Taking the knee has not ‘lost its power' – it never had any to begin with

Telegraph

21-07-2025

The shock value of the Lionesses' decision against taking the knee was that they still laboured, five years on, under a misapprehension it was some vital instrument in the fight against racism. Watching them stage this ritual before their games in Switzerland has brought echoes of that overwrought summer of 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement unleashed such chaos that genuine action took a back seat to superficial slogans and designer hashtags. Kneeling felt tokenistic even then, a tick-box exercise for football to show how much it cared, an easy PR win while avoiding any commitment to deeper change. In 2025, it has become so perfunctory that the England women's team are forced to admit it serves no useful purpose.
'Is the message as strong as it used to be?' asked Lucy Bronze. 'Is the message really hitting hard?' To those questions, Alex Greenwood provided some form of answer. 'There's maybe a feeling,' she said, 'that it has lost its power.' The reality that these players dared not acknowledge was that it had never had any power in the first place. This was not some 21st-century equivalent of the Black Power salute, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood atop a podium at the Mexico City Olympics and raised black-gloved fists to the sky at grave personal cost to themselves. This was an empty, performative piece of gesture politics.
The wonder, truly, is that it has gone on so long. Even when Gareth Southgate's England included it in their pre-match repertoire in 2021, many fans loudly booed in protest, rejecting both the symbolism of a fad that had originated in the United States and the blurring of political agitation with the escapism of sport. The pro-knee brigade's argument, of course, was that this crusade had less to do with politics than an assertion of universal human rights. But this seemed naive at best when you examined the other principles of BLM leaders who portrayed themselves as 'trained Marxists': defunding the police, for example, or dismantling the nuclear family.
Perhaps the most compelling case against kneeling was made by black players who hated it. Wilfried Zaha described it as 'degrading', explaining that his parents had taught him to be proud to be black, that they had urged him to stand tall. 'I think the meaning behind the whole thing is becoming something that we just do now,' he said. 'That's not enough. I'm not going to take the knee.' It was four-and-a-half years ago that he delivered this impassioned statement, so it seems peculiar that the Lionesses are only now reaching the same conclusion.
The original rationale was that taking the knee would assume unstoppable force purely through repetition. And yet the reverse has taken place, with the spectacle so denuded of impact that the Premier League has long since chosen to reserve it only for a few carefully-chosen fixtures. For an institution so wedded to the idea that it compelled players in 2020 to replace the names on their shirts with the words 'Black Lives Matter', it is a means of saving face.
Now we find ourselves at the logical end point, where the practice is phased out altogether. You might expect this to happen if its stated objectives had been fulfilled, but the bitter truth is that it has done nothing to eradicate the scourge of racism. Just as Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho received unspeakable bigotry after missing penalties in England's European Championship final defeat to Italy, so Jess Carter has spoken of 'vile' and 'abhorrent' comments directed towards her online during the latest tournament. For all that she deserves sympathy over her ordeal, it is revealing that she and her team-mates are abandoning their anti-racism campaign on the pitch at the precise moment that they confront evidence of racism off it. There could scarcely be a more damning illustration of the gesture's hollowness.
In sport as in society, we are past the point of being impressed by those who drape themselves in the cloak of righteousness. In 2020, amid the collision of pandemic and culture wars, conspicuous projection of virtue was all the rage, with Jake Humphrey adorning his fleece in the TV studio with one pin badge for the NHS and another for BLM. But in 2025, it is a turn-off, with the sight of footballers dropping to their knees for a couple of seconds inducing nothing more than ennui, a sense that they are acting out of obligation rather than any sincere concern for the cause of anti-racism itself. So, never mind Greenwood's notion that it has 'lost its power' now. Ultimately, you cannot lose what you never had.