Premier League

One Love? One kick in the teeth after another at this World Cup for queer football fans

The One Love armband

The One Love armband was already a sanitised symbol but now it’s just a symbol for bottling it; and then bucket hats and t-shirts were targeted…

On Saturday night, five people were killed and 17 others were injured in a mass shooting at a gay club in the US state of Colorado. Club Q has been described as the heart of the LGBTQ+ community in the city of Colorado Springs and was supposed to be a safe space.

Earlier that day, the president of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, gave a bewildering press conference on the eve of the World Cup in Qatar to hit out at those critical of the tournament’s location. In his speech – in which he claimed to feel Qatari, Arabic, African, gay, disabled, like a migrant worker, and like a woman – he played down concerns that queer fans faced danger in a country where gay people risk torture and imprisonment.

“They have confirmed and I can confirm that everyone is welcome,” he said.

Of course, this came in the settling dust of a swift U-turn on the legality of alcohol sales at stadiums during the tournament. Infantino continued: “If this is the biggest issue we have for the World Cup, then I will resign immediately and go to the beach to relax. I think if for three hours a day you cannot drink a beer, you will survive.”

The point, of course, is not whether fans can survive without alcohol, but rather what other promises will Qatar renege on with little-to-no notice? Maybe whether everyone is welcome…

The shooting at Club Q is very important context ahead of the World Cup and Infantino’s remarks. Infantino is a man speaking at a platform with straight, white, male privilege claiming to understand and relate to experiences of people who do not have straight, white, male privilege – and he’s claiming to understand it because, in his younger days, some kids would say mean things about his red hair and freckles.

The USA, a country where many believe freedom to be queer is at the freer end of the scale, ranked 23rd in a recent list of social acceptance of LGBTQ+ people by The Williams Institute, which conducts research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. Qatar ranked 111th on that same list.

For context, the UK ranked 9th. For further context, Home Office figures suggest homophobic hate crimes were up by 41% in the UK in 2021.

The hate crimes experienced by many LGBTQ+ people across the world – and the looming spectre of the possible hate crime that queer people are consistently in…

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