Political Discussions in Facebook Football Fan Groups during the 2022 Qatar World Cup

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, presenting our work on the discussions of the 2022 Qatar World Cup by online football communities. This draws on the theory of third spaces: primarily apolitical spaces where political talk can emerge and often takes place in a more congenial, respectful manner. This means they have democratic potential: discussion there may be able to avoid political disagreement and the avoidance of political talk.

We apply this concept to the case of the Qatar World Cup, which was highly controversial for the Qatari regime’s dismissive approach to overall human and specific minority rights; we gathered posts and comments from domestic football fan groups on Facebook in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Danish to examine how they addressed the Qatar World Cup and its many political controversies.

This also produces various methodological challenges, of course; the data are multilingual and vary in their politicisation; they address a central topic (Qatar) as well as a number of more specific subtopics. We tried to address this by taking a snowball approach using keywords related to identified controversies and identifying related keywords, but this did not work particularly well; instead, we worked with text embeddings based on the core keywords to calculate the similarity of posts and comments to these main topics.

This showed that political discussion did emerge in these fan communities, alongside more general football discussion; the discussion quality on some such topics is considerably better than on others, however – LQBTIQ+ and women’s rights discussions attracted considerably more toxic debate than discussions about worker’s rights and other human rights issues, for instance. The ability of third spaces to sustain meaningful political discussion in non-political environments is highly variable, therefore.