PUNDITS UNITED
Football can be a divisive game.
And not just for people who support opposing teams.
It can also create tension between people who love the game, and those who see it as an obsessive pastime… especially if they live in the same house and there is a tv remote involved.
I’m a member of the first group, although I do have sympathy for the second because I often watch televised games instead of engaging in more serious pursuits. But football can also bring people together, and its international popularity can sometimes be used to aid serious causes that make the world a better place.
We saw that last year when gay rights and women’s rights advocates, and socially aware commentators used coverage of the World Cup to highlight human rights issues in the host nation, Qatar. And we are seeing it again this month after the British government censored a freelance football journalist.
Fortunately for the future of free speech, it wasn’t just any journalist they went after, it was arguably the most popular one in the country who also scored 48 goals for England during his international career. And the support Gary Lineker received when the British Broadcasting Corporation suspended him from hosting Match of the Day seems to have turned his intended punishment into a government own-goal.
Lineker has a long history of using Twitter to comment on social issues and he had a lot to say during the World Cup about Qatar’s stance on gay relations and working conditions for migrants… and about the plight of women in Iran. And none of those posts seemed to bother the British government.
But when he condemned their proposal to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, the ruling party put pressure on the BBC to remove him from Match of the Day. And that’s exactly what they did, despite the fact Lineker’s Tweet simply restated the United Nations’ position that deporting refugees from the UK without first checking the validity of their cases is a clear breach of its Refugee Convention.
But then Match of the Day analysts,
Ian Wright and Alan Shearer, refused to appear on the show to protest Lineker’s treatment and the rest of the staff fell in-line with the boycott. That meant the Saturday and Sunday editions of the hugely popular football summary show had to be cancelled.
The 90-minute in-depth analyses were replaced by 20-minute video-only highlights of the weekend’s Premier League games, but most viewers were not amused, and the media turned on both the government and the BBC. So, Lineker was reinstated, freedom of speech appeared to win the day, and both the press and the British public became more sympathetic towards asylum seekers.
But hopefully that is not the end of the story, because there are two other issues I think we should consider while the football loving public is still paying attention. And they are: why do so many of us rely on sports personalities and other celebrities to tell us what’s wrong in the world, and why don’t those injustices upset us as much as disruptions to our football coverage?