Mute response to war exposes football’s complex relationship with geopolitics

The game is now tangled up in tides of mutual enmity and alliance – this is what sportswashing looks like, it turns out

David Beckham is clearly a very complex man, or at least a very complex set of overlapping brand identities. A few months back Beckham addressed a rapt audience at a St John’s Wood synagogue about the foundational importance of Judaism in his life. “I am part of the Jewish community,” Beckham announced, going on to talk about eating chicken soup and wearing a kippah at family functions.

Every aspect of Beckham’s public image is minutely managed. Identity is very important to public figures. This part of him seems to be something he wants to project to the world. With this in mind, and in view of the horrendous events of the past week, Beckham will perhaps feel some kind of logical contradiction in the fact he, like Hamas, is the beneficiary of Qatari money.

Beckham was paid a reported £125m by the state of Qatar to act as a PR agent for its operations in the foreign policy area of football. Hamas is, according to some detailed reporting, in receipt of hundreds of millions of pounds of Qatari money that is, it is said, directed to administrative support, aid and resources for impoverished families. Safe to say, concern for the Jewish community is not a key part of the Hamas operation.

No doubt some will see a contradiction in this. Here we have a serial borrower of other people’s causes. See for example Beckham’s disposable allyship with LGBTQ+ people, another deep personal conviction discarded like an oversized 1990s leather jacket in the face of cold hard cash from a state where homosexuality is criminalised.

The more sympathetic view is that this is a deeply compromised area for all sport, and for football in particular. Certainly the Premier League faces a high-jeopardy straddling of the political and cultural divide it has opened up in pursuit of its rapacious commercial aims.

There was no moment of solidarity before Premier League matches at the weekend towards the victims of the sudden escalation of violence in Gaza and Israel. Five Sunday fixtures were played out a day after the first rocket barrage, without a moment of silence or a message on a placard. Understandably so, in practical terms. It takes time to agree such things. Premier League owners are not, in fact, engaged in a constant speed-dial Zoom call to debate issues of political messaging.

As things stand, the Premier League has no plans to make any statement of support or to offer any visible sign of sympathy. Some would suggest there is very little actual substance to such messaging in any case. Recent times have brought matchday recognition of events as diverse as the tragic earthquakes in Morocco, the floods in Libya, the war in Ukraine, a train crash in Greece and the death of John Motson.

There is a danger of entering a multi-event grief Olympics here, with ever decreasing effects each time. But the thing is, once you start doing this, or indeed refrain from doing it, that choice becomes significant too.

This is not the place to even begin trying to resolve the cause and effect of historical blame. Safe to say events this weekend are the latest chapter in a horror story, with an entire history of Palestinian blood being shed.

But the current escalation has killed more than a thousand civilians in three days, with talk of kidnap, babies taken from their mothers, of more than 200 slaughtered while attending a music festival. Many British citizens are directly affected. This is not the death of a football commentator.

Football, meanwhile, is the world’s messaging system. It does take sides and offer solace. The Premier League had a view straight away on Ukraine and Russia, under instruction from the British government. The response here will be silence.

At which point devastatingly complex tides of ownership and influence begin to crowd in at the edge of the picture. In recent years football has simply rolled over and invited ambitious state-backed actors to divvy up its internal organs in return for yet another revenue stream.

So we end up with the current situation. A day after the surge in violence began the biggest game in the world that weekend was played out at the Emirates Stadium without mention or sympathy, at a time when mention and sympathy are undeniably the fashion.

As for the optics, well, the optics are frankly bizarre. Arsenal’s home stadium is literally called the Emirates, which has its own neighbourly connection to the regional strife involving Israel and Palestine. The game was broadcast on the Qatari state TV channel BeIN Sports, a key Premier League rights holder. Manchester City are owned by Abu Dhabi, an emirate with its own complex relationship with Israel, most recently the thawing relations that have drawn a separate hostility from Iran.

Any discussion of how to mark the outbreak of a new and brutal war will also involve input from the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia – one of 20 board members in the English top tier as owners of Newcastle United – which has its own complex intersection with all parties.

Saudi has been trying to normalise its relations with Israel, which is seen as a potential background element in the sudden escalation. Saudi is also one of three regional powers, along with Qatar and Iran, to publicly lay the blame for the violence at Israel’s door. Is a statement of support for murdered civilians ever going to be possible in this scenario given the political pressures, given the fact Saudi will in effect be putting its name to such a message?

There are endlessly tangled tides of enmity and alliance here. Manchester United are in negotiations to be bought outright by a Qatari. Saudi’s fund also has a hand in the consortium that owns Chelsea (although, we are assured, with zero overlap). The Premier League has willingly thrown its doors open to this tornado of political influence, where such interests are now not just inside the building but sitting at the top table. This is what sportswashing looks like, it turns out.

Not just influence and visibility, but an arm of bloody international relations right on your doorstep, dressed in your colours, still couched, dimly, behind the idea – laughter in the dark here – of sport as a force for good.

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