Lineker, Neville and Wright are examples of the capture of sport by politics.
JUPPLANDIA
The other day black football ‘legend’ Ian Wright decided to wade into racial politics. For non UK readers, I’m talking about soccer, not NFL, but the things I’m going to say apply to the US and America’s defining national sport as well, or to sport in general.
Wright gave us the standard bullshit cry baby stuff we have come to expect from many black sporting stars. His comments were in defence of the younger generation black (actually mixed race) player Jude Bellingham. Bellingham has received criticism from England fans and some managers for an alleged attitude problem, most recently in a petulant response to his England manager in a recent game, but also with equal attention focused on what have been deemed disappointing performances. Bellingham, was touted as a superstar and hasn’t really delivered superstar performances.
Wright leaped straight past the performance and attitude issues to find the REAL cause of criticism of Bellingham, which was of course RACISM. Bellingham is criticised because he’s black, innit:
“I don’t think they’re ready for a black superstar. Who can move like Jude [Bellingham] is moving. They can’t touch him. He goes out there, he performs, he does what he does, he says ‘who else?’. It’s too uppity for these people.
I’ll put it in football terms. They all love N’Golo Kante. He’s a humble black man, gets on with what he’s doing. Not saying that he’s an Uncle Tom or anything, that’s just how his personality is.
But if you get a [Paul] Pogba, or a Bellingham, and you get that kind of energy, that does not sit well with the people. That kind of person. So someone like Jude, for some reason, frightens these people because of his capability and the inspiration he can give.
It’s something that you’re taught as a black man when you’re going out there, you just want to do the best you can and keep your head down. And be, for want of a better term, a humble f****** slave.
This is dragging up from that kind of energy. Because if you are outspoken, black, and playing to that kind of level and not caring, that frightens certain people.
That’s what’s happening with Jude. This guy is obsessed with him. He’s moving off that type of energy. He can’t see a black man doing what Jude is doing and not think that it’s not uppity. That he’s not an uppity n*****. I’m going with that. That’s what that comes down to.”
So there you go.
Criticise a Jude Bellingham performance, or point out that he acted like a spoilt twat when substituted in the 84th minute of a game against the mighty opposition of Albania, and you are a racist who thinks black men should be humble slaves. Bellingham didn’t score in the game, had a couple of good touches, and had an assist for one of the England goals. So an OK performance for a player widely described as one of the most promising talents of the team, but hardly spectacular. He then did a pathetic flounce and pout when substituted.
Wright’s unhinged and ridiculous response to the rather mild criticisms Bellingham received is nothing new. It’s a well established pattern now that if a black player is criticised for performance or attitude issues, it must immediately result in the playing of a Race Card in response. Fans basically aren’t allowed to criticise black players who turn up late for training again and again, or wonder why kids are selected to take penalties in key game apparently based on skin colour, or of course object to the constant ramming home of Whites are Racist messaging in football from campaigns like Kick Racism Out or from woke political gestures like taking the knee in response to the national anthem.
Insanely, that last BLM bullshit, which shows disgusting contempt for white fans and for white majority nation states by pretending they are far more racist than they are, lasted a lot longer in the UK than in the US. Over there, the bullshit has abated somewhat, but in the UK the average white fan going to see a match is still being told that he, somehow, killed George Floyd. Collective white guilt is the opening ceremony of British football matches, and if it’s a Celtic or a Liverpool match is often accompanied by Hate the English and Love Hamas bullshit on top.
If it’s not that, it’s Pride armbands and flags, with committed and loyal football fans who just want to see a ball being kicked around negotiating an obstacle course of woke messaging just to get through the fucking game and get full value for their eye wateringly expensive season tickets. The straight white fan (the majority of fans) get lectures on their innate evil rather than getting to enjoy the sport they love without politics being shoved down their throats. The relentless wokeness and the corporate greed of the modern game combine to make the whole thing a lot less masculine and working class than it used to be.
The sports stadium becomes not a cathedral of athletic excellence or sporting skill, but a venue where frustrated fans find themselves sitting through a kind of progressive sermon every time they want to follow a team. I’m sure US fans of the NFL and the Super Bowl understand what that frustration feels like. The great escape from miserable reality becomes yet another place where you’re beaten over the head for being white, or Christian, or heterosexual, or male.
Wright of course has been banging on about racism for some time now. Here he is four years ago:
Partly this is not Wright’s fault. The powers that be want everyone banging on about racism all the time, even if they only ever want one type of racism (white on black) spoken about.
Wright and other black players and commentators are never going to be free of journalists asking them about race issues, and every season or two another anti racism campaign kicks off as if British football terraces and British general attitudes are exactly the same as they were in the 1970s.
One of the features of wokeness and race obsession is that it feeds on itself. Britain, for instance, currently has one of the least racist football fanbases in the world. It has far less football hooliganism, now, than it had in the past. Fans are banned for life for racist chants and actions. All the decades of lecturing and berating as well as penalising, banning and arresting worked.
But football is still telling us to Kick Out a racism that no longer exists. And of course ignoring forms of racism that are actually thriving and growing. This is the Britain where Jewish football fans were banned from attending a match at Aston Villa because the Aston Villa ground is in a 70% Muslim area and Muslims, in supposed response to the Israel-Hamas War, threatened to riot if Jewish Israeli fans were allowed to attend.
Not a peep on that from Ian Wright or from any mainstream football authorities and fans. The British police colluded with Muslim agitators, bowed to their threats of violence against Jews, and then pretended it was a perfectly normal and decent decision. When Ian Wright’s England contemporary and commentating friend Gary Lineker shared a clip that compared Jews to rats (a standard Nazi trope), the whole football commentating Establishment, Wright, Shearer, and Neville included, continued on friendly terms with Lineker, either rallying to his defence or maintaining highly cordial relationships with him.
The same country and media outlets thar breathlessly await bullshit about nonexistent white racism towards black players, that encourage and demand such endless race grifting and race card playing when it comes to a kind of racism they beat long ago, never stop to ask if still endlessly pretending white fans are being racist when they aren’t is now a sustained attack on all the fans who happen to be white. Nor do they pause for a minute to wonder whether multiple sports stars and talking heads either ignoring or displaying anti-Jewish attitudes is a more urgent issue than multimillionaire black players and former players telling us that they are slaves.
All while the bemused white football fan wishes he were such a slave, since slavery now apparently comes with multiple homes, lifelong freedom from financial worries, stardom, TV crews hanging on your every word, and your most idiotic fucking pronouncements treated as Holy Writ and examples of how stunning and brave you are.
Wright’s latest bullshit was prompted by his pal and co-podcast personality, former Manchester United player Gary Neville. Neville of course has been frantically filling in his own woke CV with as many deluded, race baiting and rancid reactions as he can muster. We have just been told that he cried when he discovered allegations of racism involving one of his companies/get even richer schemes. Neville, like many well meaning persons of impeccable leftist moral probity, is a property developer. His other recent foray into politics came when he informed the nation that the England flag was a terrible and oppressive marker of evil, but apparently magically OK if you only ever wave it at a football match.
Neville was horrified by working class men at one of his property empire building sites raising an England flag. In a display of leftist outrage, a Beta moment of pure Soy Rage, Neville ripped the flag down (leaving other national flags at the same location flying). He then posted an emotion charged, near weepy description of it all.
This level of self hatred is what passes for normal these days among men who played for the very country whose symbols and majority they apparently despise.
Meanwhile his compatriot Lineker claimed to have been bullied as a youth for ‘looking black’, despite not, actually, looking or being black. Their contemporary Gareth Southgate, who became England manager and (spot a pattern here) banged on endlessly about racism, sounds exactly like a leftist politician, repeating the exact same messaging on race (always white villains, always an urgent threat) and gender (Southgate and Starmer both pushed a Netflix fiction demonising white boys as murderers as a serious, even real, commentary on violence and masculinity).
So why are so many former or present football stars such unutterably stupid and unthinking NPCs? On the surface sport should be the place where real meritocracy thrives, and where false narratives of oppression are laughed at. In sport, the metrics of performance are pretty easy to access, and the playing field is quite literally level. Football too was the working class sport in Britain, and it’s the white working class which remains most in touch with normality and objective reality. Wokeness is a luxury belief system dominant in the middle class and ruling class.
Which begins to have our question answer itself. The reason there are so many prominent voices of black grievance (when anti black racism in sport is vanishingly rare) is because these people get attention and promotion (as any other race grifters get too). They are ASKED for these views, and PAID for them. For current or past performers, any failures in their career, any personal disappointments, any reasons why fans might legitimately dislike them for non racist reasons, become things they can explain to themselves as racism (as occurred with Sol Campbell, the ex England and ex Spurs and Arsenal player who left a club to join their hated rivals and then explained dismay at his betrayal of club tribal loyalties by assuming the response was about his skin colour).
And the reason that white former players (all of whom tend to be the same generation) become such boring robots on race issues is because they were the generation that emerged after the entire working class nature of football had been destroyed. The old very male climate of sledging, mockery, physical challenge was replaced by a far less physical game AND a far more middle class game, a game where virtue signalling replaces talent and multimillionaire stars trying to conform to dinner party elite attitudes share nothing in common with white working class fans. The pathetic submissiveness and self loathing of white former players like Shearer, Neville and Lineker is their ticket into a middle class world that considers sophistication, education, intelligence and worth all to be wrapped up in hating and demeaning both traditional masculinity and ‘whiteness’.
It’s how the uneducated footballer pretends he went to university. It’s how they get the funding and support for moves into things like commentating, being allowed on TV when their playing days are over, building up property empires, and socially mixing in more ‘elite’ circles.
If a footballer wants to be taken seriously, he has to be a person who can’t be taken seriously by the white working class.
This article (Why Are Football Stars Such Beta Males?) was created and published by Jupplandia and is republished here under “Fair Use”
Featured image: zeit.de
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