Magnificent Norway and bad football WC – VG
I haven’t watched a second of the football World Cup. It doesn’t make me a significantly better person, just as they look at are not miserable people.
EGON HOLSTAD, commentator in VG’s collaboration newspaper in Tromsø
There is hardly an easier and less free investment than sitting in Norway and boycotting the football World Cup in Qatar.
The most obvious first: Qatar is a thoroughly corrupt country where human rights are eaten for breakfast every day, and only that the International Football Association (FIFA) has allowed itself to be bought into putting the world’s biggest sporting event on a battlefield for slaves and victims of a dehumanized view of women and queer, is more than enough.
Dissociating yourself from this does not require anything.
So it’s easy not to watch, when you know this is the background. That the country had no facilities for football, that it was practically not a nation with a football culture at all, that the matches must be played in air-conditioned stadium facilities, in November, because it takes place in a desert, is something else.
So it’s easy not to watch. Whether that makes the undersigned something morally high is a completely different matter.
I also have no problem with others choosing to watch. It doesn’t make you a worse person to watch World Cup matches on TV, even if social media is abuzz with announcements that suggest many people think so. Football shame and World Cup shame are terms that sound slightly comical to my ears.
Moreover, we in Norway, where we sit on top of the world, must be careful not to highlight ourselves as being so terribly much better than the others.
Unfortunately, being presumptuous is never particularly stylish. Not now either.
We do not have to go very far back in time to find good examples that Norway and the Norwegian Football Association (NFF) also have every reason to look down at the ground and speak softly when it comes to their own handling of both the World Cup and the . the attitudes we believe tarnish this year’s WC, for example what has to do with queerness and the rainbow symbol.
In 2014, the Norwegian men’s national football team met Russia in a match at Ullevaal. After “a thorough process”, the NFF agreed that they would allow supporters to enter the stadium wearing clothes in the colors of the rainbow, while at the same time giving an emphatic notice to those who might display rainbow flags or banners (as a direct support for queer people who are persecuted in Russia) were to be ejected from the stadium.
It’s been such a short time that you can still literally hear the echo of the homophobic howls of joy in the Kremlin.
When Tromsø IL (TIL) advocated a boycott of the WC in Qatar in 2021, and before it was whether Norway would qualify, it started a debate which, almost naturally, ended with Norway not wanting to. boycott.
They would rather influence through dialogue, by going to Qatar and letting our healthy and good attitudes in the West spread about the World Cup and the country of Qatar as a blanket of reason.
A kind of fuck-for-the-virtue project we never got to see carried out in practice, all the while Norway failed to make it to the World Cup.
And how many had thought that Norway should refrain from going to Qatar, and withdraw in protest? Let alone, how many had failed to watch the matches for Norway on TV? It’s just an unqualified guess, but it’s at least reasonable to believe that more people than now would have been willing to break a few rainbow eggs to enjoy a World Cup omelette.
Norwegian football is, on the whole, quite a long way from cleaning up its own ranks. Now individual footballers will be allowed to play football without having to explain either political affiliation or something as private as orientation, really, but it is not a bit funny that in 2022 there is still not a single man playing football at the top level. Norway, which has come forward as queer?
The football referee Tom Harald Hagen stood up in 2020, at the age of 42. All credit to him. All criticism of such aloof attitudes from the outside world that this was an issue at all.
This is also the general situation in countries where our “Western values” rule the rest of society. The almost total absence of queers in European men’s football probably also speaks for itself. Justin Fashanu, the first known player to come out as queer in English top-flight football, was a huge talent and in 1981 was bought to reigning league and European champions Nottingham Forest by legend Brian Clough.
also read
The hopelessly homophobic top football
Denying what they call “politicisation” of football is also a political act. And it takes the wrong side, time and time again.
The latter despised the openness of Fashanu’s queerness, quickly froze him out and sold him in 1982. Fashanu later took his own life, following accusations of rape. And so it was with him. Over 40 years later, he is still alone in the statistics.
When Germany and Hungary were to play an international match in Munich last year, the local authorities in the city applied to the European football association UEFA for permission to let the stadium complex Allianz Arena light up in the colors of the rainbow. UEFA didn’t want any of that kind of politicized bullshit, so that was it with the attempt.
The problem is not that national team captains of teams in the Qatar World Cup don’t put on rainbow-coloured captain’s armbands and accept a yellow card in the same fell swoop, although I appreciate that the German team campaigned by keeping their mouths shut during the team photo session in their opening match.
Nor is the problem that people in Norway or the world choose to watch the matches on TV. I don’t think there are worse people than those of us who choose to invent something else. For my own part, I have only lost my commitment, enthusiasm and joy. I’m probably already struggling to keep up my enthusiasm for English and Norwegian club football.
When FIFA president Gianni Infantino opened a completely open story by saying “Today I feel gay” there was at least an element of entertainment, albeit in a most unintentional way. Because it is he and his like-minded people who are the problem.
This gang that runs international football is a corrupt, empathetic and basically greedy bunch of scumbags who need to be replaced before you can start looking forward to a football World Cup again.
From the Norwegian side of the table, we are fortunate to have a fearless, eloquent and modern football president in Lise Klaveness. She speaks against both Rome, Munich, Qatar and the whole damn empire.
Therein lies the hope. But it will take time.
In the meantime, we can start cleaning up our own bed, both in Norway and in the rest of the European football family.