Footballers’ silence on political issues must end. The Fifa row demands it

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/fifa-footballers-silence-politics-end

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Sport and politics don’t mix, irritated athletes sometimes say, when asked why they are participating in the Genocide Games Sponsored By Sweatshop Shoes, and choosing to ignore the obvious point: the very fact of the question being asked proves that the prevarication is false. No one is saying Harry Kane should be leading negotiations over Britain’s EU membership. But no business as lucrative as elite sport is ever likely to exist in a political vacuum for long. When a cricket team tours apartheid South Africa, or a football team is sponsored by a payday lender, saying that sport and politics don’t mix is not an expression of neutrality: it is an expression of tacit support for the status quo.

The extraordinary Fifa corruption story is not a case of sport and politics mixing; it is a case of sport and politics becoming indivisible. In this instance, saying that the two shouldn’t mix would be a bit like saying the same thing about weapons and violence. At Fifa, it now seems, corruption is understood as the unremarkable consequence of a love for the game, as inevitable as a bullet from a gun.

Now football’s sponsors are coming under renewed pressure to express their clear condemnation and make Fifa bear the kind of financial consequences for institutionalised corruption that could actually force Sepp Blatter’s supporters to think again. And certainly the organisation’s history suggests that money will be able to drive change in a way that nothing else can. Still, as I watched the beautifully coiffed ex-footballer David Ginola express his outrage on Newsnight last night, I did find myself thinking: I wish it was Wayne Rooney on there, instead. People tend to listen to the England captain.

Footballers themselves, after all, might not hold the governing body’s purse strings; but, as advertisers the world over have acknowledged with money time and time again, they are more than capable of setting the agenda. And if a letter purporting to be from a bunch of anonymous small-business owners can set the cat among the pigeons in a British election, imagine the impact a similar document signed by a bunch of Premier League players could have.

Will this ever happen? It seems vanishingly unlikely. The more money footballers have, the more anxious they get about protecting it, and any player muttering about his political conscience is likely to get it in the ear from his agent at the same volume as he might if he were to agitate for a move to Newcastle United.

When your brilliance has been polluted by the venality of your bosses, the obligation is not just to your fans

But don’t mistake implausibility for justification. The fact that footballers have such a sorry history of moral absenteeism doesn’t make it all right. With massive good fortune comes the obligation to interrogate the sources of that good fortune. And when your brilliance has been so polluted by the venality of the old men who are, ultimately, your bosses, the obligation is not just to your fans – but to the proper and unfootnoted expression of your talent. If the next World Cup goes ahead in Russia with Blatter at the helm, after all, who will remember who scored the winner in the quarter final? The irony is, those moral abdicators who come out with that platitude about politics and sport are right. They shouldn’t mix. But the only way to make it so is to do something about it.