United States players have taken part in a “Be The Change” campaign for the past 18 months ahead of the Qatar World Cup.
They have been given weekly updates, had talks from experts on human rights, discrimination and players have worn pride-inspired numbers on their shirts as well as inviting workers to their training base in Doha. US boss Gregg Berhalter has praised his players for the way they have approached it but also made it clear that Qatar was chosen under FIFA’s previous regime.
Berhalter said: “Here’s how I will frame it. Any soccer player’s dream will be to participate in the World Cup. We didn’t put the World Cup in Qatar. Players and coaches didn’t vote and say: ‘we want the World Cup to be in Qatar.’ FIFA did that.
“So, we could just say: ‘OK, we are going to do our thing and play in the World Cup.’ Or we could show what type of conscience we have as a society, as a soccer group and that’s what I think you are seeing.
“Even though we know it’s our dream, we think there’s other things that are important for us at least to be aware of. We’ve been educating our players for at least the last year-and-a-half on human rights issues in Qatar. Educating them because we want them to make their own decision, we don’t want to influence that decision. We have people coming in and it’s really unbiased information they’ve been given.
“What I’ve found is that all these actions by these countries is basically the soccer world saying that we do have a conscience and we do want to use this platform just to bring awareness to some of these human rights issues. And I think it’s well within our boundaries in soccer to do that.”
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The US will also face a potentially difficult game with Iran made all the more interesting because of political tensions in the past. But again, Berhalter spoke with an openness about the issues but said his focus is on football this time.
Berhalter added: “Is it tensions in the past, is it ally ship in the past? We have a huge relationship with Iran and a lot of time it’s been good, there’s been some bad parts to it, but what I say is that we’re looking at this as a soccer game, we’e not looking at this as a political battle.
“A lot of our players are too young to appreciate what happened in the past, tensions that we’ve had and, for us, hopefully it will be a pivotal game as to who will advance into the next round.”
