The noble hunt for an un-woke England manager.

Red-pilled managers only, please.

“Lee Carsley has made his decision. He will not sing the national anthem as he assumes charge of England for the first time. Now it is up to the Football Association to take theirs. Sack him. Ideally, right now. Just before kick-off if needs be.” – Jeff Powell, The Daily Mail, 7th September 2024

As we all  know, Gareth Southgate, England’s recently departed manager, was a libtard. A cuck. A snowflake. A woke shill for the Mainstream Media. The country, as Spiked put it, had grown sick of his “relentless virtue-signalling”, of his “WOKE crusade” (Spiked again). He even refused Matt Le Tissier’s offer to help England with penalties. Not because Le Tissier hasn’t worked in football since he retired in 2003 but because, as MLT told Nigel Farage, “woke Mr Southgate” didn’t want him there. 

“And I was very, very drunk”

Just England’s luck, then, that new interim manager Lee Carsley is cut from the same disgraceful cloth, refusing to sing God Save the King ahead of England’s first post-Southgate game. To make matters worse, despite being from Birmingham, he also played for Ireland.

Lee Carsley pictured before England’s Nations League opener

Carsley’s reason? “I’ve never done it.” Instead, he likes to focus on the football. Something that, ironically, footballers and managers are regularly being told to do whenever they comment on anything deemed “political”. That might not be his reason. For a man with Irish heritage, it’s understandable that he might find belting out the British national anthem a little icky. He might think it’s a shit song (it is). He might just not like singing that much. All are valid reasons and none of them will be enough to the people that see singing a silly little song about a man in a shiny hat as somehow being more patriotic than being the bloke in charge of the national team of the country’s biggest sport. 

Just the 14 flags for Jamie this time

It really is worth noting how inherently un-“woke” being the manager of the England men’s national team is. Regardless of whether you sing it or not, every game starts with a stadium-wide rendition of the national anthem, a rather hawkish song which asks GOD to save the KING. Following that, your entire job is to prove that your country is better than all the others, while leading an army of thousands of flag waving (mostly) men whose songbook has historically included “England ‘till I die”, “fuck the IRA” and “10 German bombers”.

For those that think Southgate was too woke to manage England or that Carsley is both too woke and/or too Irish to have the job on a part-time basis, the question is: who? 

It’s a small enough pool of possible managers without having to find one who could also feasibly run as an MP for Reform. Joey Barton, for example, hates women’s football and women commentators, has claimed “the British, white, middle-aged man is under attack”, (allegedly) kicked his own wife in the head and really hates cyclists. That’s a glowing CV. But he’s also never managed above League One and openly said we should abolish the monarchy (even a broken clock etc). 

You could have Mark Lawrenson? He said the BBC was “top of the WOKE LEAGUE” and sacked him because he was 65 and white, not because he hasn’t played football since the 1980s and is a truly terrible pundit. That’s not really relevant to be honest, he doesn’t even manage, I just think it’s very funny. 

Football is always going to be performatively inclusive. It’s a business. That’s what businesses do. You wear the armbands and change the logo so you don’t have to do anything that actually matters. Gareth Southgate absolutely loved the Queen and the military and his country and he was still too woke, just because he agreed that it was bad that people aren’t allowed to be gay in Qatar. 

“Woke” doesn’t really mean anything anymore, but whatever it once meant, football clearly isn’t that. It’s supportive to causes in the way that will rile the least people and placate the most corporate partners. The England manager has to exist within that narrow ovarian window. That’s why you can comment on Ukraine but you can’t comment on Gaza. You can take the knee but you have to detach it from the original Black Lives Matter campaign.

Amidst that, whatever his reasoning, Carsley choosing not to sing the national anthem is actually far more radical than anything Southgate did politically.  

With Southgate, his own quiet-radicalism was far more about the culture of the national side than the rainbow arm bands or taking the knee. It was the use of sports psychology and repairing the players’ relationship with the media. Somehow, however, even that becomes part of the culture war. Emotional intelligence, empathy, Bukayo Saka on an inflatable unicorn, it’s all woke-tosh because it isn’t rooted in a fantasised version of what football or England used to be.

As with everything in football, if the results come, no-one will really care whether Carsley sings or not. And if they don’t, who bloody cares, Pep’s coming in the summer – vamos!