How Wokeness Killed Football

Gender critical lesbian banned: football hooliganism never ended, it just got posher

Gary Lineker: Wokeness Incarnate

After using brutal probes, invasive surveillance and public humiliation rituals, the Stasi finally succeeded in uprooting a troublesome weed from its meticulous garden. Sorry, not Stasi - Newcastle United football club. And their weed is a lesbian who believes that men can’t be women.

Linzi Smith was found guilty - by the court of…football(?) - for posting gender critical social media comments deemed to have met the threshold of transphobia. Yes, this is football - a domain once known as a hub of working-class hooliganism, with its ultras and football firms.

The fact that this particular club is owned by the Saudi Arabian regime - which enforces a guardianship system for women, who are legally considered half the worth of men - is lost on the powers that be. I suppose money talks in mysterious ways. Just look at pundit and former player Gary Lineker, who criticised the Qatar World Cup while pocketing £1.6m from working for the Gulf state’s political broadcaster.

This utterly depraved lunacy, this Kafkaesque hypocrisy, is infuriating but not at all surprising because football is a microcosm of society at large. As ever (see: Nazism, Maoism), ideas emerge with the elite classes in the universities before filtering down to the masses.

These ideas often start as ways for the chattering classes to distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi. These philosophies become status symbols to be worn with pride, which is how you end up with a Saudi-run sports team flying the progress flag for trans rights. It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to be fashionable.

This wouldn’t work if it weren’t self-policed. But it always is.

The terraces of football matches were once a hostile place for minorities. In many parts of the world, this is still the case - entire stadia chant anti-black and anti-Semitic songs. I’m pleased we moved past this in the UK.

In the 1990s, the game blew up after its deal with Sky. Matches became unaffordable to the very people who grew the sport. Over the years, this has created an aspiration among football fans of all classes to disassociate themselves from the hooliganism of other fans and previous eras. That’s why football is a breeding ground for the worst kind of authoritarian wokeness.

The tribalism and aggression remain. It’s a boiling pot of male rage. But with aspiration, it becomes wokeness incarnate. Now, the very fans who once threw bananas at black players now scream death threats - with all the entitled aggression of the Good Guys TM - at gender critical Linzi Smith (you wouldn’t believe the vitriolic and abusive posts). Many football fans are, of course, still rooted in normality. They see their weekly or bi-weekly home game as a chance to unwind from their burdens.

But all it takes for wokeness to thrive is a few policing agents scattered across the stadia. My fondest childhood memories are of my Saturday afternoon trips to Spurs. A child of divorce, this was the time I got to spend with my dad. It was beautiful in its simplicity: nothing but us and football—and lots of sweets.

I don’t get to games much now. But last season, I attended a match with my old man. The period before the game - in which we’d typically catch up and chat about the players - the club drowned us in insanely loud and colourful political causes:

The LGBT Supporters Club lectured us about why it’s essential we know their sexual tastes. With the influx of Islam to the game, this is becoming a big problem. Ipswich Town captain Sam Morsy just refused to wear the rainbow colours for religious reasons. He’ll be fine - for now, Islam trumps LGBT. But what do the woke do with Christian Crystal Palace player Marc Guéhi, who wrote “I love Jesus” on his rainbow armband. It looks like he’ll be fined.

After the LGBT parade at Spurs, the absolute worst one was to follow:

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