THE football authorities have a highly principled position about keeping politics out of football. Highly principled that is unless it’s the right type of politics: their politics.
Celtic, for example, have been fined numerous times. Once for the heinous crime of fans flying a Palestine flag at a match. Another for comparing IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands with Scottish nationalist icon William Wallace and asking the question, ‘Who’s the terrorist and who is the freedom fighter?’ Clearly, politics is to be kept out of football.
However, when it comes to taking the knee and celebrating Black Lives Matter, it appears that all bets are off. And fans across the leagues have been watching their players on television, week after week, take the knee to this campaign.
The taking of the knee was always controversial, at least it was if you lived outside the luvvie bubble of sports journalism and the football authorities.
Talking to fans, from the outset there was opposition to both the act of taking the knee and the BLM campaign group itself. Indeed, I suspect the football authorities used the fact that there were no fans in the ground to start this knee taking performance. And then the fans came back, including Millwall fans, who booed the knee taking, and the cosy bubble was suddenly burst.
Of course, there was shock and outrage from pundits, and the Millwall fans were depicted as racists. For their part, the fans explained that they were simply expressing their opposition to the extremist ideology of BLM, a movement that has now spawned a political party.
Interestingly, three days later Millwall had another game. This time the players stayed on their feet and held a banner opposing discrimination, rather than celebrating BLM, and the same “racist” fans applauded.
Some commentators have argued that the taking of the knee by players is a matter of freedom of expression. One particular columnist, with no sense of irony, or grasp of reality, argued that “taking the knee is a voluntary act by free citizens”.
The reality for players is that there is an immense amount of moral pressure being placed upon them to take the knee, by the modern elites, the football authorities, and the clubs. And given the hysterical reaction to the Millwall fans booing, I can’t say I blame them for, on mass, bowing down to this new dogma of identity politics and anti-racism.
Others have argued that the knee-taking is not really about Black Lives Matter, indeed that it is not political at all, but merely an expression of solidarity and an opposition to the terrible discrimination that black players once suffered.
I think there is some truth to this, but it doesn’t fully explain why the BLM tag was needed in a sport that has been overloaded with anti-racist campaigns and awareness raising for two decades. There clearly is some kind of link between the BLM movement and football's BLM even if it is not that clear exactly what it is.
But I also think that there is something in the argument that the anti-racist campaigning in football is not political, because in many respects it is more like a religion than politics.
It is more like a religion in the sense that anti-racism in football has become a dogma, a slogan, a sermon, a kind of incantation that we the plebs are encouraged to repeat, time after time after time.
If you watch football, you’ll have grown used to the subliminal messages that flash on the screen telling us to “Say no to racism”. We’ve grown used to the captain’s armbands, the billboard flashing around the ground, even to international captains reading scripted anti-racist messages before World Cup games.
But when you keep preaching at people and shouting in the faces of fans in this way, every now and again, don’t be surprised if they shout back. After all, in a free society, this is the least we should expect from people who are still able to voluntarily act as free citizens.
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