What the Mason Greenwood Saga Reveals About Football’s Woke Moral Panic
I'm sick of narcissistic idiots
“It saddens me what happened to him. He’s a different person to the one described in England.” When Italian football manager Roberto De Zerbi said these words about alleged rapist Mason Greenwood, he couldn’t have imagined that they’d be at the centre of a divisive culture war in English football years later.
Wokeness has increasingly intruded into football. Just last year, Uruguayan player Rodrigo Bentancur faced penalties for joking that his teammate, South Korean player Heung Min-Son, looked like his cousins. He was fined £100,000 and banned for seven matches. While the joke was ugly, it is notable that breaking another player’s leg results in just a three-match ban.
Why This Minimizes Rape
Wokeness is rooted in nice ideas. We don’t want a society in which a Korean man has to suffer racist tropes – even from his friend and teammate. And where we are now is preferable to the infamous decades of hooliganism, when racists threw bananas at black players.
But the total loss of proportion – and the idea that words are violence (are more than violence) – has made for an authoritarian streak that dominates sports.
Now, we’re faced with another such issue related to footballer Mason Greenwood, who was charged with one count of attempted rape of his girlfriend in 2022, as well as assault causing bodily harm and using coercive behaviour. Greenwood was not convicted. He and the girlfriend he was charged with raping now raise two children together.
Still, most rape cases don’t end in conviction. This isn’t the same as innocence.
Text messages have been released that paint Greenwood in a truly reprehensible light. His reputation is rightly in tatters, and he was excommunicated from the English football community. I think this is understandable; a process of shaming from a tribe that wants this behaviour rooted out.
De Zerbi, however, is different. The Italian is obsessed with winning and is paid handsomely (grotesquely) for doing so. He stole the opportunity to buy an outrageously talented player who would otherwise never have joined him at Marseille. And – quite plausibly – he sold a slice of his morality by publicly defending his new star.
Again, you might see this as lamentable. You might criticise and hate De Zerbi for standing by a man accused of heinous crimes. Perhaps you’re right to do so.
But don’t equate him with Greenwood.
Because in so doing, you minimise the horror of rape. If the professional consequences for defending a player who allegedly raped are as bad as the actual alleged raping; if De Zerbi receives the same banishment as a man who committed one of the worst crimes in our society; then we’ve lost all sense of proportion and have made this less about the shocking crime and more about performative empathy and cancel culture.
Loss Of Proportion
This is where wokeness lost anyone with an ounce of integrity and sanity. The ugliest part of it is the guilt-by-association. Frustratingly, it forbids its adherents from suggesting some crimes are worse than others. To them, all crimes and misdemeanours are of equal weight and none of them are forgivable. No one must associate with a person who associated with a person who…you get the picture.
But it’s obvious even to a child that some crimes are worse than others.
You might disagree with De Zerbi, as I do. But the idea that he can’t work again is preposterous. What he said was wrong and it makes me uncomfortable. But sometimes we have to live with feeling uncomfortable.
Especially given the truly harmful ideologies that now dominate the game under the guise of wokeness. Performative progressive causes that do more harm than good have taken over the game.
Woke Football
For years, players took the knee at the start of football matches. The names on the backs of their shirts were replaced by the words Black Lives Matter (no one seemed to care about the anti-Semitic Communist ideals of the eponymous organisation that has been accused of fraud).
Woke Spurs fans are currently calling out their club’s approach of manager De Zerbi in the name of “women feeling safe” at the stadium. They say they’d rather see the club relegated (without a care for the thousands of working class people who would lose jobs were such a big club to go down).
Yet these same fans are silent about the enormous trans pride flag that dominates the northeast corner of the ground. The irony is that this flag really does encourage men to enter women’s toilets - bizarrely, it’s literally what the flag signifies. Countless feminists have spoken out about the fear evoked by the trans flag and its movement. One such Newcastle fan, Linzi Smith, was banned from her club for speaking out against the extreme reaches of trans ideology.
Yet, from fans more concerned about their place in the hierarchy of oppression, Spurs’ trans flag provokes nothing but silence.
Nobody voted for this flag; yet it remains in place game after game. The powers that be fear being the ones to remove this authoritarian symbol. When it first popped up about five years ago, most of us thought it might just be a one-off celebration of some illiberal, women-face woowoo ideology.
As it remained, match after match, we thought it was a temporary one-year dip into madness. I can’t find the exact moment it went up – but it’s been about five years now, with no sign of departure.
One has a feeling that this flag of women hate will remain long after De Zerbi – a volatile figure who doesn’t remain long in managerial posts – is no longer of a Spurs persuasion. And the concerns of those people desperate to look good – without ever seeming to do much good – will have moved on from “women feeling safe”.
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