01.12.2022

Armbands and alienation

With the competition now well under way, Paul Demarty examines the clash between soft-focus liberalism and Qatari feudal values

“Focus on the football”: until recently, that was Fifa boss Gianni Infantino’s only mantra in response to the multiplying controversies of the 2022 World Cup. At least, now, there is football to focus on, if one is so inclined. Giants have been killed; wonder goals scored; England have reached the knock-out stage despite suffering a near-existential crisis over the dismal US game. Business as usual …

Except, of course, that it isn’t. In our last article on this competition,¹ we mused that perhaps sportswashing has been pushed so far in this case that it spills into autocritique. It is too obvious, and too obviously repellent in too many ways. From the slave labour that created the stadia which are frequently way under capacity (not a new problem, alas), to the reactionary social mores of the Gulf aristocracy and attendant PR disasters, to the last-minute banning of beer sales at matches (if you can call Budweiser beer), to the well-documented corruption of the whole process of host selection, this World Cup has been a fiasco. The only things to go right, luckily enough, are the actual matches, which have (so far) been the usual mixed bag in terms of quality, but have at least been administered efficiently. The system seems to work - as well it might for $250 billion.

Hypocrisy

While the fate of migrant workers dominated the build-up to the big show, the early days were rather taken over by the question of gay rights, and the absence thereof in Qatar. Under increasing pressure from public opinion at home, several football associations in the west, including the English, German and others, agreed that their team captains would - instead of the usual plain armband - wear a rainbow ‘pride’-style armband with ‘One love’ written on it. This did not please the Qataris, who, of course, took it as an insult. Fifa (which, for those of you who do not know, is the International Federation of Association Football) sided with the Qataris, as it has throughout all this, and announced that anyone who went ahead with the protest would be given a yellow card. That was enough to scare them all off, proving for all intents and purposes - as if it was not obvious - that the armband was a gesture, abandoned at the first sign of potential consequences. The Germans concocted a ‘safe’ protest routine, while Wembley Stadium was lit up in rainbow colours during the England-USA match; and that was it.

While all this was unfolding, Infantino held a press conference that took the form of an hour-long, semi-coherent diatribe about how unfair all the negative press was. He lifted a routine from disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo: “Today I feel Qatari,” he said. “Today I feel Arabic. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker [sic].” To which a liberal might reasonably object: yes, Gianni, but you aren’t any of those things, are you? You are a Swiss bureaucrat who may as well have been bred in a lab in Fifa’s Zurich basement. Infantino anticipated this objection, but dismissed it: he knew what it felt like, because he had been bullied for his freckles and red hair, “plus I was Italian, so imagine.” It’s a hard-knock life!

Like many apologists for the Qataris recently, he attempted to exploit westerners’ white guilt to get them off his back. “I think for what we Europeans have been doing the last 3,000 years we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,” he said. You could hardly deny that there’s a truth there, but plainly his shift to the jargon of decolonial academia was driven by the lowest of motives. Besides, the decision to hold the World Cup here was that of Infantino’s own European organisation, and would have been quite impossible if the Qataris did not have many friends in football’s European heartland (French president Nicolas Sarkozy was, at the time, foremost among them).

However, for all his manifest dishonesty and cynicism, there is something almost admirable about Infantino. He is a liar, but an ‘honest liar’ - whose lies are so transparent as to dip almost into the picaresque, as if he were a Swiss-Italian Baron Munchausen. Arrayed against him are the national associations, which are essentially creatures of the relevant clubs. The most powerful of these are, of course, essentially global brands, and they partake in the extant official ideology of global brands in general. That is, they are committed to a soft-focus liberalism: they will celebrate Pride and Black History Months; they will do lots of outreach work to ‘say no’ to racism and homophobia in the game.

Those clubs that are actually owned by quasi-theocratic petro-states - Qatar’s own Paris Saint-Germain, Abu Dhabi’s Manchester City and the Saudis’ Newcastle United, primarily - are no exception. In their case, the hypocrisy is nearly Infantino-like in its obviousness. But the moral pall is in fact ubiquitous. Different club owners have different objectives - some want profit, some want to burn off excess capital in the name of soft power. So far as players and fans are concerned - black, white, gay, straight - they matter only insofar as these fundamental objectives are achieved.

Just as the Qatar World Cup has laid bare the mechanisms of sportswashing at its most unfathomably grandiose, so it casts a similarly unflattering light on this smaller scale. For the right-on activities of rich clubs are, precisely, sportswashing par excellence - in its ordinary form. That is always the reply, after all, when fans complain that ticket prices are beyond the reach of any but the rich or unhealthily obsessed, or when private equity ghouls treat a club as a cash cow, is it not? But look at all the good work we do in the community! Look at what we give back! They do give back, yes - so long as it is advantageous.

To note the phoniness here is not to suppose that these gestures are wholly phantasmagorical. Gestures matter, if only as an index of wider changes. Socialist Worker concludes a brief editorial on the armband controversy: “Sporting bosses have made it clear they don’t care about inequality. It’s time to give oppression, and those that profit from it, a red card.”²

That merely begs the question: if they don’t care about it - and, whatever is in people’s heads, there are universally things the administrators of football care about more - why do they spend so much time, money and cultural cachet trying to look like they do? The official line of Socialist Worker is, as ever, that the anti-racism, anti-sexism, gay friendliness and so on of the establishment is fraudulent, and that, under a paper-thin veneer, everything is more or less as it was in the early 1970s.

Football is perhaps the limit case for this idea. It lags behind terribly, most of all in the case of homosexuality. This year, the Blackpool youngster, Jake Daniels, came out as gay, making him the first English male professional to do so since Justin Fashanu, whose story is not exactly an encouraging precedent (he committed suicide almost 25 years ago). Despite their professionalisation, football dressing rooms (and pitches) remain extremely macho environments. Likewise, the almost complete invisibility of the women’s game until a few years ago is telling. It has taken far longer for official anti-racism, anti-sexism, and so on, to take hold in football than in other spheres of mainstream culture.

That it has taken hold, in the end, surely suggests that it is more than a mere veneer. It is, in fact, a series of meaningful social institutions for managing antagonisms. Yes, the FA’s gestures were quietly shelved in the name of avoiding a yellow card for Harry Kane (not that he was any use in the utterly turgid display against our American cousins on November 25); but it came in for a storm of criticism, and even fell back on this pointless stunt of lighting up Wembley to placate critics.

It is all part of the same thing - the gesture, and the ideological ‘police action’ in the face of its abandonment. That it was abandoned reveals the fundamental fragility of gains won only by elite action, and thus the strange emptiness of the political approach of modern liberalism. Decades of ‘awareness raising’, DEI training, and all the rest - everything goes on one side of the scales; and on the other, a single yellow card wins the day. It is imperative that this is remembered as a shameful event, otherwise the authority of the ideology is in question. (So the Wembley thing was, for all the mockery, probably welcome, as an indication that the FA is still onside.)

Alienation

We are witnessing, then, the clash between corporate liberalism and the wheeler-dealing of an earlier generation of corrupt football bosses. In a somewhat ambivalent role we find ordinary fans. It is too easy to caricature us - especially the English - as brazen, unhealthy-looking bigots. There is certainly a lot of that around, illustrated by the caller to LBC radio who complained, after the USA match, that the present England squad could not hold a candle to the men who died for king and country at Ypres. Yet the first efforts at anti-racist organising on football terraces were very much a grassroots affair - only later coopted by the administrative apparatus. The same is largely true of LGBT supporter groups. Today, fans - like the population at large - are divided on these questions. Recall, in last year’s European championship and the run-up, the controversy over ‘taking the knee’: how some fans booed, and others cheered loudly.

There is one sense other than Infantino’s in which western football authorities might want to take a look in the mirror before denouncing Qatar. It cannot escape notice that, in the countries whose football associations are doing all the handwringing, far-right ideology is generally on the march. The UK sports minister, Stuart Andrew (who is gay), promised to wear the rainbow armband to England’s final group match against Wales; meanwhile, he sits in a cabinet which is attempting to wheedle its way out of the asylum system altogether, along with parliamentary colleagues who shamelessly exploit anti-trans and anti-gay dog-whistles in the hope of saving their skins in the next election. In Germany, Alternativ für Deutschland is still growing in support. The US team has been more circumspect in its virtue-signalling - as well it might be, since large parts of the country are slipping back into equating homosexuality with paedophilia.

Such popular reaction feeds upon the sense that people have no meaningful control over their lives. For a picture of this situation, we might as well turn to football. Just as the football authorities’ official liberalism is a synecdoche of a wider ideological transformation, so the financialisation of the game - over especially the last three decades - is quite typical of the wider culture. It is notable that the big blow-ups in the sport essentially concern the division of the spoils: recent World Cups have pitched Europe and North America against the poorer regional football federations; the Super League controversy saw the super-clubs face off against Uefa (Union of European Football Associations), with Fifa waiting in the wings to see who won.

In such a situation, it is easy to identify the mega-rich owners, the corrupt administrators and the people policing politically-incorrect terrace chants as one vast elite blob. To do so, however, is merely to choose sectionalism over solidarity and thus cement fans’ alienation from the power structures of the game.

Never has this alienation been more obvious than it is right now.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk

1. ‘A tournament to remember’ Weekly Worker November 17: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1419/a-tournament-to-remember.↩︎

2. socialistworker.co.uk/what-we-think/nationalism-more-important-than-equality-to-football-bosses.↩︎