Thank heavens for that. English football clubs will no longer have a minute’s silence for tragedies like floods, earthquakes and volcanoes across the other side of the world. Of course, it’s lovely for players and fans to show solidarity with their fellow human beings. But the whole thing has got out of hand, is horribly inconsistent and achieves next to nothing.
In September 2023, all English clubs held a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of an earthquake thousands of miles away in North Africa. But following the attacks by Hamas on Israel a month later, which led to the murder of 1,200 people, the FA chose not to light up the Wembley arch in the colours of the Israeli flag, though it did so for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022.
The problem is that the bigger the sport the more it likes to signal its virtue
The sad truth is that tragedies – terrorist outrages, natural disasters, plane crashes – happen every year. Take 2025. Floods in Pakistan displaced over a million people. The Myanmar earthquake killed over 5,000. Tens of thousands died in the civil war in Sudan, while others suffer in ongoing conflicts in Ethiopia, the Maghreb region of North Africa and the Congo. There have been dozens of terrorist incidents, from New Orleans in January and Mali in February to Syria in June and Nigeria in August.
You could make a case for marking them all with a minute’s silence, but that would just lead to footballers spending the entire 90 minutes linking arms around the centre circle, looking solemn. A line must be drawn somewhere.
The problem is that the bigger the sport the more it likes to signal its virtue. So Fifa, despite presiding over epic levels of corruption for decades, established its Foundation in 2018 to demonstrate its ‘commitment to making a positive social impact and addressing the most pressing global challenges’.
It’s not just football, of course. Rugby was at it too. After George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020, the RFU, 4,000 miles away in London, suddenly announced that England fans, who for decades had sung ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, would henceforth need to be educated on its historical context. Why? Because the song was apparently composed by a freed slave in 19th-century Oklahoma, though you’d be hard pressed to find a single England fan who knew that, still less one who sang it because of its origins.
The Welsh Rugby Union got in on the act too. Visitors to the Principality Stadium have long revelled in Sir Tom Jones’s famously rousing ‘Delilah’, belted out before kick-off. But in 2023, the WRU decided to ban it because, if you took the lyrics literally, which absolutely nobody in Wales does, you could be accused of glorying in domestic violence. Jones himself scoffed at WRU decision, correctly predicting that the fans would carry on singing it anyway, just as the Twickenham faithful bang out ‘Swing Low’ louder than ever.
In short, in both Cardiff and London, the administrators’ attempts to go woke have gone broke, as anyone with half a brain knew they would, while doing absolutely nothing to further racial harmony in England or tackle domestic violence in Wales. So, what was the point, other than to make the administrators feel better?
Mind you, it’s unfair to pin all the blame on the officials, when some of the players and coaches can be just as bad. Did taking the knee achieve anything? The brilliant Lionesses, who have won two major tournaments in the last three years, correctly decided to stop the practice as it was having no impact, and others are following their lead. England rugby player Billy Vunipola, among a few brave others, never took part in the first place, even when it was all the vogue, proudly towering above his fellow players in the lineup who had all sunk to the ground.
I still find it painful to watch that video of Gary Neville being skewered by Ian Hislop on Have I Got News for You after pompously excusing his reasons for working as a pundit at the Qatar World Cup in 2022. England star Jordan Henderson, who has been a great servant of the game, punctured his own support for gay rights when he signed a multi-million-pound deal to play in Saudi Arabia. As for Gary Lineker… no, I can’t bear to go there.
Well, let’s hope that these global sports, and some of their star names, are now starting to realise the error of their ways, and to understand that virtue signalling is actually pretty shameful and sometimes hypocritical unless it’s carefully thought through and backed up by genuine action. And how often does that happen? Maybe it’s best to just play the game after all.
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