It’s a Thursday evening in November, and I’m sitting in front of the television, speechless. I have just watched the documentary Geheimsache Katar by sports journalist Jochen Breyer and author Julia Friedrichs, about the preparations for this year’s World Cup in Qatar. In the lead-up, various clips from it had appeared in my feed and on Instagram Stories. So I should have been forewarned.
But hearing with my own ears how women were compared to unwrapped or just-opened sweets by the people in charge onsite, and how homosexuality is described as “spiritual damage,” provided a hard reality check. I feel like actor Matthias Brandt, who, at the end of the ZDF documentary, responds to Breyer’s question about whether or not he will actually watch the 2022 World Cup in Qatar with a resigned sigh and shrug of the shoulders: “I was dreading that question…No idea!”
I’ve been a big soccer fan since I was a kid. In our family, going to the stadium was a rarity, but Saturday night Sportschau with Dad was always a must. I can still vividly recall the euphoric atmosphere at the 2006 World Cup in Germany: We experienced the summer fairy tale with neighbors at joint barbecues in courtyard driveways or on terraces and screamed our heads off together. Even today, I get goosebumps when I think of the crowds in the streets, frenetically celebrating the championship title of VfB Stuttgart in my Swabian hometown. For me, soccer has always been a symbol of community and cohesion. Soccer is universal. Soccer transcends borders. Soccer is not interested in origin, status, or education. It transcends countries, religions, and languages.
So it feels all the more serious when the host country of the world’s biggest soccer event discriminates against and excludes people. As a cis, heterosexual woman, I’m privileged not to fear being arrested on site because of my sexual orientation—or worse. But how can the love of sports be properly celebrated when love in all its wonderful forms is suppressed?
Admittedly, homophobia in soccer is not new. So far, only a few footballers have come out publicly. In the spring of this year, English player Jake Daniels became the first active professional soccer player to make his homosexuality public. In Germany, ex-national player Thomas Hitzlsperger is probably the most famous example, although his coming-out came after the end of his career. He was very critical of the World Cup in Qatar in an interview with Zeit.de. He still feels a great passion for the game, but “the circumstances under which this World Cup is taking place are scandalous, it has never happened in this form before. Qatar has bought the right for around 200 billion euros to broadcast four weeks of images that do not reflect the reality of life there. The country is not concerned with sport, but with portraying something that the world wants to see…For that, very many foreign workers had to die; for that, people were and are mistreated and oppressed.”
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