The insane annual circus of Poppygate was kickstarted by Daily Mail opportunism
Not for the first time, poppies make a November appearance in Mediawatch. There’s no new information here really, but it just feels like a particularly appropriate day to note just how mad the entirely media-confected annual poppy-shaming festival really is.
Poppy cock
There’s a brilliant, thoughtful and lengthy piece in The Guardian about the shifting nature of remembrance, the weaponisation of the poppy and the Royal British Legion’s attempts to distance themselves from the more rabid poppy-policing that becomes a national sport for two weeks every November.
Mediawatch heartily recommends reading the whole thing, but there are a few sections that are of particular interest to those of us of a specifically football-media bent.
The first section covers the very first instance of poppies being worn on football shirts. Something that is now imposed and enforced so rigorously that its absence is unthinkable did not actually happen at all until 2003, in an otherwise unremarkable game between Leicester and Blackburn, after Leicester executive director Paul Mace decided it would be a nice touch.
The match was the first time remembrance poppies had been worn by all the players in a Premier League game. “I don’t think I ever heard a single complaint, and universal praise is very rare in football,” said Mace. He was proud to see veterans parading on the pitch at half-time, proud of the positive press coverage and proud to raise more than £5,000 for the RBL. “If I look back on 13 years at Leicester, this was probably the best decision I ever made,” he said.
After the matches, other clubs contacted Mace. “They had questions: where did you source the embroidered poppies? What permissions do we need?” Over the next few years, the Premier League granted permission to any club that wanted to wear poppies, but didn’t impose rules about whether they should. That would come later. Within a few years, as the presence of poppies on football shirts was enforced ever-more hawkishly by the press and politicians, it would be hard to remember that for 82 years, no football team had played with poppies on their shirts and absolutely no one had suggested that there was any problem with this.
It’s that simple fact at the end there that we want everyone to keep in mind over the next week or so as War Christmas really ramps up. Eighty-two years between the poppy’s introduction as a symbol of remembrance and its first use on football shirts. And not one person ever thinking this was a problem.
Which brings us to the next part of all this. How did we go from 82 years of no poppies on football shirts, to Leicester going ‘this might be a nice thing to do’ to all football clubs being required to don poppies or risk the keyboard-wielding wrath of war-loving online trolls?
Enter star of multiple Mediawatches passim Charlie Sale of the Daily Mail.
By 2009, six years had passed since Mace put poppies on Leicester City’s shirts. That year, Charles Sale, a sports writer for the Daily Mail, was chatting to a Premier League contact who mentioned that 12 out of 20 teams in the league now wore poppies on their shirts. Sale didn’t have strong feelings about poppies; what he did have was pages that needed to be filled. “I’m not a mad patriot,” he told me. “But I had to find a story every day.”
Sale wrote up the column about the poppy holdouts. Senior editors loved it and decided to launch a campaign to ensure that no team would remain poppyless. They called it Poppygate. “The first rule of a Daily Mail campaign is you don’t start a campaign that you’re not going to win,” a former editor who worked with Sale told me. “We knew it would resonate with our audience, this idea of the military and the need to show respect.”
None of this should surprise any halfway regular Mediawatch reader, but there’s still something about the quiet part being said loud so bluntly. And also remember – especially relevant today of all days – that this is not in any way restricted to either a) football or b) the Daily Mail.
This is how the tabloid press operates on a regular basis on any number of topics. Brexit and the current deranged overblown trans panic both have their roots in similarly humble beginnings. The key point to remember is that the journalists or even the papers themselves don’t even necessarily feel strongly about the subject, just that there are pages to be filled and frenzies to be whipped.
And that line about never starting a campaign you’re not going to win is so revealing to the ultimate point of it all. There is no grand belief system here; no, nothing so noble as that. Just point-scoring and cheap wins.
It’s what our forefathers fought and died for, of course.
And boy did the Mail go for it.
Over the next few days, the Daily Mail went hard, calling out teams who didn’t wear poppies. “I worked at the Daily Mail for 20 years – shaming people was part of the process,” said Sale. Six teams quickly bowed to the pressure and ordered their poppy patches. “That was the power of the Mail at the time,” said Sale.
Liverpool and Manchester United resisted, arguing that poppies wouldn’t show up on their red shirts, and that it wouldn’t add to the substantial work they already did with the armed forces. (A news story that week thundered that this “excuse” was “undermined by the emblem being proudly displayed on the red shirts of Arsenal.”) The following year, both teams wore poppies.
Another win for the Daily Mail. Wielding its awesome power not to fight injustice but to make sure some football shirts had some patches on them. Who precisely was defeated? Not really clear, because Wokery hadn’t yet been invented yet, had it? Although maybe, just maybe, the frenzied tabloid attack on the Wokerati isn’t all entirely above board either? Genuinely, what a time to be alive.
But to Mediawatch this seems such an unimprovably fascinating case study in how the media works, the way it doesn’t simply – as so often claimed – reflect what is happening but actively, deliberately shapes those narratives. To the extent that if need be they can just be plucked entirely out of thin air like Poppygate.
And thus, just eight years after poppies made their first ever appearance on shirts, came the great England Poppy Sh*tstorm of 2011.
From then on, poppy shaming became an annual tradition as November approached. “We’d think: who’s playing? Are they wearing poppies? What are they doing to commemorate?” said Sale. In 2011, a story came along so perfect that it felt almost scripted. England were due to play a friendly match against Spain on Armistice Day, and Fifa, world football’s governing body, refused to allow England to wear poppies on their shirts. “It was a great story for us: how dare we not do our boys proud by honouring them with the poppy, just because it might upset the Europeans?” remembered the former Daily Mail editor. (In truth, it was not a matter of overly sensitive Europeans: Fifa has a longstanding prohibition on political symbols on football shirts.)
The story was picked up everywhere. Prime minister David Cameron described the ban as “outrageous”, adding: “We all wear the poppy with pride, even if we don’t approve of the wars people were fighting in.” Prince William, who was then president of the FA, wrote to Fifa expressing “dismay” at the decision.
This is just such weird behaviour, isn’t it? We know that the press are on poppy-watch every November, desperate to be mortally offended on their readers/viewers/listeners’ behalves by any shameful non-compliers. But again, hearing someone talk about this as their job without seeming to realise or care how mental it sounds is really striking.
To talk proudly of the power the Mail unquestionably did and to a large extent still does wield, but then cheerfully admit you used it to turn the once dignified act of remembrance into an annual point-scoring contest. Mediawatch isn’t generally one for going over old ground. We often call it out, in fact. But this really does feel like a particularly pertinent day to highlight this particularly pertinent football-centric example of just how batsh*t this entire industry can be.
That England not wearing poppies on their shirts – something that, remember, they had never done and nobody had ever expected or demanded they do – became a Mail-confected (and Sun-assisted) issue of such gravity that the (admittedly opportunistic and scheming) prime minister got involved along with the future King.
It just strikes Mediawatch that it doesn’t do any of us any harm when consuming absolutely any football #content whatsoever to keep at the back of one’s mind the thought that the now unavoidably massive annual poppy-shaming festival that has grown inexorably over the last 15 years exists entirely on the back of one unarsed Daily Mail sports diarist having a blank screen in front of him one quiet November day.
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