WE watched Rangers fans scrambling for the paltry 9,000 tickets on offer to watch a European final last week. Frankfurt had a similar number of tickets and yet by kick off, the 42,000-seater stadium was filled with what looked like nothing but Rangers and Frankfurt fans. Who were the “spare” 24,000 tickets for?
On a similar note, last week I tried, in vain, to get tickets for me and my son and daughter to go to Wembley to watch Sunderland against Wycombe. Sunderland received 44,000 tickets and Wycombe received 20,000 and yet the stadium has a 90,000 capacity and it looked like about 20,000 seats were empty.
For the forthcoming Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, Uefa have allowed the teams to buy 20,000 tickets each, leaving 40,000 spare in the Stade de France. They have also warned fans not to buy “unauthorised tickets”; as if that helps anyone. And so fans will once again get fleeced, scrambling around for tickets for a game that only they really want, and deserve, to see.
The reason I mention this is to suggest that the people running football are pretty clueless and appear, at times, to be concerned about almost anything other than football and football fans.
Who cares if fans are going to travel across Europe in search of tickets and pay way over the odds for them? Or that tens of thousands of fans are essentially locked out of one of the biggest games of their lives?
What the football authorities are very good at, however, in fact, world leading, is in lecturing football fans, and indeed football players, about what “values” they should have.
The latest in what is a long list of Orwellian “right-think” initiatives has come at that other Parisian football establishment of Paris Saint-Germain and involves the Muslim midfielder Idrissa Gueye, once of Everton, who appears to have refused to wear an LGBT awareness strip.
Gueye’s crime is to have refused to take the knee to the promotion of gay rights awareness and the French football authorities have written to him demanding an apology for refusing to play in a strip with the LGBT rainbow symbol. If he won’t apologise they want him to state that his opposition to this awareness is unfounded.
The Idrissa Gueye case is important because it demonstrates the modern hypocrisy of “tolerance” whereby a diversity of opinion or belief is trashed, all in the name, ironically, of tolerance.
Having spent decades telling fans that politics has no place in sport, today, by comparison, the quasi-political outlook of the modern elites is being forced onto people, and some of the basic principles of a free society, like freedom of conscience, are being trashed.
Half joking, a colleague asked me, “Isn’t this Islamophobia?”
Back in the UK, the knee taking in football continues but has been watered down. From an initial support of Black Lives Matter, having faced some opposition from fans, knee taking is now, apparently, about being against any discrimination of any kind.
READ MORE: Football fans treated with contempt
In which case, shouldn’t the British football authorities be up in arms about the discrimination against the Muslim Gueye. Why is the British press not expressing outrage about the enforcement of ideas onto this man?
The reason of course is that the Western elites are in fact all about discrimination. If you do not subscribe to the correct values, as they see them, you will be discriminated against. If you do not accept that we live in a gendered, systemically racist, heteronormative world of power and abuse, you are a sinner, and shall be punished.
In this world, and one in which football fans are constantly seen as a problem, the authorities are determined to make you “educate yourself” – for which we should read – “adopt our values or else”.
Coming back to the farce of ticket allocation, I suspect the reason for this is that those in authority love the idea of football as a cosmopolitan melting pot where the tribal passions of rival fans is tempered by a stadium half full of football tourists who have come more for the spectacle and the “experience” than the battle on the pitch.
The mass, largely working-class game of football terrifies and excites our modern elites who fear the aggressive rivalry of fans and would far rather foster a party atmosphere than allow fans to take over a stadium and to fully express themselves. Well, good luck with that.
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