Code of silence forever broken
Conversations once suppressed are now raging across sport. Personal protests usually punished with cards or fines have overwhelmed governing bodies, who dare not repeat the lie that sport and politics are separate.
As many articulate voices have pointed out, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer who pressed his knee on a prone man’s neck for 8min 46sec was not only about “politics”, but human rights, life and death.
The politics kick in at the voting booths and whatever else is left of the United States’ democratic process by the time Donald Trump is through with it.
Against the backdrop of mass protests across the US, sport’s traditional response to slogans on footballers’ shirts, gestures to TV cameras and Instagram posts is dead in the water. No sane administrator could try to pretend the old ways are applicable in this case.
The yellow card shown to England’s Jadon Sancho in Germany for lifting his shirt to reveal a “Justice for George Floyd” message might be remembered as the last gasp of a myth. Sport has never been indivisible from society. And while supporters might soon tire of a world in which every grievance is displayed on every playing field, try telling black athletes that their job is to run around the pitch obediently for the enjoyment of a society that allows police officers to go around killing people for the colour of their skin.
Even Fifa, for so long a specialist in sloganeering and soft punishments for racist conduct, has given up the pretence that the outside world stops at the turnstiles.
“Fifa fully understands the depth of sentiment and concerns expressed by many footballers in light of the tragic circumstances of the George
Floyd case,” the world governing body said in a statement. “The application of the laws of the game is left for the competitions’ organisers, which should use common sense and have in consideration the context surrounding the events.”
In other words, over to you, Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga and Serie A. In acknowledging the right of black footballers to express disgust, Fifa is also passing the buck to its members.
The killing of George Floyd is of course part of a pattern of police brutality in the US. Violence and discrimination were not invented a week ago. It has taken a critical mass of outrage, though, to render the default position no longer viable, and vigilance is needed to spot governing bodies who previously distanced themselves from indignation (or even punished it) rushing out statements to plant themselves on the right side of history.
One such body is the NFL, which many current players are accusing of hypocrisy for clamping down on players for taking a knee during the US national anthem while now expressing solidarity with black players. One wonders what Colin Kaepernick, who was effectively driven out of the NFL for leading those anthem protests, makes of the current rush to appear empathetic and angry.
Grandstanding is not an option when so many athletes — especially footballers — are raising their voices, as Sancho, Marcus Rashford, Rhian Brewster and Paul Pogba have.
These players are not merely denouncing police brutality in a distant land. If you read their posts and statements, they are making points about a lack of fairness and equal treatment in their own societies. Thus a single apparent police murder has assumed a force even black Americans cannot have expected. And they had a right to be sceptical, because the web is littered with images of black people losing their lives — and stories of the perpetrators escaping justice.
Fifa’s call for discretion is also a way of buying time. It knows it cannot be seen to be anti-protest at this delicate point. So let us check back with Fifa when the death of George Floyd is no longer headline news or an issue on which polite society can so easily agree.
The way to create a world in which Liverpool no longer feel the need to take a knee at Anfield for a team photo in support of “Black Lives Matter” is to remove the root causes of George Floyd’s death. There is no room here to be facile. That process will not be easy. But it does not start with showing Sancho a yellow card, looking the other way on George Floyd’s death or firing off catchy phrases.
Sport’s response has not “crossed lines” or “politicised” the field of play. It shows that athletes are not puppets and that sport has a power it can actually use in support of its rhetoric about “universal values”. Good riddance to the omerta.