights abuses on an industrial scale. What it may have provided was a modicum of hope; the chance to believe that people of influence do care that we live in an unfair and unequal world that discriminates based on intrinsic characteristics that are simply part of what makes humanity so interesting and varied.
The potential for football to act as some form of smokescreen or disguise that would allow for Qatari human rights abuses to be forgotten about for a month or so has been obliterated within 24 hours of the first meaningful kick of a ball at this World Cup. It is no longer the case that the host nation is trying to manipulate proceedings from the shadows as they did in securing the tournament, nor are they hiding behind a façade of half-hearted promises to change.
This tournament is here, and it is theirs now. If you don’t like how it is playing out then you are welcome to avert your eyes and take no part, but if even competing nations feel compelled to bend the knee over issues they supposedly believe to be important, then what organisation or individual attached to this World Cup is genuinely not acting almost exclusively out of self-interest?
Although Iran suffered an almighty beating at the hands of the English, and will now be cast aside as whipping boys in a group that seemed fairly open just a day ago, they still found a way in which to establish themselves as something greater than just men who kick a ball. By refusing to sing the national anthem, the Iranians, united as a team along with thousands of whistling supporters in the stands, showed the courage to defy those likely to punish them at home in ways that will almost certainly go beyond FIFA’s fearful sporting sanctions.
It is through acts such as this that football’s purpose as a conduit for wider sentiments within society can be fulfilled. Even though the majority of players and managers at this World Cup lead lifestyles that the majority watching on television will never be able to relate to, they still largely felt as though they belonged to us rather than the bureaucratic machinery of global sporting governance. On Monday, the Iranian players proved they still belong to the people of a now volatile and uncertain nation.
It is shameful that the football associations of those seven countries who abandoned the armband cannot say the same.
