A couple of weeks ago, the head of Chartered Management Institute, Anne Francke, said that talk about sports, particularly football, in the work-place is exclusionary to women and that firms should clamp down on such conversation.I like to wake up with a radio alarm when the news is being read out, and when I heard that bulle-tin during my morning slumber, I laughed out loud and said to the radio – “what the fuck are you talking about? That’s fucking ridiculous.” And that’s exactly what I’m saying through this piece.
Football is my biggest passion. I live for it. Every waking moment is spent thinking about Lucas Moura in Amsterdam and what could have been had Spurs won the Champions League back in June, and it’s the same for millions of people all over the country. There are two key reasons why Anne Francke’s comments are so ridiculous. The first is the most shocking revelation, and it is that women can also like sports. Crazy, right? In an increasingly inclusive world, the notion that women need to be protected from people talking about football around them is just laughable. It is so much more divisive and exclusionary to say that sports talk isn’t allowed because women don’t like it.
The justification Francke gave for her idea was just ludicrous. She said that “it’s very easy for it to escalate from VAR talk and chat to slapping each other on the back and talking about their conquests at the weekend.” Painting football chat as some sort of gateway to lewd, inappropriate and frankly disgusting conversation is insane, and just not true. Not once have I, or any man I’ve ever known, ever been talking about football and progressed to talk about who we’ve been sleeping with. Not in the office, not in the concourses at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, not anywhere. Comments like Francke’s paint men that like football sweepingly with the same brush, and that to me isn’t acceptable.
The second key reason is that sport is likely the single most effective way for men to make friends, not just with other men but women too. In any situation where I am meeting new people and have to engage in con-versation, often with men I’ve not met before, the very first thing I ask is “do you like sport?”
If they say yes, then there’s an immediate shared passion that can be debated endlessly. If they say no, that’s fine, but I’ll know immediately that it is unlikely that we’ll ever meet up outside of working hours. Match of the Day commentator Jacqui Oatley hit the nail on the head, she agrees that Francke’s suggestion is a “terrible idea”, and said that “if you ban football chat or banter of any description, then all you’re going to do is alienate the people who actually want to communicate with each other.” Which is exactly right, it doesn’t solve anything.
Sport for me and millions of other men is a gateway, not to talking about our conquests as Francke believes, but to having friendly faces around you to whom you can actually talk about anything with eventually. It’s a vital tool in build-ing networks that you can fall back on for support, while enjoying your passion for something together. Getting men talking to each other is so important. If a man doesn’t talk, things get bottled up, problems don’t get shared and his mental health can plummet rapidly, especially in a culture that often overlooks men’s emotional wellbeing. If you were to police men talking about sport at work, you would be policing the biggest facilitator of male friendships on the planet.
Sport is such a key part of my life that if I were not allowed to talk about it at work, I would just be sat at my desk saying nothing to anybody, silently thinking about whether I should transfer Sadio Mané out for Mohamed Salah in Fantasy Premier League. I wouldn’t make any friends at work, I would have zero motivation to actually turn up, and I would feel increasingly isolated because I was banned from talking about something which makes me who I am in a place where I would spend most of every day. It may sound dramatic, but that kind of suppression of personality can be fatal to men. If men do speak derogatively about women in workplace conversations, or in any conversations, they should be pulled up and called out, but to link such conversation to sports talk is absolutely ridiculous, and I for one hope Anne Francke gives her head a wobble.
