When human rights are out of the game: an analysis of the silencing of national teams during the 2022 World Cup

Abstract

The 2022 Football World Cup, hosted in Qatar, brought together 32 national teams represented by the respective national football federations. This study considered these teams as organizations and their capacity to inform and shape public perception according to their communication strategies through messages on their social networks. Such a major sport event provides, in addition to the competitive experience, a unique opportunity to give visibility to social responsibility and human rights issues. This study focuses precisely on the relationship between the visibility and the dimension granted by these selections to human rights violations associated with the host country of Qatar. For this purpose, the analysis of their digital presence on Facebook, the platform that concentrates the largest number of followers of these federations, is considered. The theoretical basis of this study addresses concepts such as the Spiral of Silence, Public Opinion, Invisibility Strategies, Silencing of Organizations, Agenda-setting, and Framing, which contribute to the understanding of how communications can impact and influence public opinion in raising awareness about issues related to social responsibility, human rights and their representation in the public space. This investigation, characterized by being quantitative and qualitative, is assumed to be a multiple case study and adopts a methodological approach with the content analysis technique. We consider a sample of 5,069 publications extracted from the official Facebook accounts of each one of the national teams participating in the Football World Cup. For the investigation, the period of the event was considered, from November 18, 2022, to December 21, 2022, to which were added, for analysis purposes, two days before the official opening and two days after the final. When analyzing each of these publications, we mainly tried to verify the correspondence of these messages with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN's 2030 Agenda, which are used in this study as a reference for the presence of social responsibility content, deepening the analysis for the recurrence of messages that warn of human rights violations committed by the host country of the World Cup, Qatar. The results indicate that although some of the national teams addressed issues related to the Sustainable Development Goals, only 3 of the 32 national teams mentioned, even superficially, the human rights concerns associated with hosting the World Cup. This flagrant discrepancy between the recognition of these social issues and the visibility conferred by the official communication of these organizations through their digital platforms constitutes the central point of the results. The implications of these findings reveal a gap between recognizing controversial issues and communicating about them. The study highlights the need for sports organizations to adopt a more consistent and responsible approach to controversial issues, considering that the potential impact of their messages can shape public opinion. In this way, we seek to contribute to academic discussions that mainly involve the invisibility strategies of organizations in the face of communicating critical issues. A competition of the magnitude of the 2022 World Cup provides not only a stage for sports performances but the opportunity to draw attention to matters of public interest that can be debated and reflected on through the dissemination capacity of digital social networks.