Premier League Sexism

What is a sexist? It is such a complex issue. Are you a sexist if you don’t like certain women? Are you a sexist if you think of all women as second class citizens or mere sexual objects? Are you a sexist if you think power belongs only to men? Are you a sexist if you just say these things and don’t act on them (speech isn’t an action)?

Such a complicated issue, if of course you are a partially retarded dinosaur. I think it is becoming increasingly easy to spot people who are sexists these days, the sort of crusty old men who send emails about “female irrationality” and female colleagues being on/off “your shaft” as if it is actually about humour and less about their own sexual inadequacies and latent Oedipal complexes, the sort of wealthy men that hand around in tired old institutions like the Premier League and the FA, somehow walking away with huge pay packets whilst retaining the illusion of doing pretty much nothing (except sending lewd emails).

Unfortunately the rest of the Premier League and FA boards are similarly retarded dinosaurs, and seem to think that if you are a private sexist then that is all well and good, just as long as he isn’t expressing these views in a poster campaign he can keep his huge pay packet which comes from fans who apparently have to simply accept that at least one sexist dinosaur runs the Premier League. Would he be allowed to say he ‘would like to touch young boys’ in a private email, sending cartoons about this to his diplodocus friends? 

Rani Abraham is now being threatened with legal action by the Premier League, who are apparently powerless to sanction their employee, Richard Scudamore. Even in a clear case of wrongdoing, punishment is enacted on the temporary female worker, not the wealthy male executive – such action is more indicative of how acceptable sexism is than the emails themselves. It is also a problem of class, a colleague of mine was fired 6 months ago for making disparaging comments about a senior staff member in a private email, there is one set of rules for the executives, and one for workers. Executives have become more powerful than the bodies they work for, through football to the financial sector, whilst the Premier League have misjudged how out of kilter they are with public opinion, the sexist triceratops will keep his job and the message to people like Rani Abraham is to put up and shut up. Fortunately, most people have more integrity than executives. 

Disunited We Sit

The weekend comes and you have some small freedom. You love football, and thus you pay Sky Sports £50 a month to watch said game alone or at most with a small amount of friends. You do not go to a stadium and stand with other people, hang around the ground before and talk at length with anyone who will listen about formations, signings, other teams games etc. In short, you are the modern football fan.

None of this is your fault though. Unfortunately you have been subsumed into the cult of the individual, though help to escape is available if your truly wish. Cult's are only seen as ridiculous from the outside, they have their own internal logic which reinforces the cult behavior, so lets start with how you first got involved.

Football matches can be expensive. Most of the professional leagues are a struggle to afford for most without significant sacrifices (of sexual partners, long term relationships, other important interests), ticket prices go up above inflation most years and yet stadiums rarely get filled. Consequently the atmosphere has deteriorated at the game, you can't stand, you can't drink or smoke, and in places like the Emirates only the posh twats are left. In short, the product has got worse whilst the price has gone up, so you rationally stayed at home, and bought into the Sky ideal of sitting on the sofa and watching their adverts. Sky then pump their increasing revenues into the game, players get paid unjustifiably large wages, big media becomes a more significant and cohesive actor than fans as a unity. TV money has contributed to the deterioration of the live product, not least by scheduling games at ridiculous times, and constantly across the weekend (and week). Nobody asked for this, it just happened.

As a rational consumer, you aren't going to pay more for less, and thus you substitute for another similar good just like good neoclassical people should. You have separated out and lose the experience of collective action, of spontaneous unity and shared joy which football revealed to people every weekend for years. What you have forgotten is that football is not a product, and that is how they got you in to the cult, my friend. It is created as a spectacle by gatherings and organisations of people to enjoy in itself, the money is paid in to fund the collective aspirations and should be reasonable to the wages of the collective. Football can be changed by the people that support it, it isn't a bag of fucking crisps or razor blades which you can just substitute for something else, it is a living expression of unity. Football has resisted disunity for years, even when other realms of society have fallen away. These ideals have been retained in other countries, and they can be here too, though only with fan involvement.

There are affordable games available in the non league for those keen to wean themselves of corporate sofa football, however only when fans harry teams and leagues into improving the atmosphere and experience in stadia through re-introducing standing and letting people drink again not to mention lowering ticket prices will we see a change. Wages for players need to be capped, we can hardly kick sky out of the equation, however the more people that goto the ground the less watch there programmes, and it can be reduced to a reasonable amount of games. I would love it if sky changed first, however the leaders of cults tend to be dogmatic - far better to escape back to the real world and face up to these wider problems in the games which are turning people off.

Before you start whingeing that you live 200 miles away from your team and therefore cant get to the games etc, you might want to start asking why that is. It will almost certainly be because of current societal forces, however the response to this is not bleak acceptance and moving to London, it can be resistance and pride in where you are from, through resistance and pride in football. I can hardly blame people for being part of the cult, I am only trying to break you out of it. Unity is strength, leave the cult of the individual and join me and the others back in the lovely, cruel real world.