England's national football team this weekend returned from their campaign in the Euros, having fallen in characteristic fashion to a penalty shoot-out. Unfortunately, the ugly streak of national team support which previously burnt an effigy of David Beckham for his getting sent off in the 1998 World Cup reappared through racist abuse directed at the black players who missed England's penalties, and the defacing a mural of Marcus Rashford in Manchester. This prompted the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to condemn the abuse, only for Tyrone Mings, an England player, to accuse her of having stoked such abuse through her prior position of criticising the players' kick-off stance of kneeling against racism, and her stated belief that it was the fans' right to decide whether to boo it themselves.
As cynical as Patel and this UK government in general are, in that specific instance she was correct that fans are as entitled to boo players making a statement as players were to make that statement in the first place. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the message or the medium in either direction, it should be self-evident that allowing one group of people (players, staff) to communicate their beliefs while denying that right to another group (fans) - particularly when, for the national team, those players are supposed to represent the nation as a whole - is wrong. If the right to boo should have been denied, and possibly punished, then those who cheered ought to have been subject to the same treatment. If the players had decided to stand behind a message that 'All Lives Matter', would the fans have been wrong to boo that as well?
These questions are exactly why there should be no political or 'moral' messaging of any kind in sports or entertainment events, aside from perhaps in situations where participation in the sport forces players into taking a side - see final paragraph. Off the field, players can of course do, say and support whatever they believe in. Once it is brought into the stadium, fans have every right to respond one way or another when an event they have paid to attend is used as a platform for activism.Personally, I find the players' activism equally dishonest considering that in a year-and-a-half, they will be legitimising a World Cup played in stadia built on the corpses of slave labour, in Qatar, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death. I'd wager there'll be a lot more PR-massaged equivocating closer to the time, even if the national team's stance right now is very much in favour of using sport as a promotional platform for such issues as long as it has no personal cost for any of them. If you must be activists, be activists: don't be hypocrites. Perhaps it would be better for everyone, however, to treat sports less like politics and politics less like sports.
(I originally posted a version of this in the comments of the linked Guardian article on the topic, where it was deleted within minutes. If it is now forbidden among certain political persuasions to even question whether public figures should use their entertainment platforms for activism while contesting the right of their paying public to contest that activism, that should tell you everything you need to know about what a precarious place the founding principles of a free society find themselves in.)
