The FA chief executive, Martin Glenn, sees a fire and reaches for the gasoline.
On Sunday, Glenn was discussing Pep Guardiola’s much-publicised yellow ribbon, which the Manchester City manager has worn in support of politicians who have been imprisoned in Catalonia following the independence referendum there in October.
Having been the FA’s chief executive for three years, Glenn is well-versed in facing the media but practice seemingly hasn’t made perfect.
No, instead, he’s managed to piss a lot of people off. FA rules ban all political messages from being worn on shirts and Glenn said he wouldn’t want the Star of David or Robert Mugabe’s face on football tops the same way he doesn’t want Guardiola wearing the yellow ribbon.
While that particular comparison attracted intense scrutiny, Emmet Malone of The Irish Times highlighted a different remark, in which Glenn said the poppy isn’t divisive or political.
“We have rewritten Law 4 of the game so that things like a poppy are OK but things that are going to be highly divisive are not,” Glenn said. He continued:
“That could be strong religious symbols, it could be the Star of David, it could the hammer and sickle, it could be a swastika, anything like Robert Mugabe on your shirt — these are the things we don’t want.
“To be honest, and to be very clear, Pep Guardiola’s yellow ribbon is a political symbol, it’s a symbol of Catalan independence and I can tell you there are many more Spaniards, non-Catalans, who are p****d off by it. All we are doing is even-handedly applying the laws of the game.
“Poppies are not political symbols; that yellow ribbon is. Where do you draw the line, should we have someone with a Ukip badge? Someone with an Isis badge? That’s why you have to be pretty tough that local, regional, national party organisations cannot use football shirts to represent them.”
Glenn is the spark that has lit the powder keg. Not only did he mention ISIS, the Star of David and UKIP in the same breath, he was always risking a backlash by saying the poppy is not divisive.
The problem is that, to some, it can be seen as contradictory. To most British people, the poppy remains a symbol of remembrance, an emblem with which to commemorate military personnel who died in the line of duty.
Thing is, Martin Glenn has the kernel of a point on political symbols (though believe he’s wrong on what the yellow ribbon actually means). But it is totally contradicted by the FA’s stance on the poppy.
— Rory Smith (@RorySmith) March 4, 2018
But the poppy doesn’t mean the same to everyone. James McClean has stood out like a sore thumb in English football in recent seasons for refusing to wear a poppy every November. Despite writing a considered open letter outlining his reasons for not wearing one on his jersey, he still attracts all sorts of abuse at the same time every year.
Of course, to McClean, a proud Derry man, the poppy also remembers soldiers who were involved in such conflicts that led to Bloody Sunday, that dark chapter of the Troubles when 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were fatally gunned down by British soldiers.
For McClean, to wear a poppy would be to disrespect the victims.
It’s important to remember that, in 2016, Fifa ruled that poppies contravened its rules on political symbols. However, the FA defied Fifa’s ruling anyway and England’s players wore poppies during an international against Scotland around the time of Remembrance Day in November 2016.
The FA has since convinced Fifa that the poppy is not political, a development which allowed England’s players to wear poppies during a friendly against Germany on Armistice Day.
This, entirely predictably, is where you end up when you rewrite the rules to say that the political emblems you quite like are not political emblems at all…. https://t.co/7P3lJlOGal
— emmet malone (@emmetmalone) March 5, 2018
But that does not excuse the FA’s double standards. Glenn’s comments, apart from handing the FA a spectacular PR disaster bright and early on a Monday morning, represent the FA’s blatant, head-scratching hypocrisy.
Glenn’s logic centres on the yellow ribbon being highly divisive while stating that the poppy is not, which strikes as particularly jarring considering the fevered debate the wearing of poppies produces every year.
In trying to justify the FA’s stance on Guardiola’s ribbon, Glenn has instead laid bare the glaring contradiction which hangs over English football’s governing body.
Speaking on The Second Captains football show, Ken Early likened Glenn’s rationalisation of the poppy to war between two tribes of tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels, fighting to the death over the religious question of egg-breaking. Early compared the FA to the bigger tribe in the book, representing a kind of ‘our way is the right way’ attitude.
Of course, as Early said, Glenn’s distinction between the poppy and Guardiola’s symbol is nonsense.
This whole ‘our symbol is fine but yours needs to be banned’ is not a good look. Rules are there to be adhered, not tiptoed around.
We’re not blowing things out of proportion here. It needed to be said and we said it.
