Qatar 2022 is no World Cup for gay people

Many members of the Dublin Devils FC, Ireland's biggest LGBTQ+ inclusive football team faced the same dilemma, stay in the closet and continue playing football or come out as gay and leave the sport.

To most involved in football, the concept of a gay person playing is alien to them. Grassroots football typically has an old school culture, where traditional straight masculinity is seen as a strength and casual homophobic slurs are thrown about. This makes football an uncomfortable environment for coming out as a gay.

Amateur football takes its lead from the professional game and before last year, when Josh Carvallo and Jake Daniels made the decision to come out as gay, LGBTQ+ had little presence in the men’s game. Discussion of LGBTQ+ people in football was dominated by tabloid rumours of gay footballers in the closet.

Gary Lineker, in his recent well-intentioned but ill-advised comments, alluded to there being gay footballers in the game who are uncomfortable coming out. We need to ask why? Fear of fan reaction is certainly one reason, but perhaps we should look at what the footballing authorities are doing to promote LGBTQ+ participation and the example their own actions are setting.

This week's intervention from the UK's Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, who told LGBTQ+ fans that they should show "a little bit of flex and compromise" if visiting Qatar was pilloried, from among others, by human rights activist Peter Tatchell, who was prevented from protesting against Qatar's record on human rights in the country this week.

In 2010 FIFA announced, after a now discredited vote, that the 2022 World Cup would be held in Qatar, a country that Human Rights Watch says, "represses the rights of LGBT people and punishes same-sex