If you want to be picky, you could say Raheem Sterling chose an ill-targeted metaphor in his statement this week on racial prejudice and the need for a step-change in football’s power structures.
Comparing the spread of racism to the spread of Covid-19 is probably not the best way to change those minds most in need of changing. Let’s face it, a global Venn diagram of virus-deniers and bigotry-sceptics is likely to feature a fairly dense overlap, a concentration of people who don’t really think either of these things exist. You hear that? He just said racism is fake too! We’re home free!
In the meantime it is interesting the current protests have centred on visible symbols of oppression, and specifically on statues. There has already been some pushback against this from those who find themselves suddenly eager students of 18th century naval merchant culture. But there is good sense in looking at these things again.
Most obviously, statues of the ruling classes are made to be pulled down. Is there anything more tedious than being asked to marvel at the majesty of some tinpot local bigwig? How long is it necessary to keep on venerating someone anyway? For ever? Just for a while? When, oh frowning and austere pre-industrial entrepreneurs, will you be done with us?
As for the idea pulling down a statue that celebrates a slave trader represents the beginning of the end of history, a first step towards tearing down Dickens and Churchill; well, at some point you have to show a little faith, grow some rust-resistant copper-alloy balls, and say, yes, some things are simply bad. We can cope with this. The centre will hold.
They are significant, these visible marks. Enslavement, the idea one person is simply a chattel, a lesser form of human, has been legislated away. It would, in my opinion, be illogical to suggest people who are alive now should personally apologise for its existence hundreds of years ago. But it is important to understand racial prejudice is a muscle memory of that same principle, an echo that will often go unheard to the naked ear, but is instead scaled back into everyday interactions, decisions, life chances. Getting rid of words, images and, yes, statues that spread that resonance; well, that just seems as if it is basic good sense.
With this in mind it is good football is talking about power, prejudice and representation, most notably in the form of Gianni Infantino, who has voiced Fifa’s support for an end to abuse and oppression. Football is the dominant popular culture, an arena that should, as Sterling says, be offering up its own plinths, its lighted windows, its platforms of power as something exemplary and uncorrupted.
At which point it may just be a good moment to talk about the next World Cup. At a time when every executive office of footballing power is imploring us to consider society’s inequities, how does Qatar 2022 look these days?
There isn’t much point in dressing this up now. Football is two years away from a tournament that is, among other things, a showcase for the glorious productivity of the Kafala system of labour. These working practices have been called a form of modern-day slavery by the International Trade Union Confederation, in conditions across the region that are at times “little more than prisons for workers” according to Amnesty International.
Those gleaming, splendiferous World Cup venues, those repositories of sound and light, are also tributes to the efficiency of a bonded labour force of Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Indians and other migrant people employed to implement this vast global projection of power. Official figures suggest otherwise, but a counter-commentary of those who monitor the situation suggests there have been thousands of deaths (pdf) along the way. Should we be sitting in these arenas watching football? Or tipping them into the harbour?
It is worth noting Qatar introduced laws last year to diminish and, it is claimed, abolish the Kafala system, under which foreign workers are essentially tied to their employer, unable to seek another job in the country and often too dependent to leave. These new laws have been described as superficial. Only this week Amnesty revealed migrant workers had gone unpaid by a private Qatari company for up to seven months while building Al Bayt Stadium, unable to leave the job, unable to leave the country.
This is not intended as a piece of whataboutery or a comparison with the scars and the significance of actual, forced, seagoing, murderous European slavery. This is not some ghastly race to find the greater horror. It is simply to point to the oddity of football’s apparent powerlessnesses as it asks itself what it can possibly do about oppression and prejudice as it speaks fine words – cheers, Gianni – about the imbalance of power. All the while preparing to shoot off en masse and bask in these glorious migrant-built structures, disposable monuments to a four-week show of power.
What am I expecting to happen here? Instant cultural reforms? Everyone shakes hands and joins the TUC? Ruling elites to issue a tearful Instagram apology (“this has been a powerful personal journey”)? The best outcome is slow reform which, it seems, is already happening.
I guess I am simply agreeing with Sterling when he says there are structural issues that need to be torn down, while also pointing out that he, as a footballer, is stuck right in the middle of this, a passenger in football’s own exploitative networks.
As for those boarded-up statues, they are at least doing their job. They’re making us think about the past and also the present. Welcome, britches-clad men of destiny, welcome splendid new lighted bowls of Fifa, to the idea of the unintended signifier. We will look on you and marvel. Just not, perhaps, in the way you had in mind.
• The subheading on this article was amended on 15 June 2020 to refer to World Cup infrastructure, not venues as stated in an earlier version.
