Sport and politics: how Twitter has changed the rules

For years almost everyone in British sport hated talking about politics. But this general election may be seeing the dawn of a new era – with at least some sports people only too happy to engage politically

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“I’d certainly vote Conservative and most players would,” says a Premier League footballer. “But no one will talk about it because we get shot down. We’re not supposed to have an opinion on these things…”

So speaks one of many sportsmen and women for whom the political significance of the days between now and May 7 is perfectly clear, but who enter the debate with trepidation. If the world at large doesn’t shoot them down, then the world of sport certainly will.

The Queens Park Rangers midfielder Karl Henry found himself accused of being a class traitor by Stan Collymore a few weeks ago, after he had declared on Twitter, during Jeremy Paxman’s televised interviews of David Cameron and Ed Miliband, that the “clear message” from Labour was: “If you do well for yourself, we’ll take it all from you and give it to those who haven’t. #Vote Conservative.” In the buttoned-up world of Premier League football, everyone wants to shut down the political conversation. “We’ve got enough on our plate,” the Independent on Sunday was told by QPR when seeking a conversation with Henry this week. As if discussing politics was some type of indiscretion.

Sol Campbell is part of Operation Black Vote

But not all of those who play sport are prepared to be silenced. This is the first general election in which we will see its participants able to contribute to the discussion through the prism of social media, and the leaders’ debates have already been a rich catalyst.

“I’ve captained a number of teams and it’s clear to see Miliband is no leader #leadersdebate,” Sol Campbell declared – part of a political contribution that has seen him campaign for Operation Black Vote and be pursued by the Conservative Party as a prospective candidate for the Kensington & Chelsea seat being vacated by Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Though he has now said he has no ambition to add Chelsea to his list of London territories, there is already a clear Eurosceptic stance. “I look at the Eurozone and I look at Germany,” Campbell has said. “The only reason that Germany loves the euro is because they make so much money, because the mark was so expensive.”

SOL CAMPBELL: We knew Operation Black Vote would trigger a strong reaction. That was the point.

Safe to say that the policy enshrined in the Green Party manifesto – a ban on grouse shooting and hunting any animals for sport – will not form part of the Campbell manifesto, on the basis of his recent eye-catching appearance in Shooting Gazette: “I’m helping out the Conservatives on various issues to do with sport and diversity.”

Campbell’s rapid dousing of the candidacy story may have something to do with the criticism that comes attached to being a Conservative in a traditionally working-class sport – something that Henry now knows all about. The midfielder’s comments about the Labour desire to “take it all away” seemed to reference Miliband’s mansion tax. And though you have to expect something back, if you’re going to launch a bold political statement about the Conservative Party into such a vast and unnuanced repository as Twitter, Collymore made it personal.

He accused Henry of betraying the Ashmore Park Estate where they both grew up, and employed a political vocabulary to argue for a “balanced wealth distribution” and “cohesive society.” It all got personal, culminating in what looked like a veiled threat from Collymore, who told Henry: “I’ll see you at QPR.” It is thought that the two men have subsequently met to discuss their differences and shaken hands. “Karl believes he is entitled to look at fiscal matters differently as his circumstances have changed and he is not one to back down,” says a source close to the 32-year-old. “That doesn’t mean he won’t fight for the rights of others.”

Henry’s role in fighting the management for the bonus payments he felt his team-mates were entitled to at Wolves, the club he left in 2013, points to a socialist strand, too. One of the Twitter messages he sent to Collymore during two days of argument questioned the former Nottingham Forest striker’s assumptions about what kind of politics must be attached to a council estate upbringing. “Please tell me the views I should have, based on where I’m from? Is it, ‘council estate’ = ‘vote Labour’ by any chance?”

His allegiances reflected the general football dressing-room view, judging by others who tweeted out during the leaders’ debates. “Surely we can’t let Ed Miliband run our country?” asked Crystal Palace’s James McArthur. “Farage & Miliband speak well but look like they should both be being chased by Will Smith in Men in Black,” added Steve Harper, the former Newcastle United and now Hull City goalkeeper.

None of the leaders impressed Rio Ferdinand, Henry’s QPR team-mate. “Unfortunately, none of these people on that stage engage with the generation of today,” was his first #leadersdebate contribution. “Is Ed looking at everyone else the way he is looking at me here in my kitchen ?! Stop It!”

The footballers’ shift away from Labour can be traced back to the early 1970s – a time when players were leaving behind the redbrick back-to-backs of the maximum wage era and suddenly becoming wealthy, self-made men. The change is manifest in Hunter Davies’ brilliant and seminal football book of 1972, The Glory Game, a chronicle – updated and still in print – of the writer’s extended access to Bill Nicholson’s Tottenham Hotspur team.

Davies asked the players about their politics and found nine of the 12 who expressed an opinion were Tory – Alan Mullery, Mike England, Martin Peters, Alan Gilzean, Phil Beal, Joe Kinnear, Ray Evans, Terry Naylor and Roger Morgan – while of the three Labour men – Ralph Coates, Cyril Knowles and Steve Perryman – only Perryman seemed to have any “political feeling”. In a faint precursor of the Collymore/Henry debate, Perryman told Davies that tax “has got to be paid”, that he was against private schools and was astonished that so many of the players were Tory and were planning to send their children to fee paying schools.

“Aren’t all the players Labour?” he asked. No, Davies’ chronicle revealed. “Several of the players were decidedly racist in the views and most were apathetic Tories,” Davies wrote. “Despite the affluence of their houses, the majority still reflect their working-class upbringing in their normal domestic life.”

Davies, who went on to ghost-write autobiographies with Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney, reflects now that the life and outlook of footballers makes them naturally Conservative. “The psychology of footballer is that they are brought up to think of themselves,” he tells me. “They are put into academies where the aim has to be to get ahead of everyone else if you want to come through. It applied to that Tottenham team, even though they were earning £200 a week, living in semis: private houses on modest estates. Now the players are more cut off from the world and they have lived their lives in a hothouse since the age of eight. Their perspective is different from the working-class families they have left behind.”

Those families’ proletarian outlook does not change just because their prodigious sons have leaned right. Rooney’s mother, Jeanette, continued to work as a dinner lady, long after he had moved her into a smart new home. Mrs Rooney’s outlook has always been that she has not wanted to live on her son’s money.

University of Michigan economist Professor Stefan Szymanski believes that the naturally conservative mindset in sport is borne of the player’s sense that: “I am better than anyone else. I have worked hard and I deserve what I have.”

This Conservatives lead extends right across the sporting terrain. Cricket’s Andrew Strauss, rugby union’s former Worcester Warriors lock Craig Gillies, rowing’s James Cracknell, and Frank Lampard are all ostensibly in the blue camp, with the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson meeting them, for Labour, on the barricades. (Lampard told a journalist at a Sport Relief event in 2007 about “a really good chat” he’d had with David Cameron. “As a footballer, I don’t actually want to get involved with the whole campaigning thing, but I am a Tory, yes, and I really like David Cameron.” )

But the presence of celebrity supporters can be overstated, the Labour Party’s party’s former director of communications Alastair Campbell tells me. “The public facing stuff is actually not as important as people think,” he points out. Though Ferguson’s Labour support was good PR, his real value at election time came in the conversations with Tony Blair and Campbell about how to deal with the pressure and relentless focus. Campbell’s new book Winners provides a highly revealing insight into the way that politics can learn from sport in ways that it has failed to catch on to.

When Campbell was custodian of the New Labour message, he corralled many stars of sport into shows of support for the party. In that number, of course, was Kevin Keegan, playing head-the-ball with Blair at the 1995 Labour Party Conference. Blair was so impressive that everyone forgot this was the same Keegan who, with Liverpool team-mate Emlyn Hughes, kissed Margaret Thatcher on the steps of No 10 in 1980. Labour’s challenge is actually how to debunk the notion that being wealthy means voting Tory, Campbell observes: “I think we’ve still got a problem; an assumption where ‘how can you call yourself Labour if you make a lot of money’.”

Campbell laments the fact that sports stars find themselves under attack when they contribute to this debate. Joey Barton, who did not want to contribute to this piece, talked intelligently about UKIP, the Chilcot Inquiry and Heathrow expansion on the BBC’s Question Time recently. But then he made a very unwise – and demeaning – stereotypical comment, telling UKIP’s MEP Rachel Bours that voting UKIP was the equivalent of voting for one of “four really ugly girls”. He apologised but was demeaned for his mistake by presenter David Dimbleby at virtually every opportunity.

But it isn’t just high-profile footballers who are using social media to get involved in the political debate. The Peterborough United’s defender Christian Burgess, who also tweeted on the leaders’ debate, ascribes his own lack of trepidation about tweeting on the general election to possessing fewer followers than Barton, though he also seems unlikely to come out with a line like that on the BBC.

The 23-year-old former Arsenal academy player has views on the benefits of immigration developed on the degree course he started at Birmingham University and finished at Teesside when he signed for Middlesbrough in 2013. “Of course, you have to be sensible and don’t want the floodgates opening but immigrants from all over the world are contributing to society here and that’s forgotten,” he tweeted at the start of the campaign, returning to the issue during last week’s leaders’ debate: “Thought this argument on immigration harming the NHS was over when the Green Australian said 40% staff were foreign.”

The Conservatives’ Free Schools also concern him – a product of both his parents being teachers. Some fail, he says. Others cause existing schools to fail.

The Peterborough dressing-room is evidently more right than left leaning – the debate for some players being whether to adopt politics which “works for them” or “stick to the working class ideals” they were brought up on, as Burgess defines it. “People are talking about the Labour mansion tax hurting them. The other view is ‘you didn’t have that kind of house before…’”

It’s the Collymore/Henry argument with the personal abuse taken out and the League One side’s squad are up for the discussion. Even when it becomes known that the General Election is to be the subject of our interview, a spontaneous political argument breaks out in the dressing room, where training has just wrapped up. Unconventional, perhaps, just two days before an away trip to Barnsley, but there is clearly a far greater political consciousness across the landscape of British sport than you might imagine.

With a new medium to express it, we can expect to hear more in the critical 18 days which stretch ahead. “You start talking about these things and you see people developing their own ideas and being comfortable about doing that,” Burgess says. “Players are not as stupid as some people would like to make out.”