Football’s image problem: is the beautiful game really so nasty?
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Version 0 of 1. An advertising agency writing a slogan for English football based solely on the headlines of the past week might be tempted to go for “Game of racists and rapists”. As Sheffield United FC was forced to withdraw its offer of training facilities for ex-striker Ched Evans, just out of jail for rape, Wigan Athletic FC owner David Whelan – while giving an interview to defend his appointment as manager of Malky Mackay, who sent sexist, racist and homophobic texts in his previous job – himself made offensive comments about Jewish and Chinese people. Amid these rows, England supporters sang sectarian songs during a match against Scotland. Such controversies popularise the view that football is no place for women, liberals or anyone who is not a direct descendant of John Bull. In my view there is an element of white van man with flags about this notion, with a largely working-class sport derided by a political and media establishment dominated by rugby-loving public schoolboys. But, even beyond that, the game’s denigrators are often throwing mud inaccurately. It is, for example, a common argument that Evans must never resume his job because he is a “role model” to young men. But is there truly a risk of an impressionable boy drawing from his example the moral that it’s not so bad to serve 30 months for rape because the Football Association will support your right to play afterwards? Evans can be seen to offer a crucially educative example to the young in that his story warns of the legal consequences – however famous or well-paid the man – of failing to take responsibility for sexual behaviour. This is surely a lesson that all parents would want their sons to learn. There is also, as often in judgments shaped by mob justice, the matter of double standards. Lee Hughes played for Oldham immediately after serving three years for causing death by dangerous driving, while the current Plymouth club captain, Luke McCormick, did three-and-a-half years for causing the deaths of two children through dangerous and drunken driving. The Twickenham mob will respond to these cases with jokes about a Dream Prison XI. But, if we are not going to accept the possibility of rehabilitation and reassimilation into society after crime, then life imprisonment must be introduced for all offences. A culture of eternal damnation has led to a worrying fashion for a sort of career-death penalty, in which the media and tweeters impose a top-up term on released prisoners who they think have got off lightly. This is one way in which football is punished for its international visibility. Luis Suárez’s record of leaving teeth-marks on defenders is headline news. Yet several rugby players have been jailed for on-pitch tackles classified as criminal assault, and most seasons throw up other players lucky not to have joined them. And while in Mackay and Whelan among others – the former England captain John Terry was disciplined for directing a racial insult at a black opponent – football clearly harbours those who need to watch their tongues, the game has an impressive record on the wider question of representation. Which other British profession produces dozens of black millionaires every year? Certainly not the media or politics. It’s true that football’s management layers are almost all white, but most other businesses do not get anywhere close to such a diverse workforce, even at the level of employees. Nor do other sports. English football has produced hundreds of Barack Obama-like breakthrough figures, rugby some and tennis none. In cricket, it has rarely been the case in recent years that more than one non-white player is a first pick for the Test team, a record bettered by South Africa, which was forced by history to address the matter more seriously. The look of football is, admittedly, easier to defend than the sound of its fans, such as that anti-Republican abuse at Scotland v England or the minority of Sheffield United supporters who have backed their jailed striker with a song to the effect that he can do whatever to whichever woman he wants. That sentiment is indefensible. But, as someone who spends most Saturday afternoons and many Tuesday nights at live football matches around Britain, I have accumulated a forcible playlist of nasty terrace chants. These tease any perceived weakness of the opposition team, whether its alleged identification with terrorists, small crowds (“Your ground’s too big for you!”, to the tune of Verdi’s La donna è mobile) or high local levels of unemployment – the same hit from Rigoletto, given the lyrics: “We pay your benefits!” None of this is pleasant, but isolated outbreaks of moronic singing should no more be allowed to define football than trolling should delineate the internet. In both cases, some toxic rhetoric is the price of larger benefits. Both the City of London and the Houses of Parliament could be closed down on the grounds of the vocabulary and views of their most noxious members. And, if the ideology of language is to be the measure of sporting virtue then what of rugby? The former England star and now broadcaster Brian Moore publishes in an appendix of his latest memoir, What Goes on Tour Stays on Tour, the lyrics of a number of “traditional rugby songs”. These are riddled with misogyny (the cook on the Good Ship Venus serves up a stew of female gynaecological waste products) and other bigotries, including the perky verse in Four and Twenty Virgins when the “village cripple” who “wasn’t up to much” is laid on his back so that he can be “fucked with his crutch”. Moore didn’t write these horrible songs, but he has presumably sung them and, by publishing the words, risks becoming a role model for current players and schoolboys to belt out these pathetic ballads on their buses. So should we ban rugby songs? Sack all players proven to have hollered them? Perhaps better to accept that all of Britain’s sports have aspects of their cultures – often a product of the class rituals of those who play and watch them – that are abhorrent to sober post-match analysis. One corrective to these problems may be the welcome higher profile of female sport. Today’s England v Germany international at Wembley was under relatively little threat of rapists on the pitch or xenophobic songs from the terraces, but it will be interesting to see if women’s football remains as problem-free if it ever becomes, like the male game, a sport where TV audiences and player salaries run into tens of millions. And those of us who will go on watching men play are happy that it now offers a gallery of negative role models – Evans, Mackay, Whelan and Terry among them – from which those who follow them into the game can learn behaviours to avoid. Perhaps they should also be given the chance to show that they have learned from their mistakes. Not every foul should be a red card offence. |