A TOXIC CULTURE IN FOOTBALL: A WOMAN SPEAKS OUT. BY SANDRA HARRIS.
A TOXIC CULTURE IN FOOTBALL: A WOMAN SPEAKS OUT.
BY SANDRA
HARRIS. ©
Okay, okay, I’m not a man. I don’t have a willy and balls, I
have the other thing. But I’m the mother of a young man, so I think that might
just give me the right to talk about one of the things normally seen as a
mostly male preserve: football.
Yes, in the past couple of years, women’s football has
suddenly become a big thing and women are gaining recognition left, right and
centre for it and other sports. There are female pundits on the television now
and I think even women referees in actual football games where men are playing.
Fair play to them all, especially the referees, because that
would be scary, being the only woman on a field full of angry, sweaty
men all barging into one another while you're trying to make note of who’s fouling
whom, but don’t tell me that men don’t secretly still consider football to be
their own personal stronghold and that ‘birds’ have no place in it.
I’ve talked before about the culture of violence amongst
footballers when it comes to their wives, girlfriends and the women they meet in
bars and fancy nightclubs. More footballers than I could name have been accused
of battery and even rape against these women, but that’s not what I want to
talk about today. Today, I want to bring up the rise in toxic behaviour of the
fans towards the men they profess to love: the players and the managers.
There’s the racism that still exists towards black
footballers, for one thing. Throwing bananas onto the pitch at a black player
or yelling ‘Go back to Africa!’ at him is beyond ignorant; it’s dragging
ignorance down to a whole other level. How could anyone do that to a member of
the team they say they support, or even to someone from another team? It’s just
so despicable but, again, mostly ignorant.
Similarly ignorant is deriding players because of their
religion or their physical appearance. Affectionate caricatures of footballers
have always been a thing and can be very funny, but constantly pointing out and
slagging off someone’s ‘gigantic’ head, chin or nose or ‘bug eyes’ and
‘cauliflower ears’ on social media would, I imagine, be detrimental to that
person’s self-esteem or self-image.
Can’t they buy self-esteem with all their millions, I hear
you ask. (Yes, we all know that footballers are grossly overpaid and that
much better use could be made of the money!) Having recently watched the
late great Donald Sutherland sobbing to camera about how his mother refused to
call him attractive, saying instead that his ‘face had character,’ I think I
can tell you that no amount of money can undo the damage done by careless words
and buy you a high opinion of yourself.
The new thing now though, from what I hear from my son, is
the verbal bashing of managers and frequent threats of actual physical
aggression levelled against them online if they don’t ‘come through’ for the fans. My
son watches the matches and enjoys going on social media afterwards to discuss
and dissect them with his friends.
That’s being spoiled for him now though by the
‘manager-bashing.’ In the first instance, in this throwaway society of ours, we
call for a manager to be sacked if a couple of games go awry. There have been a
record number of manager-sackings recently.
In fact, there have been more manager-sackings in the last
couple of years than in the whole of football’s previous history. The age of
long-term managers like Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson is dying out, if it
hasn’t died already.
Now, heads roll only a few weeks into the season if a manager
isn’t achieving instant success. Building up a team that respects and trusts
you and works well under you takes time and effort. But no, if you haven’t won
every trophy ever in just a few short months, out you go, goodbye and good luck
and don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
It’s like the way a lot of jobs traditionally involving repairs to things like shoes or washing-machines have gone by the wayside because we no longer even try to fix or mend things; we just throw out anything that’s broken or torn and replace it immediately with a new model.
Cars,
televisions, radios, wives, it’s all the same. Why fix something when you can
buy a new one online? That’s right, you don’t even have to go to the shops, you
can do it from the comfort of your own home, and all at the click of a button!
What really disturbs me, though, is this sickening new trend
on social media of calling unsatisfactory managers ‘terrorists’ and
photoshopping tea-towels onto their heads to make them resemble someone of the
Muslim faith. Islamophobia was already a thing long before this, though, with
people on social media saying things like, ‘Not all Muslims are terrorists,
but all terrorist are Muslim.’
A terrorist is a person who bombs and kills innocent people
because they think that something in their religion demands it of them and will
reward them for it. In what way, pray tell, does this resemble a football
manager and what he does for a living?
You may disagree with a manager’s tactics or with his choice
of which player to put on the field and which to leave on the bench, but you
surely don’t think it’s a good idea then to threaten to rape his wife and
daughter and set his house on fire because of it? Death threats and threats of
violence against managers and their families are being more and more commonplace.
Colombian footballer Andres Escobar was shot dead in 1994 for
scoring an own goal against the US in the World Cup and ruining Colombia’s
chances. His killers were members of a drugs cartel who’d lost money betting on
the competition, ‘thanks’ to Escobar. If I said, calm down, lads, it’s
only a game, would some folks think I had a bullet coming to me too?
This, I know, is an extreme case, but who’s to say we won’t
end up like that over here? With the hate we already show to people who are
different or who don’t come up with the goods on the pitch every weekend like
we expect them to- Gareth Southgate is relentlessly targeted on social media for his cautious style of managing his England team- we’re actually
not too far off it now.
Believe me, I know how much money footballers and managers
make, and of course I think that that money would be better spent on
building homes for the homeless, or on giving much-needed pay-rises to
overworked nurses, or on trying to lift single parents and their children out
of the poverty trap. Of course I think that.
The money the players and managers are paid is too much for
the average person to fathom. It’s silly money, really, especially when
you’re putting it in the hands of an eighteen-year-old footballer who doesn’t
know what to do with it.
However, if we tolerate racism, death threats and verbal or
physical aggression or the threat of same towards anyone, rich or poor,
we run the risk of creating the kind of society in which we will eventually
find it unbearable-slash-impossible to live.
The aforementioned Gareth Southgate is a case in point. When it looked like English football was finally ‘coming home’ after the much-discussed ‘fifty-eight years of hurt,’ he was the best in the world. You’d have had him round to dinner and let him shag your wife and marry your daughter.
Now that the dream
bubble has popped yet again, people are- predictably- out for his blood.
Moving
away from football for a moment, last month, there was a bomb scare at the home of Irish
Taoiseach Simon Harris. He wasn’t present at the time but his wife and very
young children were, and the home had to be searched by police to make sure it
was safe.
Now, I didn’t vote for Simon Harris’s (no relation)
party in any election, but he still doesn’t deserve to have his wife and
children terrorised in their own home in that way. No-one does. There are ways
of communicating your point to others without using violence or the threat of
violence.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump while he was speaking at a political rally this weekend just gone is- presumably- another example of a person being targeted because someone else doesn’t like the cut of their gib. I say ‘presumably’ because I don’t know if we know yet why the shooter did what he did.
Anyway, those are my humble opinions, for what they’re worth. Over and out.
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