Taking a knee: how sport is addressing racism
It started four summers ago, said Ben Hoyle in
The Times. At the beginning of a San Francisco
49ers’ American football game, their black quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, decided he just wasn’t going to stand while the national anthem was played. Instead, he knelt – a gesture that quickly became known as “taking a knee”. It was Kaepernick’s way of trying to “raise awareness of police brutality towards African Americans”, and overnight it became a “national talking point”. Before long, other American footballers followed suit, and taking a knee became “as identifiable as the raised fist, black power salute that Tommie Smith and John Carlos made from the Olympic podium in 1968”. It also cost Kaepernick his football career: the 49ers released him at the end of that season, and no other team was willing to hire him. But following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis two weeks ago, the symbolic power of the gesture “has been magnified”. Protesters across the US and Europe have taken it up; in the UK, players at Liverpool, Chelsea and Newcastle have taken a knee before training.
During the Kaepernick saga, American football has “wrestled publicly with issues of race and racism”, said Ken Belson in The New York Times. But until Floyd’s death, discussion was mostly limited to the rights and wrongs of taking a knee, and support for Kaepernick came mainly from black players. Now, however, “a broader range of players and team officials has chosen to speak out” – and Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National
Football League (NFL), has apologised for being unsupportive: henceforth, he says, no action will be taken against anyone taking a knee. It’s a remarkable turnaround. Something similar is happening in European football too, said Rory Smith in the same paper. In the past couple of years, players such as Raheem Sterling and Romelu Lukaku had started to challenge the racism they have had to endure as footballers. But there is now a new “willingness to confront, head on, systemic discrimination outside sports”. You can see it in the way players in so many teams are now taking a knee, and in the way that players in Germany’s Bundesliga – English forward Jadon Sancho among them – have scrawled “justice for George Floyd” on their T-shirts.
Football can certainly play a part in tackling racism, said Oliver Holt in The Mail on Sunday. But it will need more than just the players’ involvement – the organisations that run football will need to act as well. And their record is very poor indeed. Last year, Uefa fined Bulgaria s75,000 for their fans’ racial abuse of England players during a Euro 2020 qualifier – less than the s100,000 fine handed to Denmark’s Nicklas Bendtner for flashing sponsored underwear. The Premier League, which gets billions of pounds a year in broadcasting revenue, is contributing just £300,000 this year to Kick It Out, the anti-racism campaign. To fight racism, football needs to recruit more black executives and black managers, and to impose swingeing penalties on clubs whose fans are guilty of racial abuse. “There’s no quick fix.”