It’s middle-class commentators – not supporters – who seem obsessed with the number of black players
There were altogether too many darkies in England’s World Cup Squad for me to take any pleasure in their moderate achievements out in Russia. They did not represent me. I learned this via the Guardian in an article by a man called Steve Bloomfield who insisted that the team represented only the 48 per cent of Britons who voted Remain, because there were too many ‘players of colour’ in the side for the likes of us gammon-faced scumbag racist Leavers. Also, they were young. Apparently we ‘don’t usually like’ these kinds of people. Steve had been through the squad and painstakingly counted how many of them looked a bit on the darkish side, and came to the conclusion that there were 11. I don’t know where he put Kieran Trippier: I suggest you ring him up and ask him.
This kind of bile-filled, deranged obsessiveness entertains me no end. Steve clearly doesn’t go to football matches or he would know that black players are a not entirely uncommon phenomenon these past 30 or so years. And always cheered onward by predominantly working-class football fans who voted overwhelmingly for Leave. There were black players at my club, Millwall, long before the Guardian decided it might be expedient to employ one or two writers ‘of colour’ for its rapidly diminishing audience. And the black fans in the ground worked alongside the whites in the plastering trade, or as electricians or plumbers: they were not, in the main, on the Guardian’s editorial board or BBC producers. The people who voted Leave were integrated long before middle-class tossers like Bloomfield.
But he is not alone, bless him. As the sociologist Frank Furedi pointed out on Spiked Online, the middle-class white left commentators spent the entire tournament counting black faces among the teams.

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