The ongoing row about freedom of expression regarding the San Francisco Giants baseball players who exercised their First Amendment right to include Bible verses written on their rainbow queer-caps during a “pride night” game on June 12 may seem like a quintessentially American sporting controversy. But such two-tier ideological standards are now one of America’s greatest global exports, alongside Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, gay marriage, and DEI.
Witness what happened before kick-off in the England soccer team’s opening World Cup game against Croatia only a few days after the Giants debacle. Anyone who watched it will have seen an egregious left-wing protest taking place by all 11 England players as the game started — they just may not have noticed it. That’s because the protest in question was completely invisible.
To the untrained eye, the England team appeared to do nothing at all. That, however, was the whole point — because they had been specifically asked to do something by thousands of their fellow countrymen. Unfortunately, what they had been asked to do was considered the wrong thing, politically speaking: to kneel before kick-off for Henry Nowak.
No Knee for Nowak
Henry Nowak was the innocent 18-year-old Anglo-Polish boy murdered by a Sikh in the U.K. city of Southampton in December, then handcuffed by DEI-brainwashed cops who automatically believed Nowak was the aggressor because he was the white one. His case had really hit home among the British public before the World Cup began, and a campaign was launched requesting that the English team either take a knee or hold a moment of silence in Nowak’s memory.
This felt appropriate because, like U.K. Prime Minister Keir “Two-Tier” Starmer, Nowak was a big fan of the English Premier League team Arsenal F.C., several of whose players were in the England line-up, and because he had been stabbed on his way back from meeting his own amateur football (as soccer is called in Britain) teammates on a night out. At the time of the World Cup game, a petition urging this memorial had gained more than 5,000 signatures.
Perhaps the England squad just didn’t see this? But their manager, Thomas Tuchel, and Prince William, patron and former president of England’s Football Association (FA), must surely have seen a pair of open letters sent to them by Wendy Louise of the group Together For the Children, asking them to remember Henry pitch-side. She also provided the group’s numerous followers with the relevant royal and FA email address contact details to ask the same favor, and some followers appear to have made good use of them.
Also writing to Prince William, Tuchel, and the FA was Jeff Banks, a prominent English fashion designer and former BBC TV presenter, who had previously created official outfits for the England soccer team itself. Sadly, the football authorities’ response to all such public requests seems to have been Sweet FA (that’s British English for “Jack Squat”). Why did they all apparently refuse to respond?
Football Focus
Perhaps the FA read all these petitions, letters, and emails after all. A mere day before the England-Croatia game, the FA put out a statement abruptly announcing it was now their official policy that the national team should avoid all ideological controversies and message-making whatsoever, it being their sole responsibility to stay “focused purely on the football,” not politics. Excellent. I quite agree. In any ordinary circumstances, sports teams should not be advocating for partisan causes of any kind on the field, not even irreproachable ones like that of ensuring justice for Henry Nowak. They should just be playing sports, nothing more, nothing less.
Yet exactly as with the Giants players being pressured to wear “pride” caps but simultaneously being banned from writing Bible verses on them, so the England soccer team itself has had some visible past double-standards on the matter of celebrating people who have died during arrests of a racially tinged nature. Before their opening game against Iran in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, the team’s then-manager, the notoriously woke Gareth Southgate, boasted that his team would be taking the knee on the field in the name of George Floyd and so-called “anti-racism” generally:
It’s what we stand for as a team [i.e., cultural Marxism] and have done for a long period of time. … We feel this is the biggest [thing], and we think it’s a strong statement that will go around the world for young people, in particular, to see that inclusivity is very important.
This stance annoyed plenty of English people at the time, and memories of the whole propaganda exercise lingered — only to resurface when news spread that, come World Cup 2026, the very same team was now refusing to bend down in supplication for an innocent white English victim in the precise same way it once had quite happily done for a black foreign criminal. As a result, outraged posts like these soon proliferated online:
In Liew of the Truth
Angry English protesters have been far more obliging, taking the knee for Nowak in several public street gatherings. As some protesters were soccer fans and spent part of their time singing popular stadium chants (particularly an obscene one about the hated Starmer), media commentators such as sports writer Jonathan Liew, of leftist U.K. broadsheet The Guardian, were enlisted to dubiously portray them all as drunken thugs:
Black Lives Matter “protesters” once looked like they were “having fun” too, back in 2020 when they looted shops, smashed cars, and burned down buildings. But The Guardian never reported on such “fiery but mostly peaceful” protests in a similarly disapproving fashion then. “The distinctions between the human and the [social media] content, the grief and the grift, have long since dissolved into one and the same thing” at such gatherings, complained Liew. Oh yes, that never once happened with the whole George Floyd thing, did it?
As well as a two-tier criminal justice system, a two-tier government, and a two-tier media, it appears England is now burdened with a two-tier national soccer team too. The England squad may play in whites, but they certainly don’t play for them anymore. And they absolutely, definitely, don’t kneel for them.
