This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Eric Cantona will not be watching the World Cup in Qatar. Not a minute of it. This tournament, he says, is “only about money and the way they treated the people who built the stadiums [more than 6,000 migrant workers have died since Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2010]. It’s horrible. I understand football is a business. But I thought it was the only place where everybody could have a chance.”

The men who for a month will be watched all around the globe surely have the responsibility to make their voices heard

It’s a powerful and seductive idea, football as universal leveller: the global game, the simplest of sports, the one metaphorical world currency. It’s also the reason that this tournament engenders such widespread disquiet.

A host country with a dire human rights record, a repressive attitude towards women and a ban on homosexuality — all these fly in the face of the genuine inclusion which football can and should be about. Giving the tournament to Qatar was a decision based on cash and influence, a line in the sand in every way: the moment when the notoriously corrupt FIFA could no longer even be bothered to hide their true colours.

These, therefore, are the game’s two faces: a grasping, soulless behemoth against perhaps the most charismatic man ever to play in the Premiership. The Death Star against the Jedi knight; the Inquisition against the heretic. Three years ago, when receiving the UEFA President’s award, Cantona began his speech with a quote from King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport.” If it wasn’t a direct rebuke to FIFA and Qatar, it sure sounded like one: a very unfoolish fool speaking truth to power.

It will be hard for any of us to follow Cantona’s example and abjure the entire tournament, not least because it would involve a month-long, saturation media-coveraged, smartphone-enabled version of the famous Likely Lads episode when Bob and Terry have to avoid hearing an England result for an entire evening. But Cantona himself would probably not blame us any more than he blames the players.

“If you have a player who says, ‘I will boycott the World Cup,’ you say, ‘Bravo.’ But you cannot condemn a 20-year-old player, who has a ten-year career, who lives in a world surrounded by people from football 24 hours per day.” Cantona has no doubt where the primary responsibility lies. “Speak about the federations, speak about the politicians, who have the power to say, ‘No, we do not go to the World Cup.’ The politicians, the presidents, the federations, the ministers: the real power, everywhere in the world, they have the power to boycott it. It is too easy to say the players.”

It is too easy indeed, but nor does that absolve those players entirely. England manager Gareth Southgate says, “there is a limit to what we can affect”, which is depressing and true in equal measure, but affecting something is surely better than affecting nothing.

England captain Harry Kane and nine other captains have said they will wear a “One Love” armband. It’s a nice gesture, but that’s all it is: a gesture, a statement so bland there’s nothing to get hold of let alone object to, a sop to the guests’ feeling that Something Must Be Done without actually causing the hosts any real discomfort.

It stands in stark contrast to the genuine domestic social activism already espoused by some of Kane’s team-mates, such as Marcus Rashford and his campaign for free school meals and Jordan Henderson’s fundraising for the NHS during the Covid pandemic.

Then again, it’s not as bad as the way in which David Beckham is heavily promoting Qatar’s tourism industry. Joe White, the co-chair of Three Lions Pride which represents LGBT+ England fans, calls the former England captain a “sell-out. You can’t go from doing all the stuff he did in the early Noughties, on the front cover of Attitude talking about LGBT inclusion, to taking millions to be the face of and legitimising a country that criminalises mine and others’ existence.”

Why is Beckham doing it? He hasn’t said so, at least not publicly. He can’t possibly need the money, and as for the idea that holding a major tournament in itself helps countries liberalise — well, the previous World Cup was held in Russia, and look how swimmingly that’s worked out.

At some level, more basic and primal than intellectual choice, the really resonant protests come from need rather than desire. Take the most famous one of all, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising black-gloved fists on the Olympic podium in 1968. (Both men reject the gesture’s near-universal label as a “Black Power salute”, insisting that they were only seeking equality.)

At some level, more basic and primal than intellectual choice, the really resonant protests come from need rather than desire

“It wasn’t a matter of whether I wanted to do it,” Smith said. “I had to do it. I was standing on the highest platform in the world. How could I not?” Carlos concurs. “When the time came, when I had my one chance in life, I stood up and said ‘this shit is wrong. It’s got to be corrected.’”

So too here. And football is the perfect vehicle through which to say so. The men who for a month will be watched all around the globe surely have the responsibility to make their voices heard. After all, there are many things they can say. The only thing they can’t say is nothing. In the words of the great sprinter and campaigner Allyson Felix: “You can’t change anything with silence.”