England players shouldn’t carry weight of protesting Qatar 2022

England will be going to the Qatar World Cup come what may, but is it realistic to expect a group of players to carry the burden of protest?

At the time of writing, England are a statistical near-certainty to qualify for the 2022 World Cup finals. A draw against San Marino in their last match will secure a place in the finals as winners of their qualifying group, from which they’ve dropped just four points while remaining unbeaten. But having got there, another fight is looming, and it doesn’t look like a fight that the England players can win.

Everybody already knows just how contentious the decision to stage the finals in Qatar has been, and several other European teams have already made their stance on the matter clear, with players from Germany, the Netherlands and Norway being particularly vocal on the subject. Their protests earlier this year have only intensified the pressure on England’s players to join them.

After the Albania match, Conor Coady spoke out on the subject to indicate that England’s players are now looking to make a statement of their own, saying that “a conversation hasn’t been had yet because we’ve always said – obviously we are seeing quite a lot in the news at the minute – that we make sure we do our job first”, and it’s hardly surprising that the players should have a desire to speak out. After all, the current generation of England players have, to varying degrees, made having a social conscience part of their collective identity.

But what can they realistically achieve, and what difference might it all make? The answer to that question probably depends on whether you take their concerns in good faith or not. There will be some who will argue that the only protest that would bring about meaningful change would be to boycott the tournament altogether, and there is absolutely no indication that might happen. After all, that decision could have been made prior to the qualifying competition, saving the cost and inconvenience of two years’ worth of trekking across the continent to play matches.

To get an idea of what an England team protest might look like, let’s take a quick look back at what the Dutch national team did when they protested earlier this year. They wore t-shirts with ‘Football supports change’ printed across the front prior to their qualifying match against Latvia, and issued a statement confirming the rationale behind their decision:

‘As early as 2010, the Royal Netherlands Football Association (KNVB) expressed its opposition to Qatar holding the World Cup. Conditions for migrant workers in the country are terrible, but a boycott is not the best response.

‘Human rights organisations emphasise that a boycott would mean that migrant workers would lose their wages and recent progress in Qatar would come to a halt. In their view, it is better at this stage to go to Qatar and use the World Cup to exert diplomatic pressure on the authorities to pursue reforms.’

It is possible to argue that England players may have missed the boat with these protests, that the best time to make them was during their qualifying matches, when there was a direct line between the journey and the destination. But as things stand, England’s players would only now make their point during Nations League fixtures in the summer and autumn of 2022.

Is this ‘enough’? Can any level of protest be ‘enough’? What does ‘enough’ even mean, in this context? England’s players will likely take pelters from all sides over whatever statement they do decide to make. For some people, any form of protest will be beyond the pale, another example of players sticking their oars in where they’re not wanted by breaking the officially sanctioned line that we should ‘keep politics out of football’. But for others, the only acceptable form of protest would likely be a full boycott of the tournament, which would at least make a statement that would be heard around the world.

What we’re likely to end up with will be a halfway house between these two extremes, which will not satisfy those at either end of the spectrum over this debate, with everybody forensically analysing whatever protest they do make under a microscope. But the state of online discourse isn’t the players’ fault either. The sheer bad faith of 90% of online discourse ensures that mature debate is next to impossible, regardless of what they do or don’t do.

It’s also worth bearing in mind that they’ve been put in this invidious position by… well, just about everybody else. The nations within FIFA which decided to contort the World Cup finals almost completely out of shape by giving it to Qatar in the first place and FIFA’s executive committee have put everybody in this position, as have the national FAs who haven’t spoken out on the subject much either. And, of course, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if human rights abuses hadn’t taken place in Qatar in the first place. There is a fundamental perversity in the fact that the protests against these abuses will likely attract more comment than the actual abuses themselves.

Perhaps the only thing that any players can do is make their statement and try to shut out the background noise. It suits a lot of people for footballers to be the focus of all this speculation. Every column inch discussing their response to it all is a column inch less that might have been taken up with discussing the abuses themselves or the fundamentally flawed process by which these finals were selected to be hosted in this particular country in the first place.

England players have to negotiate a minefield by making their statement, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a position into which they have been dropped by the game’s governing bodies. How we got to this point should definitely not be forgotten.