No one’s laughing any more though. Football has been the backbone of life for a huge number of men in this nation for decades. The chants, the brotherhood, the rivalry, the tribal feeling of us against them, it’s the natural state of man played out in a nice safe and controlled sphere of public life. It’s part of bread and circuses. And in the last few years, it’s become insanely political.
Competitive sport is a healthy thing, let’s not get away from the fact. A healthy nation with healthy men would promote competition on the sporting scene to better it’s best and push it’s people to strive for more. That’s all well and good, but we don’t live in a healthy nation, we live in a rather corrupted and broken one. Sport today is mostly a distraction but as of the last few years, it’s also become a manipulation to control the pendulum swing of the general public. It started back in the 80s and 90s with “Kick it out” to end racism in football. We have had the blind eye turned away from alcohol and the problems it causes to focus on “English hooligans abroad.” Recently we had the kneeling for Saint George Floyd and we constantly get rainbow laces and armbands and those hideous pride flags on the corners.
Now, we have something a little different; numbers on shirts being banned. No, I’m not referring to the lad who had the “joke” shirt about Hillsborough, that’s apparently OK. No, the number that seems to be causing a lot of concern these days is 88.
This is the age we live in: “bake the cake, use my pronouns, 88 offends me”. This is what we are dealing with now. But in Italy their parliament has decided that players be banned from having this squad number on a shirt. You can have 13, 69, probably even 666, but 88, nah, we cannot allow that. Football is just like a lot of the social media, news media, TV and music that’s around today, it’s a control mechanism. And with the rise of the right wing all over Europe, football is now going to be used to guilt any sense of nationalism from the fans. No one is asking why people are looking to get the number 88, why it is becoming such a big thing in football and what could be happening in the lives of ordinary people that this number begins to rear its head. Those questions won’t be answered, obviously. They will just ban the shirt number. At the moment it’s players, but soon it’ll be fans banned from the grounds for having the number. Heaven forbid you were a Gianliugi Buffon fan and got his goalkeeper top to go to matches in.
So how much more politics will modern man put up with in “the beautiful game”? How much more interference will he allow to be shoe horned into his distraction from the horrors of multicultural Europe? Will he complain when blacks get in for half price because of reparations? Will he tolerate his club having a drag queen as the mascot leading the children out before kick off? What if they make it a hate crime to call it “crossing” the ball because it offends Muslims and Jews?
I think modern man, so bereft of thoughts of his own, will silently put up with all this and more. They’ll mumble down the pub but they’ll turn up every week, buy each new shirt, clap like a seal when an African journeyman rattles the old onion bag. Football fans, for the most part, seem to already be beaten. Their tribalism extends to the colour of your shirt rather than your skin. They’ll complain about foreigners taking their jobs but cheer manically if those same foreigners play for their team.
But, this will make them grumble. Not much, but it’s just one more thing that’s being forced into their lives, forcing them to acknowledge the world they try to hide from. Conversations will be had, people’s appetite for the game may even begin to falter, we might even see people protest against it, who knows?
