Ibrox stadium, home of Rangers football club, saw a powerful tribute to the late Queen last night before the team’s Champion’s league game against Napoli. There was a minute’s silence, then an enormous tifo covering the entire Broomloan stand was revealed (of the Union Jack with the late Queen in silhouette in the middle). The national anthem was played on the public address system joined lustily by the capacity crowd. It was stirring stuff.
But Ranger’s tribute to the Queen defied Uefa’s general rules for pre-match ceremony and came after their specific request for an exception had been turned down. And this means the club could now be in hot water. It’s not clear how Uefa will respond but It looks likely the club will be sanctioned in some way with a hefty fine.
Perhaps it would have been better to simply inform Uefa of their plans, rather than asking permission and then disregarding the response
Uefa had rejected Rangers’ (and Manchester City and Chelsea’s) request for a special tribute ‘on the basis of maintaining a consistent pre-match ceremony with a subdued atmosphere and without any celebratory activities’. So, no anthems, which meant the Champion’s League’s own, a souped-up version of Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’, wasn’t played either. This was a trifle ironic as Handel’s original was composed for the coronation of King George II.
Interpreting Uefa’s position is a challenge but there seems to have been concern about some sort of free for all with clubs improvising tributes in potentially inappropriate ways. Uefa was almost certainly worried that a precedent could be set whereby clubs with more controversial allegiances (one thinks of Barcelona with its Basque separatist associations) potentially citing the example of Rangers when honouring their own, perhaps more politically divisive heroes. The governing body may also simply have been loath to lose control of that all-important pre-match corporate branding choreography (‘maintaining a consistent pre-match ceremony’) even for just one exceptional night.
None of these defenses stands up to much scrutiny, though. It hardly seems likely that individual clubs, with their reputations to protect, would have done anything too outlandish, or ‘celebratory’ on Wednesday night even if given a small degree of license. Nor is it plausible that allowing the honouring of a scrupulously apolitical figure of exceptional, global stature would have served as a credible argument for any club seeking to enact a tribute to a more controversial, local figure. And as for keeping control of every aspect of the sacramental Champion’s League pre-match ritual where every camera angle is prescribed to suit the sponsors and timings exactly calibrated to accommodate the maximum advertising revenue generation, let’s just say, sometimes, some things are a bit more important.
You might have more sympathy for Uefa had it not compromised its own supposed political neutrality on a number of previous occasions. The association gave its blessing to players taking the knee, a gesture whose associations with the Marxist BLM organisation was a far more disturbing intrusion into the supposedly politics-free sanctuary of the playing area than a tribute to a much-loved apolitical figurehead. Uefa’s website is also full of endorsements for causes that not every fan may be comfortable with. Uefa has partnered with the EU commissioner for equality and is fully signed up to the orthodox climate change agenda with its sustainability dogma and circular economy theories. In other words, political messages are welcome in Uefa’s realm, as long as they are of the approved sort.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect a wholly rational response from Uefa these days. Under extreme pressure from the European super clubs to cede ever more control of tournament formats and modes of revenue generation, the organisation may have lost its confidence and feel it necessary to assert its authority over every inch of its remaining fiefdom and show no weakness even in the face of the mildest challenge.
Did Rangers get this one exactly right? Perhaps it would have been better to simply inform Uefa of their plans, rather than asking permission and then disregarding the response. But the Ibrox club may have found it inconceivable that Uefa would be so bureaucratically minded, so fussily inflexible, so utterly insensitive to local sentiment as to refuse such a reasonable request. This is possible, after all Rangers have been out of the Champions League for 12 years so may be a bit out of touch with the current thinking in Nyon.
In the end, who really cares what Uefa does now? The fallout will soon be forgotten, and the fine, should it come, could be crowdfunded in hours. Meanwhile, those attending the game, despite the result (0-3), will cherish the memory of having stood up for what they believed in and participated in a communal expression of profoundly shared emotion that transcends anything generated by a mere sporting event. Rangers broke the rules, but they were right to do so.
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