Watford’s Qatar friendly reveals the limitations of sportswashing in football

Watford announced a friendly with Qatar at 5.01 on a Friday afternoon, and had to cancel it by the following Monday lunchtime.

The ‘Friday news dump’ is a well-known political meme. When you have news to break that you already know is going to go down badly but cannot get round releasing, doing so on a Friday afternoon is perceived as likely to minimise the number of people who will see it and the amount of attention it will get. Newspapers and media outlets already have their weekend content primed and ready to go. The public may glance at it but not quite take it in. It’s one of the best times to bury bad news of the week. When the Watford Twitter account announced their pre-season schedule for the 2022/23 season, they did so at a minute past five on Friday afternoon. It’s almost as if someone knew.

It took half an hour for a response from the Watford LGBTQ+ group Proud Hornets, and the optics only went downhill from there. By the following Monday morning, the match against Qatar was cancelled. The club had agreed to meet Proud Hornets and the women’s group Women of Watford that evening, but in the end there was no need. By Monday morning, Proud Hornets and Women of Watford were able to send a follow-up message confirming they were ‘delighted that Watford FC has listened to our concerns’. Watford vs Qatar in Austria was off.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon the fact that this was even considered a good idea in the first place. It seems quite possible that there is a blind-spot between some who work in the game towards the strength of feeling that seems to have been growing against the World Cup finals being held in Qatar. But a decision was taken to run it up the flagpole and see if this match would fly, which seems like an unnecessary risk to take. But it seems likely that there will be more than just one person behind this ill-thought-out choice. It may well be that a number of different people didn’t think it fully through or give it as much thought as they should.

All this makes you wonder whether this sportswashing lark is all it’s cracked up to be. After all, an awful lot of money seems to have been spent on it since it was first formally noted by the campaign group Sport for Rights, and in the years before we even had the ability to describe it in one word. But there was little that painted Qatar in a particularly positive light about the Watford story, from the assumption that playing Qatar in a…