NEVER MIND VIOLENCE IN FOOTBALL, WHAT ABOUT VIOLENT FOOTBALLERS...? BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
NEVER MIND VIOLENCE IN FOOTBALL, WHAT ABOUT VIOLENT
FOOTBALLERS?
BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
‘My
teenage son, who's also autistic, adores Premier League football and the
Champions League as well. Understandably for someone as young and impressionable,
these men are his heroes, his idols. But more and more of them are getting in
trouble for the rape and battery of women. Just today, one of his favourite
Manchester United players is on the front pages of the newspapers for rape and assault. I'll tell
you something for nothing, it's getting very hard to teach a boy of today to
respect women and never be violent to them when the men who should be his
examples and role models behave the way they do.’
Above is a post I put up on Facebook yesterday morning after it
was made known that Man. Utd forward Mason Greenwood had been arrested by the
English police for the alleged rape and assault of a woman. A lot of the comments on the post were in support of my argument that men like this do their own cause
no good.
Even while people are trying to reverse antiquated, backwards
thinking about male-female relationships and a woman’s place in society, so-called
‘celebrities’ are perpetrating acts of violence and sexual abuse/battery
against women that set society back a hundred years at least. It seems to be
happening more and more lately in the world of football, and we have to take
the blame for a lot of that ourselves.
We give our elite footballers a ridiculous amount of money
for kicking a ball around a pitch, we put them on pedestals and we let them
know that, whatever they want, they can have, because they are celebrities and we
worship at their shrines.
It’s a pretty dangerous attitude to take with them, because
it lets at least some of them feel that they are above the law. So many
footballers line up to kick racism and homophobia out of football, and that’s
brilliant, but to fully understand the attitude of some footballers to women,
you’d have to shine a light into a very murky corner indeed.
There’s an excellent article by Ian Ladyman in yesterday’s
MailOnline in which the writer talks of ‘fixers’ in football, people who will
get the players pretty much everything they want, from a sandwich to a car to a
woman. Or multiple women.
These women can be brought in from abroad, ferried round the
countryside to the venue- a private room at a club or a footballer’s basement
or ‘party room,’ and sometimes paid for their trouble… and the fixer will take care of it all.
The only difference between this set-up and, say, the one in Jeffrey Epstein’s
empire or in R. Kelly’s kingdom, is that the women procured to party with the elite footballers are presumably not underage.
Mason Greenwood (20) must not be feeling particularly good
about his life today. His club, Manchester United, quick to disassociate itself
from something so distasteful, will be training without him for the foreseeable
future. He’s been removed from FIFA 22, and you will not find any trace of
merchandise with his name on it in the Man. Utd online store. Sportswear giant
NIKE are suspending their relationship with Greenwood for the moment, and some
of Man. Utd’s top players, including Cristiano Ronaldo, David de Gea and Paul
Pogba, have unfollowed him on Instagram.
To get back to my son, my reason for writing this blog post,
I must confess that I now dread going onto social media or clicking into my
online news and hearing that yet another footballer has driven drunk and
endangered life, brawled with another man outside a nightclub, beaten up his
wife or girlfriend or raped someone, either someone known to him or a total
stranger. It makes my son feel confused, angry and conflicted every time this
happens, and I can’t say I blame him.
How is he supposed to feel? He loves these guys, his ‘footballing men,’ as we call them in our house. He watches the matches avidly. Since he was five years old, he’s collected Match Attax cards and footy stickers and spent probably hundreds of hours putting them lovingly into albums and looking back over them with pride. These guys are his heroes, maybe more so for him because of the autism-related limitations of his life to date.
These guys are more important to him than his own family (don’t worry, we know better than to take it personally) so, when they commit violent crimes against women and other people rush to publicly denounce and ‘cancel’ them, what is he meant to think? His loyalty is to the players he’s followed, in some cases, since the start of their careers, but I sometimes wonder if he knows that they’ve let him, and all their young followers, down, with their criminal behaviour. With great power comes great responsibility. I only wish someone could teach that to these rotten apples at the bottom of the professional football barrel.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
Her debut romantic fiction novel, 'THIRTEEN
STOPS,' is out now from Poolbeg Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Stops-Sandra-Harris-ebook/dp/B089DJMH64
The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is
out now from Poolbeg Books:
Comments
Post a Comment