England manager Gareth Southgate, when pressed about his political statements, said that he wasn’t going to get drawn into a virtue-signaling competition. Well, it’s probably a good thing he didn't, as he would have been spanked 6-0 by FIFA president Gianni Infantino.
As Spiked’s Tom Slater put it: "You’ve got to hand it to Gianni Infantino, the embattled president of FIFA. That rambling, hour-long monologue he gave in Qatar over the weekend – attempting to deflect criticism of the World Cup being held in the tiny authoritarian statelet by going on a bizarre faux-woke tirade – was the funniest thing the internet has been gifted for a while. His opening gambit – ‘Today I feel Qatari. Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker’ – has already launched a thousand memes, so self-parodying and shameless a display it was.
What’s more, in trying and failing to feign solidarity with the fallen migrant workers and oppressed gay people of Qatar – he claimed at one point to understand discrimination by dint of him being bullied at school for being ginger – he has done us all a bit of a service. He has laid bare the nonsense of elite wokeness, the tendency of cash-stuffed corporates, or in this case notoriously corrupt sports governing bodies, to try to use identitarian slogans to absolve themselves of any alleged sins.
The only real difference here is that Infantino did it so badly, the cynicism was so obvious and the allegations against FIFA too glaring to ignore, that he hasn’t got away with it. He was undone by the ridiculousness of it all. At one point, he seemed to suggest that Qatar was actually more pro-migrant than the West – because while the Qataris open their doors to migrants so they can earn a pittance under terrible conditions, ‘we in Europe close our borders’. While there is a point to be made about the hypocrisy and sanctimony of those posturing against this World Cup while happily taking part, painting Qatar as some pro-migrant utopia is more than a bit of a stretch."
Thank you, Gianni. We are truly grateful.
The serious point about virtue signaling is that it can be used to devalue political protests that actually means something. For example, prior to the world cup match with England, the players of the Iranian squad did not sing their national anthem, in protest at the regime under which they live. Iranian-born commentator Mahyar Tousi said that "Many feel the Iran players should be fighting at home. The players didn’t sing, but people in Iran? They don’t care about that. They’re into symbolism, but they do not like virtue signaling. They were against their own team because they say you shouldn’t have even gone... There are people being killed on the streets, your own relatives, your own friends. You should’ve just not gone. You should stay and fight. There are videos of the Iranians in Iran celebrating England beating their own team. They say the team is representing the Islamic regime. They don’t see it as representing the nation.”
As reported in the Guardian, by the time of the match with Wales, they had clearly been subject to some persuasion: "Iran’s football team half-heartedly sang their national anthem at the start of their game against Wales, after they had faced fierce criticism from government officials for failing to do so at the start of the game against England. With their lips barely moving, the players had clearly collectively decided to sing the anthem, but the uncomfortable performance contrasted with the vigour that the Welsh players sang their anthem."
The current debate about free speech is full of disingenuous arguments. Events such as these clarify what freedom of expression is, and why it is precious.
International sport may be futile in some ultimate philosophical sense, but it is rich with human meaning. Put another way, football is only part of the England team's job. They are there to express, explicitly or not, something about the country and the institutions and the people that sent them; and they form part of the story of all the national teams before and after them. They also provide shared experiences, experiences from which the nation is made. A nation can be thought of as an imagined community: a national team is there, partly, to provide opportunities to feel part of that community; to share intense experiences with people you care about; to build up belonging and common memories. Without all that - and everything else- it’s just a bunch of blokes chasing a ball.
So what does the England football team represent at the moment? Does it represent the English nation? Or does it represent the intersectional ideology that Gareth Southgate has consistently put forward? Well, a bit of both. But more than this, it is part of the totalising global corporatism that the 2022 Qatar World Cup exists to promote. Southgate probably means it when he says that they - presumably the England football team - stand for what they believe in. You feel that they probably do believe in hollowing out the repositories of national meaning and belonging; and in kneeling when told to.
Qatar itself exemplifies that global corporatism, and it indicates the final form of the post-nation state "Global Britain." That is, a deracinated economic opportunity zone or vassal state; an extractive elite; and a mass population whose lives have only instrumental value.
A nation without a nation has no need of a football team, and has nothing to sing for.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/21/in-praise-of-gianni-infantino/