Belgium’s football team announced this morning that the players will not now wear white away shirts with the word “love” on the collar in the group stage of the World Cup. The decision was made following a discussion with Fifa.
This comes after England, Wales and other European nations at the tournament dropped plans to wear OneLove armbands because of the threat of players getting yellow cards.
The captains, including England’s Harry Kane and Gareth Bale of Wales, had planned to wear the armband during matches to promote diversity and inclusion.
FIFA threatened them with yellow card and suspensions and the players bottled it.
They bottled it because they didn’t give a rats arse in the first place. You can spot a virtue signaller a mile off.
The virtue signaller draws attention to a cause or a vulnerable group in the first place, to highlight his or her own worthiness or goodness. The cause itself becomes a prop.
When it comes to the crunch, when it comes to actually doing something, they can’t be arsed, because they weren’t arsed in the beginning.
Before the World Cup started, we were treated to a procession of footballers who told us that they had a moral duty to speak out against human rights abuses in Qatar and to promote inclusion. “We’ll wear the armbands for LGBT+ rights everywhere,” they said.
All FIFA had to do was warn them that they’d be yellow-carded and they shat themselves. Heroes my arse.
If they really cared about the plight of homosexuals in Qatar, they’d have told FIFA to fuck off and dared the organisation to suspend the entire team, wouldn’t they?
It’s positively Vaudevillian.
