In defence of the One Love armband

Wales’ football manager Rob Page was clear about why his team’s captain Gareth Bale would wear the ‘One Love’ armband at the Qatar World Cup: it was about demonstrating support of LGBT rights in a country where there are none. Whatever the pushback from Fifa, Page insisted last month that the armband would be worn: ‘That’s what we believe in, that’s what we stand up for’, he preached.

The Welsh team were not alone in taking part. Football captains of eight other European nations – including England’s own Harry Kane – were vocal about their plans to wear the armband to promote inclusivity in a host nation where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment and death. ‘Wearing the armband on the biggest stage in the world will have an impact’, Kane said. 

Even Mark Bullingham, chief executive of England’s Football Association, expressed his readiness to make a stand – even if it meant being punished for breaking Fifa’s rules. It is under the fourth law – ‘the players’ equipment’ – that the International Football Association Board prohibits any garments with ‘political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images’. 

That stance looked certain until today, several hours before England’s first match with Iran. While the FA were prepared to pay fines, it seems that Fifa tested England’s commitment to the cause by threatening ‘sporting sanctions’, including Kane being booked for wearing ‘unapproved equipment’.  

A joint statement from seven European football associations announced the cowardly reversal on their armband display, which amounted to the gentlest of gestures in solidarity with gay people in Qatar. We ‘cannot put our players in the situation where they might be booked,’ the statement said. Fifa took a gamble – and won.

The Football Association of Wales insisted that, despite the U-turn, they ‘remain with the belief that football is for everyone’. Really? Yet without action, such words amount to little more than virtue-signalling.

Not all armbands are off limits at the World Cup: Fifa continues to boast of its own ones players are allowed to wear – including, in the quarter-finals of the tournament, one on the theme of #NoDiscrimination. Quite fitting after a Qatari World Cup ambassador deemed homosexuality a ‘damage in the mind’.

Fifa’s argument in threatening punishment for those who wear One Love armbands is that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. As Sam Leith wrote last month on Coffee House, sports is as political as it gets. Politics runs through this World Cup, whether we would like it to or not. Fifa president’s monologue on why Qatar’s critics should focus on the West’s historical sins is nothing short of inflammatory politics. Yet spreading awareness of oppressed LGBT people worldwide, during a sporting event that brags it ‘unites the world’, is apparently one step too far.