Image credit: 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar 0–2 Ecuador on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2022_FIFA_World_Cup_Qatar_0%E2%80%932_Ecuador_-_%2821%29.jpg

Introduction

The great Brazilian player Pele famously described football as ‘the beautiful game’. For billions of people across the world the sport delivers huge opportunities for enjoyment. Major discourses on football and the role of FIFA draw on narratives of inclusion, diversity, and transcendence. Yet the ongoing and, some would argue, growing presence of Islamophobia as part of narratives of racism in football remains significantly under-researched and thus not adequately understood. The Eurocentric origins of such anti-Muslim racism also appear to clash with other European inspired liberal discourses about the role of football as a transcendent and symbolic unifier of people from across the globe.

I contend that these tensions were exposed during the hosting of the FIFA World Cup 2022 by the institutions of the state of Qatar, its citizens, and residents. The host Qatar projected and symbolised forms of Muslimness and Islam that some 1.5 billion sporting viewers had never experienced before. Quranic verses were incorporated into the Opening Ceremony, and the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed appeared on billboards for every visitor to see. Scores of ordinary fans, from across the globe, visited, experienced, and practiced through their own faith acts Qatar’s repertoire of Islam – the vast majority for the first time.

Qatar’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2022, however, also exposed that broad spectrum of Islamophobia and forms of anti-Muslim racism and prejudice that is embedded in football culture. By extension this relates to FIFA’s ability to make claims of power in defining itself as a truly ‘global’ federation in organising mega sporting events (MSE). In this blog I question the signifier of the “Beautiful Game” in reproductions of power as empty, at an epistemic level and framed in the context of Qatar’s hosting and symbols of Islam.

Framing the Game

In the late 20th and early 21st century football has been an intrinsic part of sports globalization as a corporate, capitalist economic endeavour (Giulianotti, and Robertson 2009). The business of football and its homogenizing signifiers has been almost fully realized. Football has become the most popular sport in the world. There is barely a corner of the globe where the “game” is not played. At grassroots it invites young people, in particular, to play. At the level of professional football, the business forms part of a major transnational endeavour impacting society, economy, and politics. No other sport compares to it internationally.

Indeed, the FIFA World Cup tournament is also the biggest football mega event in the world, generating billions of media engagements, viewing and clicks as well as millions of fans who visit the host country (Chadwick et al 2022). The global image, epitomised in its logo, is one projecting universal sporting (and other) values transcendent of national, ethnic, and religious markers. This image literally sells, playing a vital part in commercialisation and merchandising the asset as part of the brand economics. It is associated with a certain kind of credibility and legitimacy that FIFA and those businesses licensing products from it, represent.

The ever-expanding popularity of football has also been viewed by those that organise, run, and control it as a two-fold opportunity. The first opportunity is to make money. The Fédération Internationale de football (FIFA) makes lots of money. It also enjoys forms of tax exemptions that increase gross revenue by making claims about its transformative “unifying” and humanitarian efforts (Bandeira 2016: 423). FIFA, for example, has reported that, despite a global pandemic and economic slowdown around the world, it accrued $7.6 billion in revenue in the 2019-2022 period (FIFA 2022: 1). The second opportunity is to use the sport as a vehicle for forms of political (with both a small and big p), cultural, and ideological messaging, control and even exploitation.

I contend, however, that the reality of football – in relation to Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hate – is different. Even today FIFA MSE’s can be described as deriving from a Eurocentric projection and frame of power persistently viewing non-western societies “from above” and a position of value-laden superiority. Historically football has been a tool, a handmaiden to the colonial project of pacification and discipline as well as post-colonial reproductions of modernity. Such actions, by ruling authorities, were “a necessity, considering the multiple uses of sport as an element for political, social, and cultural recognition (Amara 2003:100). Football, including MSE like the FIFA World Cup, I contend, is still being used by some actors as a tool to exclude or marginalize so-called non-European peoples and cultures of Islam. It certainly presents little evidence of a move to seriously decolonize either discourse or praxis. However, as we shall see with the example of the Qatar hosted FIFA 2022 World Cup, football can also serve as a site of resistance and contestation. A form of cultural exchange and dialogue was expressed and negotiated as an ongoing dynamic in wider debates about racism, including anti-Muslim hate and Islamophobia and, possibly, decolonization.

As such much about football reflects and reinforces globalization and western hegemony. A European and Eurocentric discourse dominated FIFA (as well as other Football Associations) has also shaped the rules, regulations, and institutions of football to serve their (and their corporate sponsors) interests. Some academic research in the 1990s identified the extent to which this has eroded diversity and authenticity of local cultures and identities, including Muslim identities. Developing research has suggested, however, that what has emerged are forms, of at best, glocalization of football alerting us to a more “complex connectivity” (Tomlison 1999). King suggests that such dispensations of power are akin to modern slavery (King 2012: 45).

How shall we know if we don’t know?

Study of, scholarship, reporting, blogging, producing knowledge about anti-Muslim racism in football reveals a lacuna with little by way of substantive production to enliven discourse and change practice. The limited amount of research ‘out there’ is difficult to access, focus is limited to grassroots football in highly localised contexts (Awan and Zempi 2021) or garners an ethereal appearance as part of broader perspectives on racism in football, including exploitation in Africa (Darby, 2005).

Even from the limited amount of research available we can certainly ascertain that Muslims in football, whether players, officials, fans, or organizers are othered. Their experiences of prejudice, discrimination, and attack is largely ignored. When attention is paid to so-called visibly Muslim players like Mo Saleh, Mezut Ozil, Karim Benzema, or the Moroccan team that played at the FIFA2022 World Cup in Qatar they are frequently fetishized, exoticized or othered. Primary frames are attached as positive when scoring goals or representing in the right way. But conversely if they don’t score or they fail to ‘represent’ in the right way their otherness is also made apparent. Debates around inclusion and culture in the French national team, over the last 25 years, amply demonstrate the extent to which paradigms of othering and anti-Muslim racism have operated. With Liverpool FC player Mohammed Saleh the framing of his Muslimness was portrayed as deeply positive. Here was a man who could single-handedly quash institutionalised anti-Muslim racism and reduce hate crimes against Muslims in Liverpool at the same time (Beydoun, 2023, 257-8). His success as a player and his identification with Islam while laudable has not, however, provided the “systemic evidence that [his] fame could in any way decrease the mainstream Islamophobia in British culture” (Al-Sayyad, 2018). In this way anti-Muslim racism in football is seen as part of wider frames of racism, prejudice, and discrimination which FIFA is accused of failing to tackle (Covo 2019).

Qatar, A World Cup Tournament like no othered

Even before the first match of the FIFA 2022 World Cup was played at the Al Bayt stadium in Qatar the evidence of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia were startlingly apparent in frames about the event. Media and governmental framing seized upon dimensions of Qatar’s Islamic values, culture, social norms, and governance issues to deport blatant anti-Muslim race hate. FIFA’s hegemonic narratives and Qatar’s frames were similar but also different.

Qatar wanted to frame and signify dimensions of Muslim identities for inclusion, FIFA wanted to marginalise them. FIFA’s narrative was reinforced by the European media’s obsession to hegemonizing claims of football as essentially and culturally referenced through primary signifiers of so-called western value-base and norms associated with the game, the tournament, and the fan experience both inside and outside stadiums. Indeed, anti-Muslim hostility was clearly performed as moral outrage including tropes around alcohol, women, security and safety, dress codes, player, and fan behaviours.

Then the tournament commenced. And from the very start Qatar’s Islamic values and dimensions of its Muslim identity were writ large – on the field, in the stadiums and beyond. For the first time in World Cup history the opening ceremony of the tournament led with a publicly performative and explicitly conveyed Muslim faith and identity broadcast to a global sporting audience that emphatically pushed-back on attempts to other. This was no accident; this was conscious resistance and assertion from the Qatari organisers.

Persistence or Legacy?

And yet throughout the tournament and in debates about legacy there is evidence of the persistence of anti-Muslim bias and racism. There were reactionary responses coming from media, social media, politicians, and leaders. FIFA and, in particular, its president Gianni Infantino did complain that politics was getting in the way of the football, and that issues as they related to sexuality, disability, labour and national identity were problematic. But in a wide-ranging monologue just days before the tournament the one hate that never passed Infantino’s lips was anti-Muslim hate or Islamophobia.

Throughout the tournament when issues signified as ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ manifest as hate, attack, prejudice, and assault – whether on or off the pitch, in the stadium or out of it – FIFA stayed silent. When news media anchors across Europe, keyboard warriors and social media pundits whipped up hostile, anti-Muslim racist sentiment FIFA diversity and equality chiefs were mute. Beyond Muslim players, managers, and officials themselves not one single significant football figure, including FIFA World Cup Ambassadors themselves, framed any conversation, soundbite, or interview about the hosting of the World Cup in Qatar through the lens of anti-Muslim race hate or Islamophobia. Giants of football, such as former England skipper David Beckham, were content instead to either stay quiet or, when prompted, to talk about his former Spice Girl wife or Qatar’s spice market. Indeed in the past World Cup Ambassador Yahya Toure has even criticised players like Arsenal’s former midfielder Mesut Ozil for speaking out against China’s anti-Muslim practices against the Uyghur minority. In this respect the governmentality of FIFA’s intrinsic Eurocentric frames and othering of Islam was evident, in their persistence in denying “Muslim agency” within a self-imposed “westernizing horizon” (Sayyid, 2018, 423).

Despite FIFA the Qatari hosts of the World Cup exposed the broad spectrum of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice that is embedded in football culture. Qatari authorities not only managed to challenge but even succeeded in disrupting FIFA’s claims and frames. By extension it also exposed the weakness of FIFA’s own claims to power as a truly global federation. Qatari pushback and proactive framing of and at the tournament turned out to be a tool of resistance that promoted authenticity of meaning to Islam and being Muslim while interfacing with the juggernaut of FIFA and western dominance of the beautiful game. It celebrated and fostered a new set of meanings.