Spend It Like Beckham? The Soccer Star’s Money Scandal

With the World Cup just six weeks away, the British sports icon hired by the host country to help with its P.R. has a P.R. problem of his own. David Beckham’s reported $170 million deal with Qatar to promote the tournament—and his silence regarding the country’s controversial policies—has struck many as worse than tone-deaf. “Nothing appears to have moved him,” noted The Times of London. “Not the calls from human rights campaigners to raise his voice. Not the revelations that as many as 6,500 migrant workers have died in Qatar since the country was granted the rights to host the tournament. And not the country’s criminalisation of homosexuality, despite Beckham’s support for gay rights in the past.”

Ongoing interest in the suspicious death in 2019 of Marc Bennett, a British travel executive found hanged in a Doha hotel room—officially ruled a suicide—has intensified the criticism. Bennett had resigned from Qatar Airways (the company said he’d sent confidential documents to a private e-mail address), and then was arrested and taken to a detention center, where he later said he’d been “stripped naked, blasted with high-pressure hoses, slammed against walls and subjected to sleep deprivation techniques while held for three weeks,” the newspaper reported. A United Nations mission said it had “received credible allegations of prolonged detention without judicial control and of ill-treatment.” Bennett died a few months after his release, the suicide verdict following what the British press described as a “cursory investigation” by local authorities.