Why didn’t any ‘World Cup ‘heroes’ stand up for LGBTQ+ people in Russia? | Lee Hurley

There are plenty of excuses for why no player would wear Stonewall’s rainbow laces or make a political gesture. None of them wash

As Dejan Lovren raised his hands to grab a protester sprinting across the pitch during the 2018 World Cup final, teenage sensation Kylian Mbappe raised his to high-five another. It seemed to some like the youngest player to score in a World Cup final since Pele in 1958 understood something to which many of his older peers were oblivious: that the bravest people at the Russian World Cup were a group of people who weren’t even meant to be on the pitch that day.

Football, we are led to believe by misogynists, is “a man’s game”. What we saw from the members of Pussy Riot on Sunday put into stark contrast the narrative we hear from commentators about “bravery” and “heroics” on the football pitch.

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