SIMON JORDAN: The self-righteous Premier League is all about activism… and a side order of football

We are seemingly in a ‘Just Stop’ world. Well, here’s a ‘Just Stop’ campaign I’d be right behind…Just Stop using sport to advance every bloody cause going.

Why can’t sport just be about sport? Why does football in particular feel the need to be seen as the antidote for all society’s ills?

I’d suggest the majority of people, if not nigh on all who go to watch live sport, simply go to watch the sport.

But the menu seems to endlessly consist of activism, causes, agenda, oh, and a side order of football. The game has allowed itself to become a vehicle to impart all manner of messages from climate to race, from the structure of society to the monarchy. It’s impossible to miss the constant messaging of how we should think and behave.

Let’s face it, we can turn on every TV station or read every newspaper in the land to ascertain that information – we don’t need football for that.

The Premier League turned into the biggest virtue-signalling organisation when it’s hardly got it’s house in order

Liverpool fans chanted over God Save the King and held up signs when it was played at Anfield

Below, Mail Sport columnist Simon Jordan (pictured) asks why sport can’t just be about sport?

Sport generally hasn’t been successful in uniting people on the causes or events it chooses to get involved with, often half- heartedly. It actually adds more fuel to the fire and creates more division. Football, because of its appeal and reach, has become everyone’s hobby horse.

Top of the list is the slightly self-righteous and cowed Premier League who, alongside its primary broadcaster, seems to want to put itself in positions it has no need to be in. 

The Premier League, due to a combination of an over-inflated sense of its own importance and a walking, talking PR campaign for others, has turned into the biggest virtue-signalling organisation that God has put breath into when it’s hardly got its own house in order.

The hypocrisy of it! You can’t turn around and claim that you’ve got all the virtues of the world in your locker while entertaining football clubs being bought by people who are less than palatable in some people’s eyes and a whole raft of other things going on in the game that we don’t find particularly appetising.

Yet it regularly goes on half-baked and unthought-through flights of fantasy, thinking it can solve the world’s problems while positioning itself at the front of the queue for virtue.

Look at the Premier League deciding it had to adopt the Americans’ deeply divisive taking of the knee. Despite the fact we have a very different society here and our football is a pretty inclusive, pretty diverse sport. To equate what is going on over here compared to across the Atlantic is palpably absurd but, of course, the Premier League had to be seen to be doing what it, misguidedly, felt was right.

Not content with that, it insisted teams’ shirts all carried the strap Black Lives Matter, alongside Sky thrusting that in people’s faces at every opportunity only to then suddenly realise that, despite it being at its essence a worthwhile message, it had other connotations that weren’t so palatable, and subsequently dropped it like the proverbial hot potato.

What did taking the knee on a football field really do for society? It created division and pitted people against each other. Anyone who did it was wonderful and anyone who didn’t and objected to the idea that this country was an institutionally racist island, was a nailed-on racist.

The national anthem was also greeted with chanting from Everton fans when they took on Brighton 

Taking the knee before Premier League games created division and pitted people against each other

Why does football in particular feel the need to be seen as the antidote for all society’s ills?

More recently we had the armband controversy ahead of the World Cup. Generally, footballers aren’t particularly savvy regarding these things but were used, unfairly and inappropriately, as the spokespeople for a gesture designed to support LGBTQ+ rights. 

But the bulk of those players didn’t actually want to put any skin in the game. So off we trot to Qatar with our Western values trying to impose our views and telling a developing country how to behave, but then we don’t even have the courage of our convictions. 

We want to put on an armband but as soon as we’re told there’ll be a consequence – a yellow card – then the sport becomes more important again.

Then there was the issue surrounding the national anthem for the coronation last weekend when football didn’t need to involve itself. What does playing a national anthem at football stadiums actually achieve? 

We could have just stood the games down as the ultimate mark of respect and reconvened on the Sunday without creating a background for people to be pitted against each other again because, ultimately that’s what it’s done. 

We’ve had people saying “look at those idiots in Liverpool disrespecting the culture of this country” (for the record, I’m one of them) and you’ve had Liverpool fans saying “what do you know about how we feel about things? We’ve had a terrible time”.

It’s bad enough we have a state-funded broadcaster that is supposed to be neutral that allows its most recognisable face, a sports broadcaster, to espouse us of his far from neutral opinions.

We don’t have to have this division or polarisation. We should be able to go and enjoy 90 minutes of football, take ourselves out of our grey lives, be invested in something that doesn’t involve how much our electricity bill is or how much inflation is, how many jobs are being lost or the climate crisis. We have enough crap in the world to be dealing with the moment that we walk out of a football stadium.

Captains at the recent World Cup in Qatar backed down from wearing the OneLove armband after they were threatened with repercussions 

Harry Kane instead donned one of the FIFA-provided ‘No Discrimination’ armbands (above)

Liverpool legend John Barnes has articulated many times racism isn’t a football problem, it’s a societal problem

Let’s have all the noise be about cheering goals, booing opposition and blaming all football ails on VAR

There’s no doubt football – and sport – can be a very significant way of imparting a message. We can talk about inclusion, societal wrongs and highlight all the shortcomings of the world but hold on a minute, why? Why can’t we just go to a game to get away from that when we’re dealing with it every other day of our lives.

Sport should have no greater responsibility to operate in a more compelling way than society. As John Barnes has articulated many times, racism isn’t a football problem, it’s a societal problem…and yet somehow sport is held to a different set of standards.

Football is constantly doing its own version of the hokey-cokey – ‘In, out, in, out, in, out’ – often looking silly with its unsubstantial positioning of not really wanting to be involved but feeling that it’s got to be.

When was it decided, and by whom, that from every available portal it needed to be rammed down the throats of hundreds and thousands of football fans? What is wrong with the world?!

Let’s just remember what sport is at its very essence – the ultimate escapism. In the spirit of that, let’s have all the noise to be about cheering goals, booing the opposition and blaming all football ails on VAR – and, of course, ghastly football agents!

Critics of ‘unfair’ play-offs need to pipe down 

The Football League play-offs kick off tomorrow night and for all the tension and pressure those games bring, I still believe it’s the best way to get promoted.

Not that I’d know what it’s like to win the title, but the euphoria and exhilaration of winning a final to secure promotion is off the charts.

Despite that remarkable feeling I experienced at the Millennium Stadium when Crystal Palace beat West Ham United 1-0 in 2004, I was more despondent on the two occasions we lost in the play-off semi-finals.

You will always have people arguing the system is unfair on clubs who finish just outside the promotion places, miles clear of their rivals but end up falling short.

Sunderland secured a play-off space at the expense of Blackburn and Millwall on the final day

Nottingham Forest won Premier League promotion through the play-offs beating Huddersfield

Well, tough. It’s priced in at the beginning of the season and the play-offs enhance and lengthen interest in the campaign.

There’s also an argument to bring them in for relegation but I don’t agree with that. Play-offs should be a reward for success, not a mechanism to define degrees of loss.

They are about winning something, not losing something – two very different animals.

The current system has been a brilliant addition to the schedule and for the fans who taste victory, there’s no better feeling.