He said, following a crushing defeat by rival soccer club Queen’s Park Rangers (QPR) at the weekend (the result of — I believe the technical term is — being rubbish at his job and having a crappy team) that female officials should be banned from the game.
Allow me to quote Luton manager Mike Newell in full. Oh, go on, it’s fun: ”She [assistant referee Amy Rayner] should not be here. I know that sounds sexist, but I am sexist, so I am not going to be anything other than that.”
Not fun enough? Let him continue: ”We have a problem in this country with political correctness, and bringing women into the game is not the way to improve refereeing and officialdom. It is beyond belief. When do we reach a stage when all officials are women, … we are in trouble. It is bad enough with the incapable referees and linesmen we have, but if you start bringing in women, you have big problems. This is Championship football. It is not park football, so what are women doing here?”
Now, let’s look at that, piece by piece. If it’s ”bad enough” to have incapable linesmen, and women are even worse, that makes women sub-incapable. I’m not sure how this works, but taking a stab in the dark, let’s say he means we lack the intelligence to understand the rules (hence incapable), and even the ones we do understand, we are too emotionally incontinent to apply consistently (hence any given female will automatically be worse than any given incapable male).
This mordant prediction of a time when all officials are women and ”we are in trouble” is rather touching, isn’t it? A futuristic dystopia when football has no rules, because these rules are administered entirely by people who don’t understand them.
And why would this come about? Because leagues of the politically correct who love idiocy more than football have deliberately subverted the game, peopling it with females who don’t understand it, for … well, why? Who knows their dark purposes; they merely are.
The funny thing is, without the misogyny, this would just be plain crazed ranting. Without the political incorrectness angle — let’s say he’d had a tantrum about the weather and how it always favoured QPR, or about how they had stolen his team’s lucky soap before the game, or whatever — Newell would have felt stupid.
I think he would have muttered some apology. It’s precisely because there is women-hating at the core of it that he won’t apologise.
I’m not talking about his pre-emptive non-apology (”I know it sounds sexist, but I am sexist”), issued in the heat of the moment. I’m talking about the top-to-bottom hilarious non-apology delivered on TV, during which he started off by saying he had always intended to apologise but he’d wanted to do it to Rayner in private first, and then continued: ”I’m big enough and man enough to apologise for what I’ve said. I very rarely say things that I don’t mean, but I’m not going to get into a debate about my opinions or whatever.”
So, it takes a real man to say sorry, and he is a real man. But he’s not literally sorry, because his opinions aren’t what this debate is about. What he thinks the debate is about, God only knows.
Here’s the thing: soccer in England has made a tremendous fuss about stamping out racism, and it has done very well. Frankly, it had to, because the catcalling that went on, and still occasionally goes on, in football grounds was bigoted on a baffling, neo-Nazi scale.
Sexism and homophobia, however, are not considered so grave, and have continued unabashed. A lot of the ”Screw you! We’re men, we’ll say what we like” brio that football crowds are so proud of has been diverted into sexism and homophobia, now that racism is out of bounds.
Sure, there are incidents of 1980s misogyny that not even Newell could make a stab at (Leeds United soccer club fans chanting ”Ripper 12, police nil”, because of course, it’s hilarious that some slags were getting their throats torn out by the Yorkshire Ripper, and if it was a bit unfair, and maybe they weren’t all slags, that was no more unfair than some policemen hassling innocent men who were just trying to enjoy some football!).
But football is like the small-town, modern-day Ku Klux Klan meet of misogyny; it’s the last place you can go and still say the most speciously sour and nutty things, and nobody will mind because that’s the way you are, and everyone expects it of you.
It’s the last sphere in which a man can seriously have a 30th birthday party in which all the girlfriends get sent home at midnight and the men cheer while they’re leaving! (Millwall soccer club’s Darren Byfield, this was — to her credit, girlfriend Jamelia did leave him not long after.)
And seriously, most of the time, even the most trenchant feminist might get lazy and think: ”I don’t give a stuff about these shouty nit-wits; who cares if fat women and gay men are sub-human to them?”
But Newell reminds us of why we should mind — because the endpoint of this ”men are men, women are women, I’m man enough to do this” yik-yakking is: ”Women are incompetent, they are idiots who don’t deserve jobs, the people who give them jobs are idiots too; can’t we at least try to keep them out of the important jobs?”
That is, without any exaggeration or rhetoric, where this kind of thinking finishes.
That is why we have to keep objecting to it, as boring as it is. Because if we’re not allowed into the important jobs, how on earth will we be able to afford the pretty shoes? — Â