English football league teams are falling over each other to create inclusive and diverse environments. But it seems that not everyone is included.
A football team in the EFL Championship has proudly announced that it has achieved a bronze award in the EFL equality code of practice. This was awarded to the club for ensuring it was creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for everyone and it was hitting every target of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) scheme. You might ask why it hasn’t gained silver or gold but, presumably, this is a work in progress.
At the same time, Toby Young, founder and General Secretary of the Free Speech Union (FSU), announced that Newcastle United Football Club – a club expressly “committed to equality, diversity and inclusion” – has banned a supporter from attending its home matches for the rest of this season and the next two. As reported in the Daily Sceptic, this story has been covered by the Telegraph and several tabloids. Linzi Smith, who is gay and champions LGB rights, was spied on by a unit at the Premier League described by Toby as the ‘Stadium Stasi’ and reported to NUFC for posting ‘gender-critical’ views. She was later presented with an 11-page dossier, which included her personal details: where she lived, where she worked, even where she walked her dog. Evidence, perhaps, of Orwell’s 1984 being used as a manual.
Northumbria police said she had not committed a crime. However, absurdly, NUFC revoked her membership of the club and banned her from coming to the stadium until 2026. Luckily, the FSU is supporting her. This is a clear attack on free speech and football clubs should not be allowed to ban fans due to their political views; they should be focusing on how well the team is doing. After all, Newcastle is 13 points from the top four and in poor form.
The club should also be focusing on the safety of fans. On the same weekend, Hull City – the club I support – hosted Millwall, whose supporters have a reputation for causing trouble. This was evident upon their arrival in Hull. There are unconfirmed reports that the fans vandalised trains and caused trouble at the station. Further, inside the stadium the Millwall fans were inviting Hull fans outside for a fight, which resulted in some being evicted from the ground. This did not sit well with the remaining Millwall fans who charged towards the police and the home supporters.
There was more hooliganism when Brighton faced Crystal Palace, known as the M23 derby, which saw several fights outside the ground and resulted in seven arrests. Similarly, last weekend the derby between West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton had to be suspended for 30 minutes in the second half due to crowd trouble: a man was dragged out of the stadium with blood pouring from his head.
Football violence and hooliganism is on the rise: a report this year showed 999 arrests were made between July 1st and December 31st 2022, a 10% increase over the same period the previous year. Football-related arrests were up by 59% to 2,198; the highest number of arrests since the 2013-14 season.
Why is the EFL focusing on woke ideology to make clubs more inclusive and diverse and banning fans expressing legitimate views, when football violence is on the rise? Which is more harmful: a view with which you disagree being expressed on Twitter, or a bottle over the head?
Jack Watson, who’s 15, has a Substack newsletter called Ten Foot Tigers about being a Hull City fan. You can subscribe here.
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Get woke, go broke. If they keep going down this route they’ll soon find themselves with empty stadiums, wondering what went wrong. Personally, I can’t wait. Imagine being a football player and your manager telling you “I know we paid you 11m last year, but because people are bigots and racists who don’t like our DIE targets, best we can do for this upcoming year is 60k.”
Getting to the point where the averge non-‘woke’ fan needs to turn the footie off and read a book or save the quid and the hassle from attending in person (and avoid listening to endless cussing, or being sworn at, mocked, attacked, threatened for wearing the wrong shirt, or covered in beer and piss etc etc).
Are the pretty boys still bending knees ? (but never for white girls raped by Muslims, or the long history of white slavery, or white indentured servants, or whites with their privileges as they worked in mines and factories 16 hours a day…)
As always, nobody was actually excluded until they became inclusive.
Over the longer term which virus is going to cause more destruction – the C1984 which was only a moderate irritant or the DEI which is like some nasty parasite infecting all the hosts it gets into and grows and grows and grows?
DEI warrants brutal excisions from every body it cruelly infects before each and every host dies a malingering death.
There is no “vaccine” to counteract DEI only vicious destruction will suffice.
I know Jack is a young man, but as someone who regularly attended football matches during the 1970’s, I’m afraid I have to say this. The current incidents of hooliganism are just a pale imitation, a pastiche of hooliganism. Football was truly a battleground. On the way there you would find coaches and trains being bricked from bridges and road sides. Without segregation, both sets of fans would turn the ground into a series of objectives and fighting would sweep across the terraces. Then after the game, there was the running the gauntlet to your transport and breathing a sigh of relief when you managed to get out of town.I confess it was very exhilarating as a young man to be on the periphery of it. We don’t want to see it back there, at that level, but we shouldn’t clutch at our pearls in horrors if there are incidents, and moralise about them like a Victorian Clergyman..
A lot was made out of the idiot at Hillsborough, the other week. Making an inappropriate gesture. I can tell you, in the 70’s it wasn’t unusual to have a whole stand making ‘monkey noises’ and throwing bananas on the pitch. Now we have teams of people reviewing video’s, including lip-readers to search out wrong doing. It seems to me that the less discrimination there is, the harder we want to look for it and the more desperate we are to find it. Taking the Hillsborough case, what would have been the response if the young man had just done the w*nker sign to the player..? Is that not insulting too, Did it really need the head of FIFA to announce his personal disappointment of what was a momentary error of judgement by a young man in the heat of the game. I doubt it.
Still I suppose that we the great unwashed will be judged in minutia by our betters, the righteous keepers of the moral standards. Oh, if only we could be as virtuous as they…
PS There are plenty of documentaries about hooliganism in the 1970’s on Youtube. As you’re only 15, Jack, I’m not advising that you watch any of them, but thats where they are.
I can’t fault this post. That’s how it was.
“The current incidents of hooliganism are just a pale imitation, a pastiche of hooliganism.”
Absolutely.
I found a report of a game in about 1973 Wolves vs Man Utd, in which there were 120 arrests, 18 stabbings (non fatal) , and running battles between supporters and police for two hours. Didn’t even make Page 1 of the papers.
Still, he’s right that it’s phenomenally stupid, and hypocritical, of a Saudi owned club to forensically hunt down a ‘terf’in the way that they have and apply less effort to fan violence.