Nike’s ‘playful’ cross is a gimmick too far
The warning was plain enough when Nike crowed about a “playful update” to the St George’s Cross. You might think that a heraldic emblem dating back a millennium should be spared any frivolous revision, but when it comes to American apparel executives and their unquenchable thirst for attention, nothing is sacrosanct.
And so the symbol of England’s patron saint, a cross shown in the hoist of royal standards of the
Plantagenet kings, is to be reimagined at Wembley tomorrow in an unholy gradation of purple and blue. It is at this point you look at the shirts and ask how many recognisably English details there are at all. At least the Three Lions, the nation’s coat of arms since the age of Richard I, have escaped any meddling. But the alternative rendering of the cross suggests the national team will go along with whatever gratuitous gimmickry a kit sponsor demands.
The ferocity of the response should give them pause before attempting anything similar
Even Adrian Bevington, former managing director of the Football Association’s Club England, has expressed bewilderment at the move. “I can’t believe this has been approved without at least the sign-off of at least the commercial director and the chief executive,” he said. Well, he had better believe it now. For England are about to take to the pitch against Brazil with even their defining motif deemed ripe for reinvention.
A “modern twist” is the official description from Nike, a firm for whom no gesture is too cosmetic. But surely the point of the St George’s Cross is that it is the very antithesis of modernity, with a history that can be traced back as far as the Crusades. Why would you want to distort a cross that has been an unbroken thread through the centuries? The only explanation is that Nike could scarcely care less about the heritage of the countries where they operate. After all, their stated aim in the PR spiel promoting the latest kit is to “disrupt history”.
We live in an age where it is increasingly desirable to be a disruptor. The word itself has evolved from meaning somebody hell-bent on causing disturbance to a person intent on sparking radical change within an existing industry or market. The second definition could qualify as Nike’s mission statement these days. For example, it was tempting to argue, amid the initial backlash to the blue-and-purple cross, that it would never have dreamt of doing the same to the Stars and Stripes.
But actually, it would. We need only go back to the World Cup in Qatar, where Nike’s United States kit replaced red, white and blue with a full spectrum of colour, ostensibly to draw attention to the hosts’ oppression of LGBT people. In gesture politics, there is little that cannot be co-opted to advance the chosen cause. While there is no explicit rationale for the redesigned cross, with those close to the process denying any link to the rainbow armbands of 2022, it is another awkward example of change for change’s sake.
In England’s polarised society, the St George’s Cross can provoke wildly contrasting reactions. While Lee Anderson is wedded to it, vowing to board the next flight to Rwanda if he sees any more “pearl-clutching woke nonsense”, it has been portrayed on the other side of the aisle as a jingoistic throwback. In 2014, Labour’s Emily Thornberry was accused of snobbery after posting a picture of a house festooned with St George’s flags, with a white van outside. One survey at the time suggested 24 per cent of English people found the flag a racist symbol.
Except the St George’s Cross, certainly where football is concerned, is anything but an expression of a Little Englander mentality. It was adopted by several states during and after the Crusades, and continues to feature on the shirts of Barcelona and AC Milan. “The cross is the oldest part,” AC Milan explains. “Before being used on the English flag, the red cross on a white background was born here in Italy. The republic of Genoa used it as their emblem.” Good enough for Milan, it seems, but not for the England team. Not when their paymasters at Nike can devalue 1,000 years of history for the sake of a superficial stunt. The ferocity of the response should give them pause before attempting anything similar. For whatever they thought when concocting this, they can now see a “playful update” to the flag of England represents a twist too far.