Qatar doesn’t get much for its £125 million in new Beckham documentary

It turns out that despite being consistently in the public eye for nearly 30 years, David and Victoria Beckham can still grind out carefully scripted “revelations” for Netflix.

Their new four-part series, Beckham (directed by Fisher Stevens, who plays PR-stooge Hugo Baker in Succession, and produced by David Beckham’s own production company), skillfully touches on his courting of the tabloids, his tumultuous relationship with Sir Alex Ferguson and an as-good-as-confirmed affair with his former assistant Rebecca Loos.

Yet notably absent from the 282 minutes of documentary is any mention of one of the most significant financial and political decisions of Beckham’s career: his 10-year £125 million deal to promote Qatar’s 2022 World Cup.

Also absent: any mention of criticism of the deal for sportswashing Qatar’s history of persecuting women and the LGBT+ community.

Stevens has said during the junket for the series that he asked Beckham about the deal but decided the answer “wasn’t brilliant enough to put in the film… nothing was going to change”.

But it was a question Beckham couldn’t avoid on the red carpet. Speaking to Sky News the longtime icon for the gay community insisted his team had done their “homework” on life for gay people in Qatar.

Beckham also claimed he had “conversations” with the LGBTQ+ people at the World Cup who said that they “had enjoyed the games and… felt it was the safest World Cup they’d had for a long time”.

Chris Paouros, co-chair of Proud Lilywhites, the official Tottenham Hotspur LGBTQ+ Supporters’ Association, told Tortoise: “We all loved David Beckham but it’s just disappointing… [LGBTQ+] people may have had a perfectly nice time, but for me that was uncomfortable. I knew it was a facade. If I lived in Qatar I would have to hide, like our Qatari siblings have to”.

Dr Nas Mohamed, who became the first Qatari to publicly come out as gay, accused Beckham ahead of the World Cup of “stamping out hope” for the LGBTQ+ community in Qatar. Nas said Beckham was guilty of “taking money and looking the other way”.

A Human Rights Watch report found last year that Qatar Preventative Security Department forces arbitrarily arrested LGBTQ+ people and subjected them to ill-treatment in detention as the country prepared to host the tournament.

Photograph Getty Images