Beth Mead: Qatar should NOT have held World Cup – Daily Mail
This year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year winner Beth Mead has said Qatar should not have held the World Cup due to its record on human rights and its anti-gay laws,
Mead, who won the Golden Boot in her instrumental performance which helped England claim victory at this year’s Euros, became the first female footballer to win the accolade earlier this week.
The Lioness heroine has now spoken out about this year’s men’s World Cup, praising the football but saying it should not have been held in Qatar, where homosexuality is illegal.
Mead, 27, told the Times: ‘There were people dying to build stadiums that are going to be knocked down or stood empty.
Beth Mead was crowned as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 2022 at a ceremony this week
Beth Mead arrived at the show on crutches after suffering an ACL rupture and she was pictured with her partner and Arsenal team-mate Vivianne Miedema who has the same injury
‘Their attitude towards sexuality, how they are towards women, I don’t agree with it.’
She also staunchly criticised Fifa for banning teams from wearing the One Love armband.
She said: ‘I think that really sucked. It was a great concept and the teams were all behind it.
‘They wanted to stand for something they all believed in and they were going to get punished for it. I don’t think that’s fair at all.’
She did not blame the players for backing down, saying yellow cards in global tournaments can be extremely troublesome and can risk them missing a match.
She added she did not want to promote the tournament due to its location, but she did watch England’s matches and some of the others, including the final.
Mead, who plays for Arsenal alongside her partner, 26-year-old Dutch footballer Vivianne Miedema, has been an outspoken advocate of LGBT+ rights.
Her stance on Qatar is in contrast to former England footballer David Beckham, who signed a deal with the nation, reportedly worth £10 million, to promote the tournament. He did not respond to criticism for this during the tournament.
Unlike in the men’s game in England, the women’s Premier League has multiple same-sex couples who are publicly out and proud.
The men’s World Cup was plagued with controversy over the Middle Eastern country’s treatment of foreign workers, LGBT+ rights and social restrictions.
Homosexuality is illegal in the conservative Muslim country, and can be punished by up to three years in prison. The country’s laws also allow for gay Muslims to be punished with the death penalty, although there are no known cases of this.
Some football stars raised concerns over the rights of fans travelling for the event, especially LGBT+ individuals and women.
Mead led England to glory at Euro 2022 with the Lionesses beating Germany 2-1 in the final
The Lionesses were named Team of the Year while Sarina Wiegman got Coach of the Year
Meanwhile it has been widely reported that thousands of migrant workers tasked with building the stadiums for the tournament were killed while working under poor conditions in stiflingly hot temperatures.
There were also allegations that Qatar may have engaged in corruption and bribery in order to land the tournament in the first place. Qatar denied all the claims.
During the Euros, Beth Mead inspired a generation of young football fans as she scored six goals for England and became the player of the tournament, as well as taking home the golden boot.
After Wednesday’s ceremony she had another piece of silverware to add to the shelf as she beat out cricketer Ben Stokes and curling legend Eve Muirhead to take the award.
The Lionesses also won the team award at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year, while coach Sarina Wiegman won Coach of the Year and became the first woman to ever win the award.
Mead succeeds last year’s SPOTY Emma Raducanu, the first time that women have won the award back to back since 1972.
Mead’s standout success came just a year after the devastation of being left out of Team GB’s squad for the Olympics in Tokyo, and at the same time of her mum’s illness.
Yorkshire-born Beth has joked that she and her partner 26-year-old Dutch footballer Vivianne Miedema are the Posh and Becks of women’s football and ‘the lesbian world’
Beth – who has a younger brother called Ben – explained that her parents encouraged her to get into the sport to ‘get rid of some extra energy’
Beth, who grew up in Hinderwell, a village between Saltburn and Whitby in North Yorkshire, took up football at the age of six
Lioness Beth was catapulted to the top of her game in 2022 – with her momentous year culminating in her being BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year last night
Mead added: ‘It still doesn’t quite feel real that I’ve won this award. I’ll die happy now. When it’s the nation voting, and people who may not even know you personally, that’s a really nice feeling. It is quite humbling. To beat some of those names is surreal. Stokes didn’t look too chuffed, did he?’
She attended the ceremony on crutches after suffering a recent injury with her father and partner, Dutch footballer Vivianne Miedema.
Beth – who has a younger brother called Ben who is an engineer – says her parents encouraged her to get into the sport to ‘get rid of some extra energy’.
When her mum dropped her off at a local boys’ training session they were warned it might be ‘too rough’ for her.
Beth previously said: ‘When she came back an hour later, he [the coach] basically said I was rougher than most of the boys!’.
She quickly moved on to the Middlesbrough Girls’ Centre of Excellence – prompting her parents to pick up extra shifts at work to cover the cost of petrol for the 45-minute drive they were making several times a week.
By the age of 16 Beth was signed to Sunderland – where she scored 77 goals in 78 games.
Alongside her training, Beth also picked up shifts in the local Fox and Hounds pub in Staithes near Whitby, and used her wages to buy her first pair of football boots.
She juggled a professional career with a degree in Sport Development from Teesside University and commitments as a coach to local schoolchildren.
She was quickly propelled to the spotlight and is now one of England’s star players.