@daretodenim
How is it whataboutery? It's a totally fair comparison made with Western football in order to highlight the hypocrisy of Western media. Homophobia may not be acceptable in the West in general..only it IS in football and isn't even that hidden. It's an open secret (although barely a secret) and nobody is complaining, wearing armbands in solidarity with gay players, or saying they'd like to boycott matches because of it!
Come on!!
But first, an aside. I'm not in favour of sporting events being used to make statements, be it armbands of various colours, two-minute silences, poppies imprinted on shirts or taking the knee. I think it is part of a wider culture of expressing adherence to various causes, viewpoints and beliefs in a way that doesn't cost anything to the person doing it. Because this culture has got so pervasive, people are forced into insincere expressions of public solidarity to avoid getting a public shaming. It's a strong contrast to the Iranian team's protest which was genuinely brave and could cost them everything.
But that isn't really anything to do with whether Western footballers are being hypocritical or not, assuming that their protest is genuine (and I believe for the most part it is although I expect some players are probably falling into line). Your response is that they should sort out their own house first, ie, that football is homophobic. The problem with your extremely selective comparison is that it is literally teams of footballers who are making this protest. So whatever else you can say about it, those footballers, representatives of their national footballing federations, are not being homophobic, unlike Qatar - because it's really very clear that this protest is not about homophobia in football but homophobia in society generally. At present Qatari law allows a person to be put to death for homosexual acts. That's not a very good starting point for Qatar.
There will always be homophobia at some level somewhere in the West. But concentrating ignores that in the West homophobia has gone from entirely normal to marginal, unlike Qatar. That's obvious. Someone else made the point that the protest is hypocritical because homosexuality was illegal in England when it hosted the World Cup. Good grief. That's a desperate argument. 1966 was a full 56 years ago. Apart from that, homosexual acts between women weren't illegal - even back then - and legalisation of homosexual acts between men was in process and they were legalised the following year.
I'm not totally following what your point [me: that the protest concentrates on LGBTQIA+] is in the second half of this. The media haven't only been discussing the illegality of homosexuality though, there's been plenty of other discussions. It's just what I was focussing my post on though as to me it's the clearest example of hypocrisy (to me) there is in all this.
We'll have to disagree on that too. My observation is that the armband issue is fundamentally about LGBTQIA+ rights. I expect that its proponents would disagree, but regardless of that they chose a rainbow theme for their armbands and the rainbow is these days a LGBTQIA+ symbol. It shows a certain central theme and my observation is that that's what the media are concentrating on too.