Okay, a quick thread which should be obvious. There are clearly still people in the UK who think the Premier League’s #BlackLivesMatter campaign is just corporate bandwagon-jumping, a way of paying lip-service to a flashy American concept. Here’s why that is not true.

The Premier League’s #BlackLivesMattter campaign is not empty corporate messaging. It was driven forward by players, most notably Troy Deeney and Wes Morgan. Deeney is one of the smartest athletes I have ever interviewed on the historical roots of racism. This is player power.

It is embarrassingly ignorant to come on Twitter and dismiss #BlackLivesMatter as a solely American issue when a former black Premier League footballer was killed by allegedly excessive police force as recently as 2016. https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/nov/14/dalian-atkinson-death-police-officers-suspended-charged

The people who paint #BlackLivesMatter as a solely American issue somehow fail to notice that these protests across the world all have their own George Floyds. The UK has Christopher Alder, France has Adama Traoré, Germany has Oury Jalloh, and so on.

I don’t expect people to know all the details of #BlackLivesMatter but at a time when a footballer has just single-handedly reversed government policy I do expect them to think - if only for a moment - “hang on, maybe these footballers *do* know what they are doing”. /end