The relationship with Qatar, a country with which he has longstanding links from his time as a player at the French club, Paris Saint-Germain, owned by Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, the emir of Qatar, now arguably presents the biggest risk to the Beckham brand since his talent and “curtains” haircut caught the public attention with an audacious halfway-line goal against Wimbledon in 1996 in the red of Manchester United. The distance Beckham has seemingly travelled in the last two decades might account for much of the vehemence of the backlash coming his way. Robbie Williams and Black Eyed Peas have come under fire for agreeing to perform.īut Beckham, contrary to the pet name Golden Balls given to him by his wife in the innocent days of 2008, when he could do no wrong, has been the central target of the opprobrium.īack in 2002 Beckham posed for the cover of Attitude, the gay magazine, and subsequently made the undeniably pioneering statement in a game riddled with homophobia that he was “honoured to have the tag of gay icon”. One woman said she lost consciousness.īeckham’s friend and former teammate Gary Neville was recently on the rough end of an appearance on the news panel show Have I Got News for You over his World Cup contract with the state-owned broadcaster beIN Sports. In a jarring contrast, Human Rights Watch reported just a few days before the sunny photoshoot on the suffering of gay and transgender people who said they had been detained as recently as October in an underground prison in Doha’s Al Dafna district, six miles south of the golden posts, where they had been variously verbally abused, slapped, kicked and punched until they bled. Two weeks ago, Beckham, donning dark sunglasses, posed alongside the British sculptor Hugo Dalton and his installation of golden goal posts on Doha’s Lusail City Marina. In a video message to a youth festival in Doha on Thursday he claimed the World Cup would be a platform for progress, inclusivity and tolerance. It is his image flashing across Qatari World Cup Snapchat and Instagram channels. “The modern and traditional fuse to create something really special,” he said. This summer, Beckham, 47, took part in a promotional film for Visit Qatar in which he spoke of the pride of Qataris about their culture. There is not so much an LGBTQ+ community in Qatar as a disparate collection of terrified individuals. Under an interpretation of sharia law, it can lead to a death sentence. Same-sex sexual activity is punishable by seven years in prison in Qatar. “I see that his future will be ruined but at least he will have some millions,” said Fahad, who as a younger man spent two and a half months in solitary confinement in a Qatari prison for the crime of wearing makeup. But the former footballer’s decision to accept the fortune from the royal house of Thani and take up the ambassadorial role is, to Fahad’s mind, a damnable pact worthy only of scorn. Fahad tries to be understanding about the temptation posed by the £150m deal that Beckham is said to have been offered by Qatar, albeit the value of the contract is disputed.
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