It is Women’s Football Weekend but there’s something in the men’s game I’d like to address in my first column of this season – namely the Qatar World Cup.
This week’s men’s qualifiers have got me thinking how I would feel if it was the women heading to Qatar next year, and the truth is I’d have mixed feelings, to say the least. We’d certainly be having a conversation about it in our Sweden dressing room.
One advantage of being a female footballer, I suppose, is that we’ve always had to speak up for ourselves. Right through my career, in almost every interview, there’s been a bigger topic to address – for a long time it was promoting women’s football – and so maybe it comes easy now.
In fairness to the Swedish Football Federation, they have been active along with the other Nordic FAs in putting pressure on Fifa, sending joint letters urging them to address human and workers’ rights in Qatar, including asking the world body to investigate the thousands of deaths that Amnesty has reported there since the awarding of the 2022 finals.
Norway’s FA even had a vote on a possible boycott in June, while in September Sweden’s men cancelled plans for a January training camp in Qatar following pressure from Swedish top-flight clubs.
That said, I’ve not heard too many individual players speaking out yet, and personally, I’m a bit disappointed with our Sweden players for not taking more of a stand. I wouldn’t expect every one of them to have an opinion but for those who do, I’d encourage them to express it as they have a big platform.
I read an article the other day by Tim Sparv, captain of Finland, on The Players’ Tribune website in which he underlines this point. He doesn’t consider himself a big name but he is doing everything he can to shine a light on the situation in Qatar, having spent two and a half years trying to learn what’s going on there.
I’m a football romantic so the business of “sportswashing” – be it Qatar using football to promote their country or the Saudi takeover of Newcastle United – makes me uneasy to start with. Moreover, I look at it as a gay woman who would never choose to go on holiday to a country like Qatar where homosexuality is illegal.
Ultimately, I would argue that there are two ways to go – either you boycott it completely or you go there and make no secret of what you stand for. The closest thing I’ve experienced to this was when Sweden played a friendly earlier this year in Poland, a country where they have “LGBT-free” zones.
As a team, we discussed what to do about it and in the end, we decided not to make a protest but instead I did an interview with Expressen, one of Sweden’s two biggest newspapers, and spoke about it there. It was important to at least raise an issue that I consider very significant.
In the case of Qatar, therefore, perhaps the most important thing we footballers can do is talk about the situation there – for the sake of the workers who’ve had no voice. When teams like England (and hopefully Sweden) qualify for the World Cup, I would genuinely encourage them to speak up if they do want to say something as in that way at least something good might come of this.
My other hope is that we’ll get from this a more transparent Fifa. I’ve never had any dealings with Fifa but, as a player, I’d ask them to involve us footballers more as a way of making them more legitimate. And supporters too. In political science, you talk about top-down government or bottom-up government; you can rule in different ways. If you involve players, fans, the football community, it becomes more legitimate.
Why not, for example, give fans a vote on where they want future World Cups to be? That would be a way of involving the whole community. It could be like The Best Awards that Fifa organise for which 25 per cent of the vote comes from an online fans’ poll.
Finally, on the subject of fans, it was amazing to play against Servette in the Women’s Champions League on Tuesday in front of a crowd of more than 12,000 in Geneva. That’s more than Servette’s men have had for any home game this season.
The Women’s Champions League has a group stage for the first time and it means we get to travel across Europe to test ourselves from October onwards. You can tell among the whole Chelsea squad that there’s a different feeling playing these games. It has become a fantastic tournament for us and a fantastic showcase for women’s football, and it’s a privilege to play in it.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3okO2Cd
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