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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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People being outraged that teams were prevented from wearing the OneLove armbands (to show solidarity with LBGTQ rights amid the backdrop of Qatari views on homosexuality) are ignorant, arrogant, and dogmatic. This is part of what other regions of the world mean when they say the west forces our values onto other people. You don't get to go into another region of the world for a sport as global as soccer and then shit on them for not sharing the same views as you. Not everything needs to be about activism. I don't have the stats, but I have to imagine most people are not in favor of gay marriage in the middle east and, as much as i am in favor of gay marriage, you have to respect that. I mean it wasn't even codified legally in the US until fairly recently. If you want to interact with other countries, you have to accept that they see things differently than you and have different values. This strikes me as being a strong instance of 'i am so open minded that i am close minded'.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/european-teams-won-t-wear-pro-lgbt-armbands-at-world-cup?cmpid=BBD112122_MKT

The main issue is that FIFA threatened to penalise this with actual bookings, not just fines as per usual for uniform violations. This — like the last minute U-turn on beer sales — seems like a case of FIFA making additional effort to accommodate local norms. And of course it adds further weight to the claim that the tournament shouldn’t have been awarded in the first place to a country whose cultural standards are at odds with those of the leading footballing nations.

Because let’s be honest here — the Arab world is shit at football, as is most of the world outside of Europe and Latin America (though honourable mentions for some West African teams, the USA, South Korea, and Japan). The only way hundreds of millions of fans are going to tune in to watch Qatar play anyone is under the auspices of a FIFA tournament featuring the big teams, all of whom come from nations where homosexuality is legal and by and large culturally accepted. This makes it all the more baffling to me that FIFA would award the tournament to a country which is shit at football, hot as fuck, corrupt as fuck, and whose cultural norms are so at odds with those of football’s heartland. At least, it would be baffling if FIFA weren’t itself one of the most odious and corrupt sporting bodies in the world.

the Arab world is shit at football,

This didn't age well, see recent match between Saudi Arabia and Argentina (yes, yes, N = 1 and all that, but it's funny)...

Because let’s be honest here — the Arab world is shit at football

They are absolutely not shit at funding football, however, which is also an important consideration. Notwithstanding football's self-perception as a game of poverty, it needs massive amounts of money to exist at the scale and in the way it currently does. The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money (e.g. Man City, PSG, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Sheffield...plus all the Etihad, Emirates, and Qatar Airways sponsorship deals...et. al.) and as such certainly have a stake in the footballing world, even if its not backed up by their national play on the pitch.

The oil sheikhdoms have supplied a truly stonking amount of that money

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of football fans see this as a massive negative. And would argue that the main impact of all of these oil sheik owners has been major transfer fee and wage inflation. There was more than enough money to go around pre-2010

That’s true, but if and when sporting bodies kowtow to whoever has the most money and not to the interests of fans, the big players, and the wider footballing community, then they should expect (and deserve) a backlash.

It's a complicated dance, though! Because the arab countries are fans, and fans who are paying much higher "prices" than just the punters at the gate.

I seem to remember the Qatar drama centering on laughable amounts of graft. Or maybe it was worker conditions for the infrastructure. There were a lot of reasons people complained before any comments about Current Thing.

The point is that it’s an omnishambles, and Qatar’s unsuitability for the tournament is massively overdetermined. It’s not people grasping at straws, it’s people pointing to yet another fucking thing.

Amen.

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