“Football is Joy, Peace, Love, Hope and Passion,” one of the Fifa-sanctioned armbands for the Women’s World Cup will read. You notice how the big words are capitalised to avoid anyone falling into the trap of assuming this is any other than a bland corporate jingle. The age of messaging is over; welcome to the slogan years.
Except that football is none of those things. Football isn’t joy, peace, love or hope when players are racially abused or subjected to homophobic or misogynistic vitriol online. Or at least if it was still love, it was hatred too.
Football can, and mercifully often does, provoke those wonderful things and can even facilitate them on a larger scale in the right hands, but it is only a vehicle. Football is football and epithetic buzz-phrases are epithetic buzz-phrases.
There are eight armbands for players to choose from at the upcoming Women’s World Cup, but “Joy, Peace, Love, Hope and Passion” is by far the most nauseating.
It might be beaten only by “#BringTheMoves”, brought to you by the 2022 World Cup semi-final armbands in Qatar. At that point, we were one step away from those overpriced wooden signs you see in garden centres – “Handle with care, wake with coffee”. Lol.
You see the disconnect here: Choice isn’t choice when it is limited to certain pre-selected options. The power of a minority is expressed only when free will and freedom of choice are present. Choice is not choice when there is such an obvious omission.
None of Fifa’s armbands mention sexuality, other than it being covered by the uninspiring catch-all “inclusion”. There will be no rainbows and no One Love armbands (themselves a step down from the rainbow flag).
The auto-response from some is that all this is meaningless – words don’t matter and armbands don’t matter. Get angry at the design of a piece of material and you might as well shout at a road sign or speed bump. Fine, it’s a point. But it’s one that wilfully ignores the deliberate paradox at play.
“Football unites the world,” said Fifa president Gianni Infantino at the launch of his new range of armwear. “But football does even more than that – it can shine the spotlight on very important causes in our society.”
Fifa are talking up their role in accelerating societal change and they are using the armbands to do it. So if they say they matter, what is (and isn’t) written on them matters too.
These messages are indeed meaningless, if not done properly. Nobody really thinks that “Unite for Peace” will make Vladimir Putin halt the invasion of Ukraine or halt the Saudi bombing of Yemen. Nor that “Education for All” will persuade the UK Government to invest more in our education system.
Here, symbolism and context is vital. And the rainbow is a genuinely meaningful, universal symbol. It is the one globally-accepted marker of LGBT+ unity. It is a statement of allyship for a community that needs it in many areas of the world. It is not a slogan.
Fifa says that it met with stakeholders, including federations and players, before making their decision – we are allowed to be disappointed in them too. But they certainly didn’t speak to Australia captain Sam Kerr: “Like most of the teams in the whole world, everyone has voiced that they would love to wear it.”
That indeed appears to be a popular viewpoint. Those players face either punishments for breaking regulations or compromising on their principles. They have been let down.
For Qatar, we were led to believe that this was about cultural sensitivity, either “we are going to a nation with different norms, and we must respect them” or “we gave the World Cup to a vastly wealthy state where homosexuality is illegal, oops,” depending on your viewpoint.
That itself was a gross abdication of responsibility towards the LGBTQ+ community. So what’s the excuse for Australia, where same-sex marriage is legal? Is this a thorny issue for the sponsors, which include Qatar Airways?
Or is it that Fifa are simply refusing to raise their heads above an ankle-level parapet? World football’s governing body has all the power but wields it only as it wishes.
It can be a difference-maker, but it chooses the difference. It could have been an ally for an entire community, but instead it chose the live-laugh-lovification of a potentially powerful message and we will sit back as the self-congratulation for meagre achievement rolls in.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/N2rkG4D
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