The England kit: a furore over the flag

Why is it that every time the England team prepare for a major football tournament, we make life difficult for ourselves by concocting some "self-sabotaging" controversy, asked Oliver Holt in the Daily Mail. 

Before the last World Cup, it was the row over rainbow armbands. Now the nation's fury has been directed at the new kit, designed for the Euros and worn at last week's friendly against Brazil. In what it billed as a "playful" design that "disrupts history with a modern take on a classic", US brand Nike has turned the tiny St George's Cross on the back of the collar from red on white into a melange of blues, purples and reds. Cue outrage. 

It "doesn't need to be changed. We just need to be proud of it," fumed Keir Starmer, in words soon echoed by Rishi Sunak. "An absolute joke," said Nigel Farage. A "namby-pamby, pearl-clutching woke nonsense", raged former Tory MP Lee Anderson.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Nike is not trying to 'wokify' the world

Let's keep things in perspective, said Eliot Wilson in The Spectator. "A slightly wacky rebrand of the flag of St George is not a vicious attack on English identity", nor a Nike plot to "wokify" the world. Rather, it expresses the prevailing mentality that anything from the past is in some way deficient, ergo altering it is "progressive" and a good thing to do. 

No, Nike's thinking is far more cynical, said Stephen Pollard in the Daily Mail. Its eye is on sales. It knows that although England shirts sell well in markets such as China and across Africa, the St George's Cross is regarded in those places as a symbol of racism and colonialism.

Starmer on popular side of trivial debate

The embrace of the flag is actually fairly recent, said Sean O'Grady in The Independent. In the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley, it hardly featured: it was all Union Jacks. Later, fascists and racists sought to make the England flag theirs. All the more reason to win it back as a symbol of inclusiveness and not join in a quite unnecessary culture war. 

You can hardly call it a culture war when both PM and opposition leader are on the same side, said Jack Kessler in the Evening Standard. No, the real story here is that Starmer has been able to place himself on the popular side of a largely trivial debate. That, and the outrageous prices Nike is charging for its shirt: £124.99 for the "authentic" version and £84.99 for the "stadium" one.