FOR SEVERAL SEASONS, THE CLUB HAS BEEN AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE FIGHT FOR EQUAL PRIZE MONEY FOR MEN’S AND WOMEN’S COMPETITIONS ~ from Dialectik Football ~ The Football Association has frozen prize money for the 2025/26 Women’s FA Cup while increasing the total prize money for the men’s competition. This represents a setback for the small steps taken in recent seasons towards equal prize money. Why has the Football Association (FA) chosen to exacerbate the inequalities in its flagship competition? Lewes FC took advantage of the Women’s FA Cup third round to raise this issue again and request a meeting with the FA’s Professional Game Board (PGB) to get an explanation for this reversal. Ahead of their match against Crystal Palace at the Dripping Pan on 14 December, the East Sussex club called on its supporters to use the game as a platform to protest once more against the freeze on prize money for the Women’s Cup. Rooks fans symbolically displayed banners bearing the equals sign in the stands. “Equality is not a cost, it’s a commitment to the future of football,” proclaims the campaign slogan. This demand is not new for Lewes, who launched the “Equal FA Cup” campaign in 2019. Since then, while the FA has indeed doubled the prize money for women’s competitions, the gap with that of men remains enormous. THE FIGURES AND THE STARK REALITY To give an idea, the winning teams in the third round of the Women’s FA Cup received £35,000 in prize money, while the runners-up received only £9,000. Meanwhile, at the same stage of the competition, men’s teams will receive £121,500 for the winners and £26,500 for the eliminated team. The freeze on the overall prize money for the women’s FA Cup (144,000 pounds was added to cover a new preliminary round) is all the more unfair given that the men’s prize money has increased by 1.5 million pounds compared to the 2024/25 season. The freeze also applies to prize money paid during the preliminary rounds of the men’s FA Cup, impacting dozens of amateur clubs already burdened by the overall increase in costs. Adding insult to injury, the winner of the men’s edition will receive 2.12 million pounds next May, 120,000 pounds more than last season. Considering the revenues of the Premier League clubs to whom the trophy is promised, this increase feels like an insult to the teams in the earlier rounds who could have shared it. “Today, the lion’s share of the £23.5 million prize money for men’s football will go to wealthy Premier League clubs who arguably need it the least and for whom this money will make very little difference,” laments Ben Hall, director of Lewes FC, in an opinion piece published on the BBC website. “Same sport, same rules, same competition, same knockout format, same governing body, but a different value placed on the women’s and men’s players.” In the early rounds, the prize money is so paltry that many women’s teams lose money. The costs incurred by travel, medical coverage, and pitch rentals often exceed the prize money earned from a victory at this stage of the competition. INEQUALITY AT EVERY LEVEL Ironically, the FA knows how to be egalitarian when it comes to national teams, its crown jewels. Since 2020, the FA has been paying women the same match fees and bonuses as men. “The question, therefore, isn’t whether the FA believes in equality, but rather why this conviction stops at the FA Cup,” Hall continues. The governing bodies have no shortage of excuses, citing commercial realities and differences in television revenue. For Ben Hall, it’s primarily a matter of political choice: “The FA decides the prize money for both competitions. They could make them equal tomorrow; they simply would have to.” For many, this situation is merely the result of the setback women’s football has suffered due to its 50-year ban by the English Football Association, perpetuating a view of football primarily as a male preserve. Under the guise of profitability, the FA is simply perpetuating this history of male dominance. A CALL TO OTHER CLUBS This is why Lewes FC wrote to all the teams participating in the Women’s FA Cup, inviting them to carry out protest actions such as a team photo before kickoff, with the players forming an “=” sign with their arms, and a 21-second pause after kickoff, referencing 1921, the year the FA banned women’s football. Lewes FC and Corsham Town did this during the first round. With its “Equality FC” campaign launched in 2017, Lewes has already become the first club – in the English professional and semi-professional landscape – to allocate equal resources to its women’s and men’s teams. It has made this fight for equal treatment in football a central element of its DNA as a “community-based” club. While it is still struggling to bring many other clubs on board, the club is not giving up. However, it is not entirely alone. A few seasons ago, Clapton CFC and Stourbridge FC Ladies also took up the cause. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation The post Lewes FC, a club in pursuit of equality appeared first on Freedom News.

THE STATE WILL PERMIT A VERSION OF THE TRUTH TO EMERGE—ONLY ONCE IT’S TOO LATE FOR CONSEQUENCES ~ punkacademic ~ The Independent Office of Police Conduct (IOPC) yesterday released its report on the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, the worst in British sporting history. During the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough, Sheffield, a crush at the Leppings Lane End of the ground took the lives of 97 Liverpool fans, some of them in the following weeks and years due to injuries sustained. Many more fans and families suffered irrevocable trauma. The IOPC report states that officers from South Yorkshire Police could have faced disciplinary proceedings including charges of gross misconduct for their actions on the day and after. The scale of the injustice perpetrated against the Liverpool fans who died and were injured at Hillsborough, their families, friends, and indeed the city as a whole, has belatedly, gradually, been acknowledged by the state machine – but only because of a concerted campaign for justice mounted by the families and their supporters in the decades since. Many of those campaigners are dead. Anne Williams, who lost her son Kevin, died in 2013. Rose Robinson, who lost her son Steven, died in 2021. Williams never lived to see the outcome of the Goldring Inquests, which overturned the original verdicts of accidental death and ruled the fans had been unlawfully killed. Robinson never lived to see the IOPC say that police officers should have faced consequences for their actions. Several of those officers are themselves now dead, and others retired. Put simply, there will be no justice for the cop atrocity that is Hillsborough, as Margaret Aspinall has powerfully noted. The report acknowledges that the media response to the disaster was fuelled by briefings and lies on the part of South Yorkshire Police, the force responsible for policing the match, which worked hard to blame the fans for its mistakes, and traduced the memories of the dead. The 1990 Taylor Report and 2012 Hillsborough Independent Panel Report found the force to have been culpable for the disaster. The role of one particular officer, Norman Bettison, merits its own section in the IOPC report. Subsequently knighted, Bettison was both involved in the disinformation campaign which followed the disaster and later appointed Chief Constable of Merseyside Police, the force that polices Liverpool. Bettison’s appointment was controversial at the time, with two members of the Merseyside Police Authority resigning in protest. The IOPC report finds that, were Bettison still in police service, he would have a case to answer for gross misconduct on the basis of statements he made minimising his role in the cover-up and the briefing campaign which followed the 1989 disaster. Hillsborough is the latest in a series of state crimes against the public to result in a moment of nominal state catharsis once a ‘minimum safe distance’ is reached from the incident. As long as there is no real possibility of justice, the state will allow a modicum of the truth to ‘come out’, once it has been dragged kicking and screaming to that point by campaigners who will not let the matter rest. But it does so only for the sake of its own legitimacy, to maintain the facade that we live in a world where police lawbreaking is the exception, not the rule, and the state ‘learns lessons’. As with Hillsborough, so too with Bloody Sunday when the final Inquiry reported so late (after an earlier Inquiry had been a whitewash) that again many family members and campaigners were dead, and where even the one prosecution against a soldier – more than 50 years after the incident – failed. So too with the Spycops Inquiry, where whatever emerges from it has already been superseded by the fact that the very illegal acts that police spies engaged in have now been made lawful for future officers by the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act 2021. It is now lawful for the police to break the law. This is the true ‘lesson learned’; make sure you’re covered for this sort of stuff, so you don’t have the potential of a difficult investigation in the future – even thirty or fifty years hence. In Liverpool, the IOPC report has told us no more (and in fact less) than we already knew. From 15 April 1989 to now, the people of Liverpool have known what really happened at Hillsborough, just as they knew what the state was doing in the weeks and months after, and just as they knew from bitter experience the nature of the slander and lies promoted by the press. The damage is done; both the lives lost and those permanently injured mentally and physically, but also the damage to a whole city, slandered by police and government in the context of a 1980s  political culture where anti-Scouse diatribes had been a feature of media representation of a city that had refused (unlike much of the rest of England) to bend the knee to Thatcherism. Justice isn’t coming, despite the valiant efforts of the campaigners. The IOPC report provides no ‘closure’. Scousers were expendable in 1989, demeaned thereafter, and wounds will not heal. Saying that some of the perpetrators might have faced a HR process (but won’t) is, in the end, the most British of responses from a state apparatus that holds its people in contempt.   The post Hillsborough: Police condemned, but no justice appeared first on Freedom News.

THE GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA ARE PRETENDING TO SUPPORT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY—BY OBEYING THE FAR RIGHT ~ Tabitha Troughton ~ Maccabi Tel Aviv fans have just been rioting in Tel Aviv itself, with the match banned as a result. For the previous 72 hours, the British public were once again instructed, by the media and politicians, not to believe their lying eyes. Forget videos of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters running riot in Amsterdam in November, or of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters beating someone in Athens unconscious in March last year: banning Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters from a game at Aston Villa is, according to the UK’s prime minister, antisemitic. It did not need confirmation from the Israeli Minister for Foreign Affairs that the British government is now entirely obeying the diktats of the State of Israel. “A line must be drawn” Gideon Sa’ar reports having told foreign secretary Yvette Cooper yesterday (19 October), listing the measures necessary further to spread fear among, and alienate, British Jewish people. This included the banning of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Sa’ar: “expressed our clear and unequivocal expectation that this disgraceful decision be revoked and that Maccabi Tel Aviv fans be allowed to attend the game”. The resulting campaign is just the most recent in a redoubled wave of attacks on fact and community, clearly at the Israeli state’s behest. It is worth examining the run up to it. At the start of October, thirteen UK citizens were among those kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli military. Millions of people worldwide had been watching live-streamed footage from the Global Sumud Flotilla; around 50 small, civilian boats on a humanitarian mission to break Israel’s 17 year-long blockade of Gaza. By 2 am on Thursday 2nd, around 13 of the boats had been boarded and seized by Israel, with the rest still under pursuit. In total, 462 peaceful flotilla activists, from around 45 countries, were eventually taken hostage. Many would later report being tortured. By Thursday evening, emergency protests in support of the flotilla crew had erupted across the world, through the whole of Europe through to Dhaka, Rio and beyond. The UK public’s response, while comparatively muted, was no different. Earlier that day, the British Transport Police had issued a warning. Protests were expected “in response to Israel detaining activists on the Global Sumud Flotilla in the early hours of this morning”. Emergency gatherings indeed sprang up that evening around the country, from Edinburgh to London Piccadilly. Later that morning, in Manchester, two Jewish people had tragically been killed, and others injured, after a terrorist attacked a synagogue. The feelings of shock, dismay and horror across the population were heartfelt: condemnations of the act, and support for the victims and the wider Jewish community poured in from across all spectrums – religious, political and communal. And then one of the largest of disinformation campaigns slammed into action. It was spread by a variety of actors with a variety of motives, but the strategy was the same. To start with: tell people that the UK flotilla protests were not protests in support of the flotilla. Tell them they were protests in celebration of the Manchester terrorist attack. The flotilla protests were “a shameful response to the Manchester attack” according to The Spectator. “Vicious Jew-hatred was indulged, yet again” agreed the Scotsman. “They weren’t demonstrating. They were, actually celebrating. I can’t even imagine whoever’s seen such vile scenes on our streets” Farage told his followers. “I could not take it that after such a horrendous terrorist attack, I could see marches of celebrations in London and other cities that celebrated this murderous attack”, Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharren Haskel said, on Good Morning Britain. The next immediate target was larger; hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people: those who had marched peacefully through London, month after month,  against their government’s complicity in genocide. Suddenly, once again, the marches were “hate marches”, specifically a mass of “Jew hate”, and directly linked to the Manchester terror attack. “Everyone on pro-Palestine marches this weekend is complicit” threatened the Express. Social media was bombarded by posts from right wing accounts: “Anti Semitic mobs have been allowed to march through our streets, waving their terrorist flags and shouting Death to Jews” was one exemplar. “People like killing Jews” the Mail on Sunday’s Dan Hodges clarified. Until now, coverage of the silent, seated, placard-holding Palestine Action protests had been sympathetic. It would, you would think, from the footage of priests, pensioners, Quakers and disabled people being arrested under the Terrorism Act, and carried off by reluctant police, be difficult to sell this as an antisemitic hate event. But not this time. “We’ve had Swastikas, pro-Hamas posters, pro-terror posters and calls for Intifada”, Dan Hodges asserted, of the most recent Palestine Action protest in Trafalgar Square on 4 October, which he does not appear to have attended. The supposed evidence for this came from three photos of people on the fringes of the protest: a grey-haired man with a t-shirt which compared the Israeli government to Nazis, and one person with a placard saying they supported Hamas’ right to resistance. A banner from Cage, the campaigning civil rights organisation demanding that the government “Abolish terror laws” was presumably “pro terror”. The Times’ Matthew Syed, wandering around the sombre square on Saturday, was asking people, there to protest their government’s support of an ongoing genocide, whether “Hamas were partly responsible”. Told to piss off with his stupid questions by women there to witness the protest, Syed extrapolates this into a “hatred of Jews”. Many participants in the protest were Jewish and the protest itself was supported by Jewish organisations, including Jewish Voice for Labour and Na’amod. There were placards affirming the general grief for Manchester, but Syed comes away with “the pervasive view that the Manchester atrocity was not a heinous attack but righteous comeuppance for an evil people”. The protestors, from priest to Quaker, were “almost gloating over the Yom Kippur attack” the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews later told his Jewish audience. Coasting on the back of this, like a surfer upon sewage, was the British government. Naturally they wanted to end the protests; the public accusations of their engagement in the mass slaughter of defenceless people. And yet, interviewed by Owen Jones and Rivkah Brown at the Labour Party conference last month, it was clear that they were not about to do this by stopping their diplomatic and military support for the current Israeli government. Indeed, the government can do nothing to go against the Trump/Netanyahu axis, or so it has persuaded itself. Consider the haunted grey face of Yvette Cooper, questioned by Jones over Gaza. Or Jess Phillips, pursued by an incredulous Rivkah Brown with questions about the proscription of Palestine Action. “We’re just doing what we’re told” shrugged Phillips’ body language. “Are you daft, or something?” “I just do as I’m told, you know”, Labour’s Peter Prinsley confirmed to Declassified UK outside the conference. So this ideologically authoritarian, blindly in thrall government doubles down. The Prime Minister told the country that there are “people on our streets calling for the murder of Jewish people”. He did not mean the threat, to all people, of insane extremist violence; he meant what Gideon Sa’ar has instructed him to mean: the schoolgirls, students, pensioners, white and brown, singing “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. According to Sa’ar, and the right wing press, and their supporters, this calls for “the elimination of the State of Israel” – and is therefore antisemitic. Legislation, said Sa’ar, was needed. And thus the UK’s right wing, and its convenient dupes, flog the fallacy that the majority of the country who demanded arms sales to Israel be suspended, or who think banning Maccabi Tel Aviv fans is a good idea, simply hate Jewish people. Meanwhile, the Israeli state not only invites in, but parades, a man known as one of the UK’s most unwanted Nazi-adjacent mortgage fiddlers. The shock among the British Jewish community when Tommy Robinson’s trip was announced was palpable, including from the British Board of Deputies of British Jews, which described him as a “thug” who represented “the very worst of Britain”. Robinson was urging supporters to rally at the Maccabi Tel Aviv/Villa game, where the Prime Minister and his accomplices are simultaneously attempting to expedite, as directed by Sa’ar, an influx of notoriously violent foreign race-haters, screaming “antisemitism” if challenged. If there were a better way to spread fear, division and hatred among our Muslim and Jewish communities, it is difficult to think of one. “If Tommy Robinson wants to show he’s a friend of Jews I urge him not to go after Jewish journalists just because they happen to disagree with him” pleaded one Jewish journalist. It is a terrible and damning game that this government and its allies are attempting: pretending to support the Jewish community by obeying the far right. Meanwhile, excluding figures from London, religious hate crimes targeted at Muslims rose by 19% in the year before March, including direct attacks on mosques and Muslims themselves. Communities are standing up to this, as they have, and they can, and they will.  The government, clearly, will not. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: Israel Police / Sports5. Maccabi Tel Aviv banners read “We’re back from reserve duty” and “Harbu Derby“ The post Red card for reality appeared first on Freedom News.

PALESTINE SOLIDARITY GESTURES HAVE MULTIPLIED IN FOOTBALL—OFTEN REFERRING TO HANDALA, AN ICONIC CARTOON CHARACTER AND SYMBOL OF HOPE ~ Yann Dey-Helle, Dialectik Football ~ At MetLife Stadium in suburban New York, Wessam Abou Ali recently celebrated his second goal against FC Porto by posing with one hand behind his back and the other making the victory sign. A nod to Handala, a character created in 1969 by cartoonist Naji al-Ali, who first appeared in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Seyassah. Handala is inspired by Naji al-Ali’s own experience, forced to leave his home in the village of Al-Sharaja in Palestine in 1948 during the Nakba. “This little barefoot child is a symbol of my childhood. He is the same age I was when I left Palestine, and even though it was 35 years ago, I am still that age today”, the cartoonist explained in an interview with Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, published in 1985 in the newspaper Al Muwagaha. “I still remember the details. I remember every plant, every stone, every house, and every tree I passed as a child in Palestine”! Initially, Handala was depicted facing forward, but starting in 1973, Naji al-Ali chose to portray him from behind with his hands clasped. A form of silent rebellion. While Handala turns his back on the audience, his gaze is turned toward Palestine, where he will return. The popular character outlived his creator, who was assassinated in London in August 1987. Naji al-Ali was a strong critic of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. This long led to him being considered a pariah. EGYPTIAN FOOTBALL AT THE FOREFRONT Since the first massive Israeli army bombardments of the Gaza Strip in October 2023, “Handala-style” goal celebrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people have multiplied. Bordering Egypt was the cradle of this movement, initiated by players of the U20 national team. During the U20 women’s match against Sao Tome Principe, striker Hala Mostafa also mimed Handala after scoring. Handala and his creator, Naji al-Ali Before Wessam Abou Ali, Zamalek players celebrated their goals in this manner during a big victory against Smouha SC in the Egyptian Premier League. Photos of Zizo and captain Shikabala had made an impression. A few days earlier, on the pitch of Tanzanian team Simba SC in the African Champions League, Al Ahly players had done the same, under the gaze of FIFA President Gianni Infantino. But this gesture had already been seen on a football pitch. According to the Egyptian Chronicles website , this type of celebration first appeared in May 2021, with attacking midfielder Ahmed Abdelkader of Smouha SC, during a match against Al Entag Al Harby. It was already a way of showing support for the Palestinian people in the face of the deadly Israeli army bombardments of Gaza. At the time, few people would have understood this gesture until the Palestinian embassy in Cairo highlighted its significance and thanked Ahmed Abdelkader. HANDALA CENSORED BY DAZN AND FIFA? While Palestinian flags and messages for Gaza have been spotted in several stands in Europe and the Maghreb, Handala’s appearances are rarer outside of Egyptian stadiums. One example is CD Palestino’s Felipe Chamorro’s celebration of one of his Copa Libertadores goals against Millonarios in April 2024. It’s quite logical to see this reference to Handala from the historic club of the Palestinian community in Chile, and it’s not a complete surprise. In recent years, supporters have also been seen using Handala, such as the ultras of Club Africain in Tunisia, or those of Bnei Sakhnin FC, an Arab club in the Israeli D1. In a recent song, entitled “Al-Qadiyya”, Raja Casablanca supporters express their attachment to Palestine. The lyrics pay tribute to Mohammed al-Durrah, a child martyr killed by the Israeli army in September 2000 during the second Intifada, and to the iconic figure of Naji al-Ali: “We live the spirit of Handala, a symbol of pride and dignity, Gaza, Hebron, and Ramallah”. During the Club World Cup, Wessam Abou Ali’s celebration was crudely framed by the broadcaster in its summary of the Al Ahly-Porto match. This discreet censorship was rectified on social media, where Abou Ali’s image was widely republished and commented on. Shortly before the competition, the organization had also deleted the official photos of his teammate Hussein El Shahat, replacing him with a simple “Free Palestine” bracelet. As journalist Leyla Hamed recently wrote on X, “FIFA is not only silent on the genocide, it is gagging anyone who talks about it”. Handala has seen it all. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation The post The footballing lives of Handala appeared first on Freedom News.

ATTEMPTS TO CAPITALISE ON THE INCIDENT BY FAR-RIGHT ACTORS WERE MET WITH REVULSION IN THE COMMUNITY ~ punkacademic ~ Liverpool Football Club’s celebrations of their twentieth English league title on Monday 26th May were marred after a car drove into a number of fans gathered on the route of the players’ bus parade on Water Street in the city centre. 79 fans were injured, with the youngest reported to be nine years old. Though some of the injured were initially in a serious condition, all those remaining in hospital are reported to be stable and improving. Paul Doyle, a 53-year-old former Royal Marine from the West Derby area of the city, has been charged with grievous bodily harm with intent. Numerous eyewitness videos posted to social media appeared to show a grey people carrier enter Water Street and come into contact with Liverpool fans with the vehicle apparently reversing into one fan before heading off at speed down the road, striking a number of fans including children. Merseyside Fire and Rescus reported having to lift the vehicle from a number of victims. Online reaction beyond Liverpool, from far-right figures and others, attempted to make political capital out of the incident, with Tommy Robinson posting on X that it was a ‘suspected terror attack’. Far-right accounts circulated images of individuals with no relation to the incident, mirroring recent reactions to incidents elsewhere in the UK—including the Southport murders last year. Such attempts were met with revulsion by members of the community, with Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotherham condemning ‘nefarious groups’ spreading disinformation in an interview with BBC Radio 4. The police were quick to rule out terrorism and release Doyle’s ethnicity. Liverpool FC and Everton FC both issued statements expressing their support for those affected by Monday’s incident, and reactions in the city displayed the solidarity and mutual support in respect of off-field incidents which have characterised the relationship between the two major football clubs since the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, when Liverpool and Everton fans stood shoulder to shoulder in the campaign for justice for the victims. Already on Saturday 24th, singers Mel C and Tom Grennan had appeared at Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Sefton Park in the south of the city wearing Liverpool and Everton jerseys numbered 9 and 7 respectively, in a tribute to the 97 fans who lost their lives as a result of the 1989 disaster. Liverpool FC manager Arne Slot, the recipient of the LMA and LMA Premier League Manager of the Year awards in his debut season with the club, missed the ceremony on Tuesday evening out of respect for those affected, whilst Liverpool FC’s staff party scheduled for Tuesday was postponed. The parade, organised to celebrate Liverpool FC’s twentieth (and English record-tying) league championship, was an unprecedented event in Liverpool with estimates of between 750,000 and a million fans lining the route which began at Allerton Maze in the south of the city before ending in the City Centre. With the Reds’ most recent previous title being won in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the parade was seen as an opportunity for fans to celebrate in a fashion they had been denied by public health restrictions five years earlier, and a carnival mood pervaded during the day despite damp weather conditions. A fundraiser has been established for those injured in Monday’s events, and has received a £10,000 donation from former Liverpool player and current pundit Jamie Carragher’s 23 Foundation, in addition to £5,000 from Football for Change, a charity which has established relationships with both the LFC Foundation and Everton in the Community. Details on how to donate to the Liverpool Spirit Appeal are available here -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top image: LiverpoolFC on Facebook The post Liverpool parade crash: Solidarity triumphs over hate-mongering appeared first on Freedom News.

THE MILITANT REPUTATION THAT PRECEDES CLAPTON CFC FANS CAUSED BRENTFORD SECURITY TO SWEAT ~ Yann Dey-Helle, from Dialectik Football ~ On September 29, the Clapton CFC women’s team – which plays in the 6th tier – travelled to Brentford for a championship match. The players had the honour of playing at the Gtech Community Stadium, a modern venue accustomed to the matches of the Brentford FC men’s professional team… and the ‘safety’ standards that go with it. Clapton fans are in no rush to see their team reach the Premier League one day. The women’s team gave them a taste of the stewards’ zeal and the security rigidity that reigns in these stadiums, particularly in terms of banners, flags, and other classic entertainment equipment such as drums. The Brigata Ultra’ Clapton was thus expelled from the stadium before the start of the match. The reason? Banners that contravened, according to the club’s security, the rules in force prohibiting “offensive” content. The ultra collective explains that they had contacted Brentford FC in advance and complied with their demands. Things started to go wrong as soon as they were searched at the entrance, as Brigata Ultra’ Clapton recounts: “We were immediately told that it was impossible to bring our banners inside, because only Brentford banners were allowed. […] The situation turned to the limit of the absurd when we were told that the banner Another Football is Possible was not allowed because it could have “multiple interpretations”, including an “offensive meaning”. “YOU TREAT THE FANS LIKE SHIT” After a period of negotiation, Brentford FC’s services had initially only banned a flag denouncing police brutality and a banner “Truth for Denis”, dedicated to Denis Bergamini, a Cosenza footballer who died 35 years ago. Reason for refusal: Denis was a man, and it was a women’s match. It was finally a banner in tribute to Federico Aldrovandi, killed by the police in Italy in September 2005, which would cause their exclusion from the stadium. After authorising it, Brentford FC considered that Aldro’s face was a “political” message. The militant reputation that precedes Clapton CFC fans has caused Brentford security to sweat. The exclusion of Brigata Ultra’ Clapton did not prevent a section of the other supporters from briefly displaying two banners inside the stadium reading “Love CCFC, Love Gaza”, in support of the Palestinian people. Security quickly intervened to have them removed. The Clapton Punks denounced this climate with a word for Brentford: “you may have a fancy and beautiful stadium, but you treat the fans like shit”. This trip to the southwest of the capital will not leave an unforgettable memory for CCFC supporters. Those who were able to attend the match still left their mark by singing from the first to the last minute, despite their team’s 7-0 defeat. A confrontation with the absurd security reality of modern football that will make Brigata Ultra Clapton say: “Another football is possible. But not at Brentford!”. It is being built far, very far from the sanitised stadiums where even freedom of expression is a chimera. The post Clapton fans expelled for “offensive” banners appeared first on Freedom News.