"Welcome to our own Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, another real-time demonstration of the fact every satirical absurdity described in Catch-22 has become, yeah, pretty much totally plausible. The nation is now fully hostage to bad actors and phoney rage. And as ever football must act as a key amplifier of all this, a public echo chamber for the anxieties of what we must, out of a sense of duty, still call the real world."
"Two days earlier Joey Barton, who exists in the public consciousness solely because of football, published a video to his 2.7 million X followers in which he said he would punch a disabled person in a wheelchair if they suggested a union flag should not be flown over a building site. To be fair, this does seem an unlikely scenario. Perhaps there could be an interim stage where the two of them try to have a chat about it first."
At the far end of a food counter men pledged allegiance to the flag with trays balanced to be allowed seats, while another group sang The Star-Spangled Banner to use condiments. Football operates as an amplifier and public echo chamber for societal anxieties, turning chants and insults into trending spectacles. The Wembley crowd shifted chants to target Gary Neville. Joey Barton posted a video threatening violence against a disabled person over a union flag dispute. Flags are portrayed as mere colours without fixed meaning, serving as instruments of groupthink and tests of patriotism rather than markers of substantive civic values.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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