Guest Post by Darren Styles
Springsteen boycotts, Obama sues, but the Premier League’s West Ham United follow the money? to North Carolina anyway… Darren Styles, Winq Publishing Editor, a life-long fan, isn’t impressed.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. So goes the adage. Another suggests all that glitters is not gold. As Premier League West Ham United? may shortly find out – having agreed to play a pre-season friendly football (soccer) match in North Carolina on 12th July.
“It’s a fantastic opportunity to grow our brand in a developing market,” the club coos. “There’s such a strong grass roots game in North Carolina, and it’s a place where – off the back of a great season – we can come and enjoy absolutely first-rate facilities and quality opponents in the Carolina RailHawks.”
The speaker, in a live radio interview with a North Carolina radio station, is West Ham United’s Commercial Director, Felicity Barnard. You can hear her enthusiasm for the opening of a new market, you can imagine the projections for a replica kit sales uplift, you can take for granted the glee of the new residents of the Olympic Stadium ?at their foresight of adding the word ‘London’ to the club badge ahead of the move to Stratford. North Carolina residents having heard of London. Probably.
As someone who first visited West Ham’s just-defunct Boleyn Ground in 1973, and who has been – variously – a season-ticket holder and/or box holder since, I know exactly where Green Street, E13, is. But then I’m not the target audience in North Carolina. Or, for that matter, in North Korea. Where, Felicity failed to mention, even they haven’t just imposed draconian and discriminatory anti-LGBT laws. Because, for all the world’s wrestling with a problem like North Korea, it’s in North Carolina that LGBT life has recently moved significantly backwards.
Oh Carolina.?
It’s not gone well. As a result of what North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory has done to remove protections from, and legislate against, LGBT rights, Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Demi Lovato and the Cirque de Soleil have all cancelled major events in the State, and the National Basketball Association (the NBA) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have said they’ll not sanction a single sporting contest there until the law is reversed. Apple, PayPal, Deutsche Bank and the Bank of America are boycotting too.
And now the President is coming for North Carolina. It seems passing a law that deliberately invalidates several anti-discrimination measures designed to protect gay and transgender people hasn’t played well in the Oval Office. The law suit from the capital vs North Carolina is in.
“What this law does is inflict further indignity on a population that has suffered far more than its fair share,” says Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “But we see you, we stand with you, and we will do everything we can to protect you. [This piece of] State legislation puts North Carolina in direct conflict with federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex and gender identity, and state-sanctioned discrimination never works and never looks good in hindsight.”
Oh Carolina. You should have invited Millwall, not West Ham. They are the team that sings “nobody likes us, and we don’t care.” A much better fit.