Why are footballers held more accountable than establishment politicians?

The mainstream media non-reaction to the Labour Leak scandal, and the ongoing lack of suspensions within the party are extraordinary in their own right.

What the leaks revealed was a bunch of horrific right-wing wreckers embedded within the Labour Party deliberately trying to lose elections, misallocating party funds, engaging in racist and misogynistic abuse against their party colleagues, and endlessly slagging off their own party's leader, policies, and supporters.

But a little thought experiment puts this scandal, and the almost complete non-reaction to it into a clearer perspective.

If leaked WhatsApp chats revealed that several players on a Premier League football team had been conspiring to deliberately lose crucial games in a misguided attempt to drive out their manager, all hell would break loose.

Especially if the players were also caught out spewing racist abuse at their own black team mates, deliberately undermining their own team's anti-racism initiatives, and repeatedly deriding their own team's fans with mental health slurs.

You could bet every penny you've got on these players being immediately suspended, coverage of the story dominating the newspaper front and back pages for weeks, the regulatory authorities getting involved, and several of the worst perpetrators ending up in jail and never playing professional football again in their lives.

But just imagine if the club decided not to suspend a single one of the players.

How do you imagine the club's fans would react if the team just carried on like nothing had happened?

And do you really think the players' mates in the media would be composing articles portraying the cheating racist scunners as the "poor innocent victims of a terrible invasion of privacy" (despite the fact that they only got caught because one of the hypothetical players had been stupid enough to upload the entire WhatsApp chat history onto the club's computer system!).

But we've seen articles from the Guardian to the Telegraph portraying these bigotry-dripping right-wing saboteurs as the poor innocent victims, and whoever blew the whistle by leaking the report as the dreadful horrible monster of the situation.

In reality we don't even need to imagine how football would react to a scandal like this, because we've got plenty of evidence of how the football community reacts to cheating, disrespect, and racism.

When the former Huddersfield, West Brom, and Notts County player Delroy Facey was caught match fixing he was jailed for two and a half years.

Two England managers have been forced out of their jobs, Glenn Hoddle over his bizarre ableist tirade accusing disabled people of being at fault for their own conditions because of "karma" and Sam Allardyce was removed after one solitary game for financial impropriety.

When former West Brom and Manchester United manager Ron Atkinson was recorded saying that a black footballer was a "lazy, thick N-word" he was cancelled. Despite being one of the pioneering managers who brought black players into his teams in the 1970s and '80s, he clearly stepped way over the line with this racial slur and lost his commentary and football columnist jobs over it.

Just think about how many times football managers and players have been sanctioned and fined for "bringing the game into disrepute", and how establishment politicians have been allowed to get away with absolutely egregious lies, expenses scamming, and horrific abuse of each other and random members of the public.

Just think about the vitriol that a whole host of football players have faced over charges of  "going down to easily", even though the referees have shown time and again that they simply don't award free kicks unless players make a big show of falling over at the point of contact.

People who fall over too easily on a sports field get more public derision than politicians who sabotage elections and spew racist, misogynistic, and ableist abuse!

The establishment political class get in comparison to footballers is extraordinary:

Consider Tony Blair's lies that led us into the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands who died as a consequence, and how he's still treated as some kind of beloved political oracle by the press, instead of the lying pariah he should be.

Consider David Cameron hiding behind parliamentary privilege like a coward to spew libellous abuse at a random Muslim guy, purely in order to falsely portray Labour's Sadiq Khan as a terrorist sympathiser.

Consider Theresa May's sickeningly racist "Hostile Environment" legislation, and how nobody in the political establishment class has faced any real consequences for the systematic abuse of black British citizens, to the extent of actually deporting scores of UK citizens.

Consider the fact that 88% of Tory Facebook ads were shown to be lies during the 2019 General Election, and absolutely nothing was done about it.

And consider the ludicrous non-reaction to the racism, mental health slurs, delaying of antisemitism investigations, and deliberate electoral sabotage carried out by the Labour right-wingers that was exposed in the Labour Leaks.

It turns out that the United Kingdom is a country with absurd priorities, where the media and regulatory authorities hold footballers, football managers, and football commentators to a vastly higher standard of conduct than the establishment politicians who actually rule over our lives!

We've just become so accustomed to the political establishment lying, and cheating, and scamming their way through their careers that we accept it as a normal part of the job.

But to make matters worse, when one politician showed up who eschewed the lying, and scheming, and self-interested scamming, the mainstream media and the rest of the political class turned on him, continually portrayed him as some kind of repulsive extremist monster, and even deliberately sabotaged his party from within to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister.

Even if it had been players from a football club you don't even like, you'd want them disciplined for bringing the game into disrepute if they'd behaved like the right-wing Labour saboteurs, but somehow, because it's happened in politics rather than football, most of the nation has turned a complete blind eye to it.

And this extraordinary non-reaction provokes the question of how politics can ever be cleaned up if establishment politicians can get away with the kind of deliberate sabotage and rampant bigotry that would result in footballers, or anyone else in any other job, getting sacked, and probably jailed if they did the same.

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