Why sport protests matter

Yet the NFL protests are all over the news, and this is probably deliberate. Guess what: Trump smears football at the very moment he needs covering fire for his amended Muslim travel ban. How better to get Americans looking the other way than to politicise the nation’s favourite sport, painting protesters as anti-patriotic traitors? The president has the moral cares of an insect, but he knows how middle America thinks.

The reason sport has been so readily politicised over the years is that it is visual, popular and language-neutral. Its values are those of the struggle, and its audiences are primed to care. Sport is spectacle, and sports fans are, by definition, ready to watch. Hence China spends tens of billions hosting the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Hence Russia and Qatar finagle themselves a football World Cup. Hence every time you turn on the TV to watch sport, you are sold something else - a car, a hamburger, a betting app, a culture war.

That, then, is the meta-story: the sporting information war. But it is also too cynical an analysis. Because while Trump is plainly trying to manipulate the population by rodeoing on the back of the NFL, it is also true that what happened on Sunday matters.

The line of historical sporting protest does not only conjoin protesters. It also connects those who have opposed equal treatment for all people. Whatever Trump intended via his NFL comments, the fact remains that last week he went to Alabama, the one-time racist heartland of the American South, and called black protesters “sons of bitches”. Earlier this year, he described neo-Nazis in Charlottesburg as including some “fine people”, and he has explicitly encouraged the police brutality that Kaepernick and his supporters oppose. Trump has recommended that the NFL fire players whom he says disrespect the nation by making their voices heard lawfully, peaceably and in public. The comparisons with Nazism and apartheid are not hyperbolic.

In historical terms, this is why the NFL protests are not treacherous, sackable offences. And their opponents, however patriotic their intentions, find themselves in the awkward company of those who applauded when Tommie Smith and John Carlos were tossed out of the 1968 Games; those who supported apartheid and were sickened to see Nelson Mandela award a Rugby World Cup to the rehabilitated national side; those who wanted Muhammad Ali banned from boxing forever; and, yes, those who were so irked at the performances of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Games.

The grossest thing is that Trump probably doesn’t care. But there are millions who do: and the NFL protestors this weekend have given them a voice. That is what sporting protest is for. That is why what happened on Sunday is important.