As first reported in the Telegraph, FSU member and Newcastle United Football Club (NUFC) supporter Linzi Smith has been banned from attending home matches for the remainder of this season and the next two.
Her ‘crime’ in the eyes of her hometown club was to criticise the view that men who identify as women should be treated as if they were indistinguishable from biological women, including being able to access women’s changing rooms, compete against women in sports like football and rugby and be housed in women’s jails.
That part of the story is bad enough. But what the FSU also uncovered while providing Linzi with assistance is an investigation unit embedded in the Premier League. The way it operates is secretive, and its remit is unclear, but one of its jobs appears to be prying into football fans’ social media accounts, checking what they’re writing about, and then determining if they’ve engaged in wrongthink.
After receiving a complaint from a fan who supports LGBT+ causes, NUFC reached out to the Premier League to help investigate Linzi, and the League then tasked its investigation unit with compiling a dossier on her, which it then handed over to the club. At that point, NUFC took the decision to ban Linzi from attending games for the rest of this season and for the next two.
FSU supporters may recall that when news of Linzi’s ordeal at the hands of her hometown club broke, we wrote that “our national game has suddenly become the battleground in the latest fight to defend free speech”.
Alas, we were too parochial in outlook – because it transpires that the UK is not the only European country where elite football clubs and footballing authorities are growing increasingly irritated by fans who insist on expressing views that, while lawful, are now considered seriously démodé by the suits in the C-suite.
In the German Bundesliga (the equivalent of the English Premier League), for instance, attempts are underway to police what fans say about matters of ongoing public debate, and where necessary either curtail their freedom of expression or politically ‘re-educate’ them if ever they say something perfectly lawful that happens not to align with fashionable orthodoxy.
Last month, the German Football Association (DFB) ordered Bundesliga club Bayer Leverkusen to pay an €18,000 fine after fans at a game in November held a banner aloft that appeared to take aim at trans ideology. The ‘gender critical’ slogan read: “There are many genres of music, but only two genders.”
As is so often the way whenever football matches take place in pluralist liberal democracies rather than totalitarian states like, say, North Korea or Myanmar, Leverkusen’s supporters were exercising their right to ‘wind-up’ rival supporters whose team, Werder Bremen, they regard as unbearably woke.
Not that the DFB saw it that way. Having ruled that the banner constituted “discriminatory unsportsmanlike behaviour”, the association then stipulated that a third of the €18,000 fine must be used for “preventive measures against discrimination”, with the club now required to submit evidence of the steps it is taking to stamp down on the public expression of gender critical beliefs by July. Back in the 1970s, of course, East Germany had a wonderfully efficient, low-cost grassroots system for keeping tabs on people’s political beliefs – perhaps with only €6,000 to spend, the club should look to revive that system.
Fernando Carro, the Bayer Leverkusen CEO, was in complete agreement with the DFB’s decision. “Tasteless and wrong,” was how he described the banner, before adding that it had “nothing to do with values such as openness and tolerance that Bayer Leverkusen stands for as an organisation.”
Politicians from the mainstream parties, such as the governing social democrats, the Greens, and the opposition centre-right CDU/CSU were also quick to denounce the action of the supporters, with only the right-wing AfD saying that what the Leverkusen fans stated – namely that there are only two genders – is “absolutely right”, and even if it were not, the fans have their right to an opinion, and shouldn’t be fined.
Unfortunately, more “preventative measures” may now be required 300 miles away in Dresden. Last week, politically suspect supporters of the Bundesliga club Dynamo Dresden displayed a banner aimed specifically at the DFB. Its slogan?
“There is only one ridiculous DFB … and two genders.”
