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When former England international and respected expert Karen Carney dared to contextualize the promotion of Leeds United, it was bound to raise the eyebrows of the fans. But few would have expected the club’s official Twitter account to haunt her and thus inadvertently direct the sexist underbelly of online football directly at her.
Leeds tweeted a video of Carney which included her saying that the club had been “promoted by Covid” and took that phrase out in her tweet.
Carney was perhaps clumsy in that wording, but he put the whole sentence in its proper context and his intention is clear. He praised the team’s style and running game when he said the team can “leave everyone behind and give them credit” before expressing concern about whether the team would “explode at the end of the season.”
She explains – after the line “I think they were promoted by Covid” – she meant that the hiatus “gave them a little breathing space” and that she wasn’t sure the team “would have gotten up without that break.”
She was right. Marcelo Bielsa’s team achieved a five-game unbeaten streak before the season came to a halt for Covid, then galloped to the title losing just two points in eight games. But last season they won just one in their last six games and both years suffered a small drop between December and February. The same happened in Spain when Athletic Bilbao de Bielsa escaped from the title race in 2011-12 and in Marseille in 2014-15, where their team went from being “autumn champions” (first at Christmas) to fourth at the end of the season. .
Carney’s comment may have been a bit clumsy, but then it would be easy to go through a two-hour spell from any commentator or expert in any game and pull off awkward sentences. It was a fair point to make and whether people agreed with it or not is not the main problem.
Twitter went into crisis. There were many comments from fans who proudly proclaimed that they had beaten the feminists. This was not an attack on Carney because she is a woman, but because she is a bad expert and was wrong. How did they know? Because the club had pedantically tweeted about male experts in the past. Many pointed out that Gabby Agbonlahor, Paul Merson and Chris Wilder have also been targeted in recent months.
In Carney’s case, however, the club sank to new depths. Didn’t they realize that the abuse directed at her would be different because she is a woman? If they didn’t, where have they been? Every time former England international Alex Scott is on TV, she’s trending on Twitter before saying a word. Scott was back on trend Wednesday as a result of Leeds’ tweet about Carney when the trolls piled in.
Did the people running the Leeds Twitter account miss the abuse Scott and Eni Aluko suffered during the World Cup? Have they been blind to the abuse suffered by female officials every time they step on the lawn? Or the misogyny that former players-turned-experts like Rachel Brown-Finis get every week? Or the abuse that any journalist suffers if he dares to write about, well, something to do with the male game? That is an extremely privileged position if so.
The inevitable happened. Carney was called “dumb bitch”, “stupid idiot” and “idiot of the week” and was told to “go back to the kitchen”, or to “put down the mic and get home, there are dishes to wash and clothes to iron. “To select a few. Someone else was” fed up with this shit of expert women, “another joked” women’s lives matter, but come on, women and soccer? Put love to boil! ” much worse.
That kind of reaction wouldn’t have happened if the target was a man. During Amazon’s broadcast of Leeds’s emphatic victory over West Brom, former Leeds player Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink could be heard in the background saying “right” after Carney’s analysis, but was not attacked, at least to the same extent.
Yet when a male pundit is the center of attention of the trolling masses, those on the attack never imply that their entire gender has no place in the world of sports journalism or football in general. This type of abuse, which tries to delegitimize the role of women in football, is the difference. It is piled on the plate of women who work in sport and who have suffered decades of abuse for daring to presume that “the people’s game” is not just a man’s game and that they have had to fight tooth and nail to be respected in soccer. for the right to comment on it and even reproduce it.
Some said that the content was already available, that Leeds should not be criticized for highlighting it as well. However, there is a big difference between the original tweet from @Punjabi_whites, with its 5,313 followers, and the decision of an official account of a Premier League club with more than 665,000 followers to do so. Not only does it vastly expand the reach of the content, but it also serves to legitimize the subsequent abuse in the perpetrators’ minds.
At the time of writing, the Leeds tweet had garnered over 5,100 retweets, over 6,500 quoted tweets, and 48,500 likes.
Leeds may have finally “fully condemned” the abuse Carney has received, but they have not apologized or deleted the tweet. There were also reports that the club was going to invite the decorated England international to appear from training ground ahead of the FA Cup third-round tie with Crawley next week, but that would be nothing short of condescending.
No, Carney doesn’t need to jog alongside Thorp Arch to repair bridges with a club that wants to correct his opinion. Much more appropriate would be for Leeds to bring in representatives from Women in Football and educate its staff, coaches, owners and players about the seemingly strange world of sexist abuse that women working in football face on a daily basis.
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