Football in the hands of the other: Qatar's World Cup in the British broadsheet press

Abstract

Using reportage of the 2022 World Cup taken from The Telegraph and The Guardian, this paper demonstrates how Bhaba's 'dynamics of writing and textuality' are implemented to represent an Orientalist discourse that describes Qatar in colonial terms. Citing work by cultural critics such as Edward Said and Stuart Hall, it is argued that the British media constructs such a discourse to re-assert a form of colonial dominance which has historically greatly benefitted the former. Adapting theoretical frameworks on 'grammars of exchange' by Said and on mimicry by Homi Bhaba, it is contended that the British media's dominance allows it to replicate the process of knowledge formation that enabled colonial discourse to thrive throughout the 19th century, and that Qatar's success in mimicking many of the cultural attributes of the West has transformed it into a viable threat which must be controlled. The paper concludes by arguing that the cultural narrative of Qatar conveyed to global audiences by the British media is a Western invention. It insists that such homogenising, Eurocentric narratives represent an ideological agenda with little relevance to the actual culture of Qatar and their exposure challenges the reductive hierarchies of neo-colonial racism that they promote.