Police and the FA are investigating Manchester United fans for “alleged homophobic abuse” after one home supporter complained about chants of “Chelsea rent boys” during the recent FA cup tie at Stamford Bridge.
What next? Chelsea fans probed for animal welfare offences for shouting ‘sheep, sheep, sheep-s******s’ at supporters of less fashionable provincial clubs?
This ridiculous overreaction marks the latest move in a sustained campaign to kick free speech out of football.
Police investigating complaint of homophobic chanting by Manchester United fans – READ MORE
The aim is to sanitise the sport to suit the tastes of the new breed of supporters who love the “beautiful game” but despise the “ugly” proles who traditionally follow and play it.
The FA statement says the authorities are committed to “eradicating all discriminatory and offensive chanting” from football’. But equating discrimination and offence is like giving a player a red card for nutmegging an opponent.
Discrimination is about denying somebody their equal rights in society, not calling a crowd rude names in a football stadium.
Of course, longstanding wind-up chants such as “Chelsea rent boys” may well be offensive to some – just as offensive, in fact, as the notorious incivility with which Chelsea fans treat opposing fans.
But so what? It should not be a crime to offend somebody’s feelings. Least of all at football.
Football has long been a refuge from the real world, where fans can talk, sing, shout and generally carry on in ways they would not do elsewhere.
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The match is the home ground of what Sigmund Freud called the ‘id’ – the more irrational, emotional side of the human psyche.
Most fans accepted that abusing one another in the stadium did not carry the same meaning as doing it in the street. Instead football, as the sports writer Duleep Allirajah defined it, is ‘Panto for grown-ups’, complete with booing and verbal abuse.
Now we are faced with an extraordinary turnaround. Football has gone from being one area where people could let rip without obeying the etiquette of polite society, to one where the thought police are most vigilant.
We have seen Spurs fans arrested for calling themselves “Yid Army” as a badge of pride, Liverpool stewards armed with a list of banned words that include not just the “n-word” but such outrageous expressions as “man up”, “playing like a girl” and “queen” (no singing the national anthem at Anfield, lads), and a Rangers fan sent to jail for singing an offensive football song in Glasgow.
The new “You-can’t-say-that” attitude was summed up a couple of years back after the first conviction of a footballer, Blackburn’s Colin Kazim-Richards, for making a homophobic gesture at Brighton fans.
The Sussex constabulary’s football liaison officer (good to know they have got their priorities right) issued a warning to all fans and players: “You wouldn’t do it in an office, why do it on the terraces?”
A rhetorical question so smug and stupid, if you have to ask it you should not be allowed anywhere near the raucous carnival of a football match.
The irony is that the crackdown on offensive and abusive words comes at a time when racism and anti-gay abuse around football are arguably rarer than ever. The less of it there is, the more campaigns we seem to see against it.
You don’t have to be any sort of bigot to take a stand against the crusade to tame the football beast into a sanitised "soccer" kitten.
FFS - if we can’t defend free speech at football, what chance have we got anywhere else?
- Mick Hume is a Manchester United fan and author of "Trigger Warning: is the fear of being offensive killing free speech?"
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