Rainbow Laces Day highlights the hypocrisy and greed of the Premier League

How good did the Amex look for Brighton’s game against Wolverhampton Wanderers? The Premier League fixture against the Old Gold was used to highlight the Rainbow Laces campaign and the Albion went above and beyond in their efforts.

The Rainbow Laces campaign has been set up by Stonewall in an attempt to make sport more open to the LGBTQ+ plus community.

According to Stonewall, four in 10 LGBT people don’t think that sport is welcoming. This will hardly come as a surprise to Brighton fans, given the homophobic abuse that we are often subjected to on our travels around the country, usually in the name of ‘banter’.

A quick glance at the angry faces and the posts about “Adam and Steve” every time the Albion update their Facebook profile picture to the rainbow flag tells you all you need to know about how widespread a problem homophobia actually is, both in football and wider society.

We’ve seen comments hoping that the Albion go down or even out of business for their support of the LGBTQ+ community. The fact that two Wolves supporters were chucked out of the Amex and subsequently arrested for homophobic abuse on a day designated to highlight the issue of homophobia was unbelievably pathetic and yet grimly predictable.

Thankfully, the Albion have been excellent in their support of the LGBTQ+ community. This year’s Rainbow Laces day summed that up with the most striking aspect being the giant rainbow flag that the East Stand became as the teams entered the field ahead of kick off.

For a fixture that was being beamed around the world, this was a powerful statement about the club’s relationship with the LGBTQ+ community. But Rainbow Laces day at the Amex wasn’t just for the cameras.

Members of the Proud Seagulls group were invited onto the pitch to wave rainbow flags. Rainbow laces were given away outside the stadium before kick off. Even the weather played its part, a moody storm leaving the sky a stunning shade of pink before darkness fell over the South Downs.

Yet how seriously can you take this support of the LGBTQ+ community when within an hour, the stadium’s LED advertising boards had gone from promoting gay rights to advertising Expo 2020 Dubai – an event being held in a country where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death?

You can’t be against homophobia one minute, but then happily advertise an event in the United Arab Emirates where gay people can be flogged, imprisoned or executed the next. It’s like promoting the Ku Klux Klan on Kick It Out Day.

If you’re willing to sell out your principles for money, then you don’t have strong enough principles to start with. “We’re all for gay rights…unless a country where gay rights don’t exist gives us enough cash.”

When we highlighted this fact on Twitter, one of the arguments put up in defence of the Albion was that they may not have had a say in what was being advertised.

As we know, there are certain Premier League partners who are promoted at every single game, especially those fixtures which are going out live on Sky. It’s quite possible that the Premier League could have forced the Expo 2020 Dubai advert upon the club.

But really, it doesn’t matter who took the decision to run the advert – be it Premier League or the Albion. Both were actively supporting Rainbow Laces day, so whichever body was happy to pocket money for an event in the United Arab Emirates has displayed the ultimate form of greed and hypocrisy.

And even if the Expo 2020 Dubai advert was forced upon the Albion, they still could have said no if they really wanted to. What might the punishment have been? A fine from the Premier League? Surely that’s a price worth paying if you truly do value the LGBTQ+ company.

Believe it or not, but it isn’t unheard of for football clubs to turn down cold, hard cash in favour of sticking to their principles. The FA recently told Liverpool that Anfield could only host an England international if they revoked their ban on journalists from The Sun attending games.

Liverpool said no. As a result, there’ll be none of the financial boost or prestige that comes with hosting the national team on one of the rare occasions that the Three Lions play away from Wembley. Principles first.

Brighton themselves have done exactly this in the past too. When Wickes signed a sponsorship deal with the Football League back in our Withdean days, Dick Knight refused the money due to Bill Archer being involved with the building company. The Albion were completely skint at the time and any cash coming in would have been very welcome, but Knight stuck to his principles.

If we could turn down money because it came from a source that we didn’t agree with and upset a governing body when we didn’t have a pot to piss in, why can’t we do it when we’re in the richest league in the world? You probably know the answer to that one.

It wasn’t just at the Amex where hypocrisy flowed on Rainbow Laces Day either. Perhaps the biggest offenders were Manchester City.

How can a club sit there and promote LGBTQ+ rights when their owner is Sheikh Mansour, the unelected Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE, who therefore presumably has huge influence on that country’s laws which make homosexuality illegal?

Of course, the answer to that questions is because City are the biggest sports washing empire in the world right now.

Sheikh Mansour hopes that by owning a football club which play beautiful football and tear up Premier League records, it reflects positively on Abu Dhabi and detracts from the fact that he is part of the ruling class of a country where human rights don’t exist, slavery is legal, critics of the government are thrown into jail without a fair legal hearing and you can go to prison for being gay.

As Amnesty International said in a report last year, “The UAE’s enormous investment in Manchester City is one of football’s most brazen attempts to ‘sports wash’ a country’s deeply tarnished image through the glamour of the game.”

City’s support of Rainbow Laces means that they want their supporters and football as a whole to be more tolerant and welcoming to the gay community – all while their success is being bankrolled by a bloke who oversees an Emirate where “unnatural sex with another person” can be punished with up to 14 years in prison.

There is no doubt that Rainbow Laces Day is a brilliant cause that everyone in football should be behind – but rainbow laces and rainbow flags will only go so far.

If the Premier League and its clubs are serious about supporting the LGBTQ+ community and improving the lives of the people within it, then they should turn away money from any nation or body who doesn’t share those aspirations.

The game is so awash with riches that neither the league nor its clubs could seriously say that they need the money. And what a powerful statement it would be. “Keep your cash, we aren’t interested in promoting events in a nation that tramples over gay rights.”

Now, that would be real support for the LGBTQ+ community. Sadly, money is more important.