For most of the last 12 months, Gareth Southgate and his players stuck to a party line on the moral questions of World Cup participation in Qatar: they would wait until they had qualified to express their opinion for fear of appearing arrogant.
It was a slightly flawed argument – if avoiding spending a couple of hours discussing something puts you off your stride before facing Andorra, Albania or San Marino, something has gone badly wrong – but you could see their point.
Now England have qualified, Southgate had his latest placeholder. He said – again not unreasonably – that he and his players must go away and educate themselves on the issues before deciding their next action.
The uncharitable translation of that is “This is my last press conference until next March”. It might be a little unfair, but it presents an impression that England’s manager would rather he and his squad did not have to reflect deeply on the machinations of geopolitics.
To which we must say: yeah, that’s totally fair enough. This is a group of people, mostly young men, who only ever wanted to be footballers and have spent the vast majority of their lives committed only to that goal.
The reward for their unlikely achievement is wealth, fame and unrelenting scrutiny. At no point during their journey were they prepared to wrestle with wider issues, but that’s not the point. Fame itself makes the spokesperson.
England boycotting Qatar is out of the question. Norway are the country who have come closest and they a) eventually voted against it, and b) haven’t qualified anyway. Expecting a group of footballers to miss the biggest tournament of their lives, going above and beyond any other politician or cultural leader in the country, is unrealistic. If that proves that sportswashing works and that the richest states eventually get their way, well…yes. It is hard to conclude otherwise.
Our expectations for footballers to be anything other than footballers have shifted over the last 30 years. When England hosted Saudi Arabia in a friendly at Wembley in 1998, nobody kicked a soap box in the direction of Andy Hinchcliffe and asked him to step aboard to discuss the recently published human rights report that the Saudi government “commits and tolerates serious human rights abuses”. The only business of football was football.
There are three distinct reasons for the shift between then and now. The first is relatively simple: the preconception of footballers as either dim-witted, unintelligent or culturally disinterested has been destroyed, for the better.
The second is that the current crop of England players have spoken out on other issues. For those in the public eye, social activism becomes an ever-running tap. The implication is that you can’t speak out on child poverty and the NHS but then ignore the human rights issues in Qatar. Unfairly or otherwise, that provokes a charge of moral selectivism.
The third reason is the most uncomfortable: sportspeople have a cultural sway that they lacked in the past, and it has been thrust upon them as much as it has been seized by them. Michael Gove was right when he said the population has had enough of experts, even if the intent of his argument was morally repugnant. The notoriety of the voice amplifies it more than the expertise behind it. Jude Bellingham speaking out against the treatment of migrant workers would cause a greater ripple than an Amnesty International report. With that bestowed power comes an assumed responsibility, whether you want it or not.
But bestowed power clashes with powerlessness. England’s players have been placed into this situation by the inaction, or grim action, of Fifa and of national governments. They have become spokespeople because we have learned to expect more from them than ministers and leaders. They did not choose to play in stadiums built by mistreated migrant workers and yet they will play in them. They are unwitting victims (albeit not ones who will garner much sympathy) of the manner in which sport and geopolitics have become irreversibly intertwined.
Something is always better than nothing. Amnesty International this week urged players to raise the issue of labour abuses of migrant workers and the mistreatment of the LGBTQ community in Qatar; that does not seem like an unwieldy suggestion. On a human level, it is the right thing to do and it is an example that will be followed by many writers and journalists, me included. I’ll go to Qatar and write about human rights issues, but I can’t pretend that I won’t enjoy the football too. If that makes me morally repugnant, or a foolish victim of sportswashing, I have little defence.
England’s players have already been thrust into a situation where winning feels impossible. Speak out now and the suggestion will be that this is simply gesture politics without any other affirmative action. Speak out ever and the accusation is that, if they really cared, they would not play in Qatar at all. Speak out never and they will have missed the chance to make a difference. Speak only to point out that the UK government deals with Qatar and so do many British companies, and it is interpreted as buck-passing apologism. On some level, each of those statements contains some truth. But it is a lot to wrestle with when all you want to do is play for or manage a football team.
Maybe that’s entirely the point: they can’t win. They’re not supposed to win. Those who hold all the control and power are delighted to shift the focus onto teams, managers and players because it allows them to deflect their own moral vandalism. Expecting a 20-year-old footballer to be the one to take a stand is proof either they have been let down by those who ultimately control the system in which they work and live, or that the system itself is broken.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3oDbydV
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