Leeds United vs Karen Carney: Not quite an 18-second story

Today, Twitter has been overly full of commenters suggesting that there was nothing wrong with the official Leeds United FC account tweeting out a clipped video of Karen Carney talking about the physical exhaustion often felt by Marcelo Bielsa teams at the tail end of seasons.

The Twitter account would have (and has) done the same for male pundits, surely this is the feminist’s dream of equality?

Instead of talking about equality, maybe we should talk in terms of social equity instead.

Football may well be the beautiful game, but football Twitter can be one of the ugliest places on the internet. Some fans delight in the anonymity of social media, of the ability to hide behind a username and unleash a torrent of abuse directly from their fingertips. As we have seen over again, with increasing frequency, players of colour are favoured targets for hateful comments. And so too, women who live and work in men’s football – which isn’t to say, women’s football doesn’t get its share of abuse too, as it absolutely does.

Trolling

There is nothing surprising about the deluge of hate women in men’s football get on social media, the tired comments have all been seen before. Comments about kitchens and sandwiches the mild end of the scale that goes all the way up to wishing cancer and rape upon an individual.

So why have Leeds come out and said they were surprised by the reaction they incited in fans? After all it was just a few years ago that senior staff at the club were ordered to take part in equalities training after the club was found to have unfairly dismissed Lucy Ward on grounds of sexism [under former owner, Massimo Cellino].

Even if current owner, Andrea Radrizzani wants the club to embrace the “Dirty Leeds” tag and use it as fuel on the pitch, does the official Twitter account really need to rile the fans up? Indeed, after Bielsa’s side clinically and ruthlessly took apart West Bromwich Albion last night, the 5-0 dismantling was cast aside as the Twitter storm rolled in off the horizon.

? “Promoted because of Covid”
? Won the league by 10 points
? Hi @primevideosport pic.twitter.com/Ctz18sksZA

— Leeds United (@LUFC) December 29, 2020

To insult the team a person supports can be akin to casting aspersions against a family member. Football takes its fans to the limit, pushing their emotions as far as they can go, and for some, no love can ever be as sweet or as intoxicating as that of a football club. Carney’s comments weren’t lashed out with a spiteful tongue, she, as a pundit, gave an opinion based on historical evidence relating to the coach. Her words weren’t intended to sting, they didn’t drip with disdain, yet an 18 second clip of her, which started with a compliment, whipped a sizeable group of fans into a furore.

Just banter

Official club accounts aren’t banter accounts, and let’s be honest for a second here, most football banter accounts are a poor attempt at humour to begin with. And if you follow enough, you’ll be forced to scroll past the same iteration of a tired joke several times in as many minutes. No, humour (re:banter) doesn’t always have to be good clean family fun, but for the most part, we lack the requisite footballing culture in England to have official club accounts successfully engaging such banter.

But let’s talk about social equity and what it was Leeds were encouraging when after their match last night, they shared a video uploaded by fan account @Punjabi_whites. Equality is parity, that is often the ideal of most, be it parity across gender, race, sexuality or anything else. However, equity looks to fairness, to understanding [historical] imbalances and adjusting the scales accordingly.

??‍♀️

Yes, pundits should be criticised (not abused) but by fans not official club accounts.

No, it’s not just because she’s a woman but obvs use your common sense – she’s going to be abused more because of it.

No, it wasn’t acceptable all the other times either.

— Emma Sanders (@em_sandy) December 30, 2020

Sexism exists, women in male-dominated sport are unfairly targeted for their very presence; no one is asking Leeds United to fix sexism, but to understand just what happens when you engage your fanbase. To understand that for every ten clips of a male pundit saying something Leeds fans don’t agree with, all it takes is one clip of a female pundit offering an opinion, to garner the same amount of vitriol in the comments. To understand the value of not just putting out a statement commending the abuse but actually sharing it on their Twitter, of making their words seem like anything other than lip service.

Many will argue that the issues they took with what Carney said, had nothing to do with her gender, and whilst that is undoubtedly true, there is no question that her lack of y-chromosome played a part for others. Women don’t need you to walk on egg-shells around them, they don’t want you to put on a pair of fuzzy pink gloves to handle their comments, but they do ask that you understand they’re rarely given the same level footing of their male counterparts.

[columns]