The Weekend: 17th July 2023
Two stories from a number which are making it tough to look forward to the start of the new season.
If there’s been a bit of a hush over this football weekend, it’s probably that we’ve been given quite a lot to think about, this last couple of weeks. The FA is at the point of handing over its Cup to the Premier League. Saudi Arabia is continuing with its “the financial flex is the point” transfer policy, and players who were marketed as having a degree of social conscience have been found to have been all about the money all along. Other players queued up to congratulate one of their own for his acquittal from rape charges. And an interview with a current player, one who was scoring for England in a World Cup quarter-final just five years ago, threw light upon the casual cruelty at the very heart of the game with such honesty as to be difficult to watch.
So let’s start with Dele.
What none of this is about is Dele Alli’s abilities—past or present—as a footballer. Football has been commoditising those who play it with a modicum of ability since the 1880s, but there is something about the tone of the way in which we talk about footballers in the 21st century that I find disquieting. They’re frequently talked of as a valuation and nothing else, like gold-plated cattle. Numbers thrown into reliable information-vacuum that is social media by individuals who’ve persuaded themselves that they’re football geniuses when what they’re actually doing is usually no more than playing Bruce’s Play Your Cards Right in their heads.
This is about Dele Alli as a human being, and the very real shift in perception from the widely-held view that he was a wastrel, throwing away this God given talent for some reason, presumably to something a little more considered and, it is to be hoped, compassionate. It had been clear that something was up with Dele for some considerable time. His performances on the pitch felt as though they were telling a story that stretched beyond football’s weirdly hermetically-sealed universe, but at the same time you can’t start diagnosing people on the basis of the way they’re playing football or trying to second-guess what might be going on behind the curtains in their life. Game recognise game notwithstanding, the only person who could decide on when to talk about Dele’s mental health was Dele himself.
Not, of course, that he was doing it at a time that he wanted to. That matter had been pushed onto him by the tabloid press threatening to go public; by his own admission, not that long after he’d come out of rehab and earlier than he was fully prepared for. In the bad old days of gate-kept media, we all know what would have happened. There would have been a lurid spread across several pages in which truth would have come a distant third-place to sensationalism and making some quasi-political—and quite likely racist—point.
But times have changed, and the tabloid press no longer has the iron grip over the narrative in the way that they used to. Social media has given players the ability to go straight to their audiences, should they wish to. Or they can partner up with any of a plethora of different broadcasters. Even had the option not been there for him to sit down and talk to Gary Neville about it, he could have posted to any one of a number of social media platforms and his message would have gotten out there in a way that would not have been possible a quarter of a century ago. At the time of writing, his interview has been viewed 4.7m times. Those are peak-time BBC1 viewing figures, these days.
And there is something else that matters in this equation, as well. Dele was able to sit down and talk openly and candidly about this with Neville because our culture has changed sufficiently to allow for this to happen, and for much of the discourse to have been measured, thoughtful and sympathetic. For all that there is ongoing talk of a crisis in men’s mental health–and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is one, but that’s really not what this conversation is about–the truth of the matter is that there is substantial evidence to suggest that men are just getting on with it and talking to each other about it, and have been for a while.
The matter was covered broadly sensitively by The Overlap, although the decision to shove the gambling company sponsor’s name into the middle of the screen a few seconds in was definitely jarring. Dele is believed. Gary Neville–who, let us not forget, is a former professional footballer and coach–handles the interview excellently, sympathetic to an extremely sensitive subject but unafraid to ask questions from which it would have been easy to shy away. But Neville’s confidence in asking those questions, The Overlap’s confidence in putting that video up in the first place, and the tone of the conversation which has followed Dele’s revelations simply would not have happened in the past.
And it’s right that we should all pause and give consideration to the way in which we talk about professional footballers, because we should… be considerate in the way in which we speak to and about others. That doesn’t feel like a radical point to make, but the casual abuse and insulting of players is burnt into football nowadays, to a point at which some ‘fans’ of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi seemed incapable of computing that it was possible that they were both generationally brilliant footballers.
None of this means that we should never be critical, or poke fun. It just means that there’s nothing wrong with being a little more mindful of the way in which we talk about footballers. There is, of course, certainly a type of person who seems to be affronted at the idea of anyone else showing any form of emotional vulnerability or at themselves showing a little empathy. It’s difficult to know what to say to people who consider showing empathy to be more effort than they’re prepared to make when dealing with others.
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And then there’s the Benjamin Mendy case. That slumping sound you thought you heard at about ten to eleven on Sunday morning? Yeah, that was probably my shoulders. Okay, we’ve had this conversation before, so here are a few bullet point reminders of where I broadly stand on cases such as this:
There are legal protocols which determine the way in which we all have to speak about this. That some people–well, many–choose to ignore this or who live in countries in which they may not have to worry about the consequences of what they say doesn’t mean that I don’t have to.
It is extremely difficult in a general sense to avoid the conclusion that the bar for a criminal rape conviction is so high that rape is effectively decriminalised. Around 1.9% of the number of rapes reported to the police result in a prosecution, never mind a conviction.
That a conviction may result in acquittal doesn’t make the person who reported it a ‘liar’. Many cases of this nature are highly complex and nuanced, and a 1.9% prosecution rate indicates that the burden of proof in these cases may be too high from the outset. It also bears repeating that–and contrary to the viewpoint of a certain type of commentator–no-one wants an apparently random selection of innocent people sporadically being convicted and imprisoned for one of the most heinous crimes there is. 98% of the 67,000 people who reported rapes to the police last year are not lying. If someone that you knew told you to your face that they they’d been raped, would you seriously think, “Oh, there’s a high chance they’re lying about this”? Or are the rules different if it’s someone you’re familiar with? And if that is the case, is the problem really the women making the allegations, or might it be… you?
All of which brings me onto the subject of the Benjamin Mendy trial. To an extent, what is most surprising about the reaction to it from a large number of players is that, in an era in which public relations are more manicured than ever, it was considered a good idea for so many of them to post messages of support and congratulations for a player just acquitted of rape. Did none of them–or none of their social media or PR teams–pause for a second and think, “perhaps I should just sit one out”? What do they think the game’s female fans will think of their reactions? Or women’s players, a few days before a Women’s World Cup is about to start? It wouldn’t even be surprising to hear them being called out at some point by women’s players in post-match interviews, at some point or other, or are we already at the point at which they’re so remote that they don’t even realise, or don’t just care?
As for Mendy himself, well presumably his career will restart somewhere and with somebody, but the fact that he has been acquitted shouldn’t mean that he might not give some serious thought to his behaviour. The boast heard in court, that he had “had sex with 10,000 women”, indicates one of two things. Either he’s a mildly pathetic fantasist who seriously believes that the value of a woman primarily rests in being just another number to add to the tally, or he’s actually had sex with two women every single day since he was fourteen years old and should be speaking with urgency to both a counsellor and an STI clinic.
One doesn’t wish to get close to victim-blaming, but since there’s a reasonable proportion of society that seems to consider it fine for women to be blamed for being raped, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to point out that Mendy may have left himself open to precisely this sort of accusation by being so promiscuous in the first place. That’s how these things work, isn’t it? With the Mason Greenwood matter in infinite limbo matter still not resolved, we certainly haven’t heard the end of this subject just yet. How enthused are you feeling for the start of the new season, right now?
The Dele doc was powerful, fair play to him for doing it and Gary Neville with the right questions Dele didn't want to shy away from. Deserves to be back to his peak, he's a tremendous footballer.