What happened to the Rainbow Laces campaign?

It's not going well

Ok, high everyone. I should warn you that this newsletter does get political. If that’s not your thing, come back for next time. If you’re game, keep reading.

Recently, running from 29th November to 5th December, was the Premier League’s annual Rainbow Laces campaign, intended to show the league’s support for LGBTQ+ inclusion and equality. If you had heard about it at all, it was probably due to controversy.

The league agreed that all captains would wear a rainbow flag armband (novelty laces seem to cause issues with boot fit, something players understandably don’t like to mess with) as the most visible “official” display. Ipswich Town captain Sam Morsy refused to take part in this gesture “due to his religious beliefs” (Morsy is Muslim). I believe in freedom of speech, certainly when it comes to religion, and the right of people to refuse to take part in something on those grounds. It is not for me to decide Morsy’s relationship with his faith. If he believes that wearing shirts sponsored by gambling companies Unibet and 32Red while playing for Middlesbrough were compatible with his faith and this is not, then I’m not going to stop him, but I can judge him for applying his religion selectively. Equally, while I wouldn’t want to enforce this, I can personally think less of Ipswich as a club for their values in picking said person to be their captain.

Manchester United had planned for their players to wear an LGBTQ pride-themed Adidas jacket, as they had done in previous years, before full back Noussair Mazraoui refused to take part in the gesture and, in solidarity, “the team then decided that no players would wear the tracksuit so that Mazraoui would not be the only one seen publicly to be refusing to wear it”. Mazraoui has objected to commitments on religious grounds before, refusing to hold a pint of beer as part of Bayern’s Oktoberfest photoshoot. Journalist Adam Crafton reported that “not everyone in the dressing room was happy with this decision”, though clearly a majority decided to go along with it. Again, I do not seek to enforce rules against this, but I am entitled to think less of the Man Utd squad as a whole for this incident. When push comes to shove, they’re not on our side.

The story was slightly different at Crystal Palace, where captain Marc Guéhi wore the armband but decided to write “I ❤️ Jesus” (and later “Jesus ❤️ You”) on it. “It was a message of love, of truth, and a message of inclusivity”, Guéhi claimed, “so I think it speaks for itself”. I suspect a lot of people genuinely don’t understand why this is arguably the most offensive incident of the lot. Guéhi never previously wrote any messages on a captain’s armband and, to my knowledge, has not generally sought to insert himself into political conversations in football. He picked now as the time to make a statement.

His message was not one of “inclusivity”. The point of the Rainbow Laces campaign is to focus on LGBTQ+ people in sport. This shouldn’t be a hard concept for footballers to understand after the Black Lives Matter campaigns. Yes, we know everyone is loved and important, but right now we are talking about LGBTQ+ people. We can talk about Jesus another day. Guéhi, a straight man, couldn’t tolerate a gesture in support of that message, so he decided to centre himself and change it to what he wanted to talk about. His second armband statement, “Jesus loves you”, sounds straight out of a conversion therapy session. A million homophobic and transphobic parents have told their kids not to do this because “Jesus loves you”. At the very least, Morsy had the good graces to just sit this one out.

I don’t know any queer football fans who look forward to this every year. I don’t know any who feel accepted and included by it. So how did we get to a point where a showing for inclusion and equality became a chance for football to display the exact opposite? Well that’s a little more complicated, so let’s get into it.

Rainbow Laces is run by the British LGBT charity Stonewall across top-level sport, in which the Premier League became a key supporter. Stonewall, it’s fair to say, has not always been universally loved within the queer community in the UK. Back in 2013, the organisation was run by Ben Summerskill, who previously insisted that Stonewall did not take a position for or against same-sex marriage before making a U-turn after significant pressure. Summerskill’s Stonewall still campaigned simply for “lesbian, gay and bisexual rights”, notably leaving out a certain letter from the acronym. Its nominees for “Journalist of the Year” once included Julie Bindel, who previously wrote an article called “Gender benders, beware” in which she makes a number of deeply transphobic attacks. The org put out educational videos sent to schools with ever so supportive lines like “I think that she wishes I was a tr*nny”.

Stonewall was a different charity back then, just as Britain was a different country. The Conservatives were back in power, but they promised us they had changed. Prime Minister David Cameron was desperate to show he embraced more open-minded social views, which was pushed even harder as the Liberal Democrats were a minority player in the coalition government. The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was passed in 2013, and it was very easy to see this as an end-of-history moment. Minority groups, it felt like, would naturally gain more and more acceptance as the moral arc of the universe bent further toward justice. That probably drove Stonewall to start the Rainbow Laces campaign in the first place. Legislative equality was becoming a reality (at least for the letters of the acronym Stonewall covered), making social acceptance the real fight. Sport, an often less tolerant space, was an obvious place to campaign in.

Stonewall did, begrudgingly, come to accept this wasn’t true for all of us. In 2015, under new chief executive Ruth Hunt, the charity formally started campaigning on trans issues and apologised for past mistakes. This was long overdue, and extremely necessary because the British public sphere was getting absolutely swamped by anti-trans radicalisation, particularly and surprisingly from the centre-left. “In Britain”, a certain brilliantly talented writer wrote in Vanity Fair, “liberal feminism has been as much of a vector for anti-trans views as the right”. When former Prime Minister Theresa May attempted to make a (fairly minor) reform to how legal gender changes are recorded, the opposition ran all the way from the far right to the pages of The Guardian, talking of “women’s concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with “male-bodied” people” (the proposed law would not have changed a single thing about this, a fact consistently and deliberately ignored by the entire British press).

I’m not sure Stonewall was quite prepared for this. The tone with which they were covered in the media became much more hostile, with previously supportive voices attacking them for promoting “gender ideology”. The British establishment is much less friendly to the charity now than it was a decade ago. It’s in that context that the Premier League more than halved its annual funding for Stonewall a year ago. It’s hard to read this as a coincidence at a time when the charity is seen as “controversial” and other organisations have distanced themselves from it.

I don’t think this is at the forefront of Morsy, Mazraoui or Guéhi’s minds, particularly. I absolutely do think, though, it is driving some “serious” journalists’ thoughts on this. Oliver Brown, chief sports writer at The Telegraph who writes obsessively about any trans woman who dares to play a sport, has led the charge. “The profusion of rainbows”, Brown wrote “is, at its root, a pronouncement of the league’s unyielding alliance with Stonewall, the foremost LGBTQ+ charity in the UK […] This is where sport’s obsession with sloganising leads: to a blurring of truth and reality, to a distortion of a regressive anti-women policy as a progressive crusade, to the absurd situation where one man can deploy religion as a defence and another be rapped across the knuckles for it.”

“It is a form of myopia I will never understand”, Brown wrote in another recent article, “why does the FA not realise, through its relentless emphasis on trans inclusion […] that it is advocating a belief system contributing directly to the exclusion of women from their own sport?” He is hardly alone in this as chief sports writers at broadsheet newspapers go. The Guardian’s Sean Ingle obsesses over trans athletes, with a string of greatest hits including writing an entire article about a trans woman without even using any pronouns (not exactly natural way to write), getting a selfie with Angela Carini (a tier one faux pas for a journalist) right after she withdrew from the infamous Olympic boxing fight with Imane Khelif and, when writing a story about “LGBTQ+ supporters” heading to the Qatar World Cup, turning to the single-issue anti-trans “LGB Alliance” for a quote (because of course that’s who he would be friends with).

I’m doing the thing I shouldn’t be doing here and derailing the topic with my own pet issue, but it needed to be done. These are very senior sports journalists who get handed awards by their peers, most of whom probably don’t have a strong opinion on trans rights and are happy to listen to their mates. Some senior sports journalists read this newsletter and compliment my work, but never say a single word when some of their colleagues go all in on attacking trans women. All I’ll say is I see it and notice it every time. I could’ve pursued a career writing about football for the bigger websites and newspapers. One of the reasons I didn’t is that there’s almost no workplace where I’d less want to be an out trans woman than a British newsroom.

Obviously the radicalised middle-aged journalists aren’t the only thing happening here. The Premier League’s most comprehensive deal with Stonewall was signed in 2020, at a time when brands were much keener to showcase progressive values. That was the mood of the moment, and I think it’s shifted now. When you turn on the TV and watch the adverts, it feels like there’s a lot less embracing social values today than four years ago. We’re entering what has to be said is a “post-woke” era, where the zeitgeist is closer to Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Even as Britain elected a Labour government, the “vibes” have rarely felt more conservative. It wouldn’t shock me if marketing consultants were telling the Premier League to ease off the Stonewall stuff, and players felt more relaxed at voicing their “disagreement”.

I think players feel more reluctant about a backlash from actually supporting progressive causes at this point. Jordan Henderson was very vocal about the Rainbow Laces campaign in the past. “The more we can understand, the more we can learn and the more we can stand together on issues like this”, he said in 2022, “the more we will move towards the kind of inclusive society that is more welcoming of everyone. Football has its part to play and, as I said, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part of my own.”

And what happened next? Well, you know what happened next. Henderson took a big offer from Saudi Arabia, permanently damaging his reputation without even getting the payday he was expecting. He’s currently in and out of the third-placed team in the Eredivisie. He received huge backlash for hypocrisy. But what matters here is that his former team mates Sadio Mané, Fabinho, Roberto Firmino and Gini Wijnaldum made the same move without anything like such controversy. Those players did not speak up for LGBTQ+ people as loudly as Henderson and thus escaped the blame. I think football internalised a message from this: don’t speak out, don’t preach values of tolerance, that way you won’t get called a hypocrite down the line.

I don’t know any queer football fans who are happy with the way this is going. The campaign has been reduced to a box-ticking exercise in which the only things that cut through are declarations that certain people don’t like us. They may as well call it hate week, because those are the messages that get heard. Whatever the aim is, it has failed on its own terms.

This feels like a failure of liberal activism to change hearts and minds. Men’s football does not feel like a particularly more inclusive place today than it did a decade ago. Where do we go from here? I have no idea, to be honest. My instinct is usually to get more radical and clear about the demands. Let’s be clear about what we want. But I don’t know if that would work. Society is taking a coarser turn and I feel powerless to stop it.

God, that was a bleak note to end on.