Sport has a vital role to play in helping to end madness of war
AS his invasion of Ukraine brings ever more unspeakable horrors,vladimir Putin has the option of tuning out for a while in Moscow today and watching the Manchester derby.
Maybe Putin (below) will be too busy with his evil plot to bother with the football this weekend but, as ever, the
Premier League will be available through the deal with the Russian streaming service Okko.
The league’s global reach is vast – and lucrative. Its latest overseas broadcast contracts now bring in more than the UK rights.
And the current deal with the Russian web portal Rambler extends to the end of this season before a new £42million, six-year arrangement with Match T, which is owned by Gazprom, kicks in from next season.
Richard Masters, the Premier League’s chief executive, has come under intense pressure to pull the plug on the coverage.
Russia’s pariah status in the wake of the invasion has opened up every commercial arrangement with the country to scrutiny.
The Premier League is popular in Russia and withdrawing access to it as part of the UK’S sanctions has its proponents.a review is under way which may prompt a change of heart but so far Masters (right) has resisted.
It is swimming against the tide to maintain ties with Russia given the nightmare Putin’s regime has triggered but for once in the moral maze it so often hopelessly loses itself in, the league has done the right thing.
Football’s voice carries and the blue and yellow captain’s armbands, the flags and the anti-war messages on the pitch-side billboards and big screens beamed directly into Russian homes carried a powerful message.
For Russians bombarded with their state TV’S Orwellian Truthspeak, any way to bring a sense of the appalling nightmare that their leader has unleashed in their name to their doorstep should be embraced.the censors will have tried their best – when La Liga put an anti-war slogan on their coverage it was covered up but unlike in China, where the authorities have pulled coverage because of the anti-war stance, it would have been impossible yesterday for any Russian viewer to avoid it.
Tit really can make a difference. Russia is a proud sporting nation.
It will be hurt by the expulsion from theworld Cup and the loss of staging rights to the Champions League final plus a stream of other important championships.
There will be many Russians who will parrot the state line of Western conspiracy, but others HE Premier League will surely start to question how should have gone further it has come to this. with their messaging. The leap from questions to Instead of just an answers to action is a armband, every huge one and may never home team be taken – but all the should have played in global sporting Ukrainian colours this community can do is weekend. help set that train in
If that led thousands of motion. supporters to wrap themselves Sanctions are rough on the in blue and yellow, so much the Russian paralympians who were better. Have a go at censoring kicked out of the Beijing Games that image. before it started – as if they had
In the face of the grim images not had enough barriers to emerging daily from Ukraine, confront in their ordinary lives. gestures like these seem exactly But how much more that – gestures. inconvenient is it for Ukrainian
The application of soft power sportsmen having to fight, in the face of lethal military literally, to try to save their might makes the flexing of country? sporting muscles feel puny. But There is no fairness here, only as the apartheid struggle showed, *degrees of unfairness.