Troy Deeney is about to tell a little-known story of the meeting that changed English football.
The murder of George Floyd in America was resonating around the world but the Premier League, on the verge of returning for the first time during the pandemic, was yet to formulate a plan.
There was widespread praise for Kevin De Bruyne and Jordan Henderson’s involvement in the decision last year for players to replace names on the back of shirts with “Black Lives Matter” and for the Premier League logo to be swapped with a BLM emblem. Deeney is quick, also, to applaud their contribution, but explains that without his own intervention during a meeting on Zoom ahead of Project Restart, involving Premier League executives and all 20 club captains, the outcome could have been different.
There were six agenda items and “at the bottom was race and our stance on it moving forwards,” Deeney recalls. He was texting Wes Morgan, Leicester City’s captain, as the meeting progressed, saying “It’ll be interesting to see what they say” and that “they might need some guidance”.
Yet they finished discussing the fifth item and Deeney heard: “Unless anyone’s got anything else to say then we’ll wrap the meeting up there.”
“They weren’t even going to talk about it!” Deeney says. “Not because they didn’t want to, but because it was a group of white men and women and they didn’t want to provoke that uncomfortable conversation.”
Deeney texted Morgan: “Are these f**kers serious?”
Before it was about to end, Deeney told Morgan, “I’m going, are you going to back me up?” Morgan agreed. Deeney unmuted himself. “Actually, I’ve got a huge problem. What do we think about this, why are we not saying this, why are we not doing that, why for the NHS do we do this, this and this but for race we can’t do that? Eight minutes later I’m like—” he takes a deep breath “—that’s me done.”
Without realising it, Deeney had set a snowball rolling that hasn’t yet stopped.
“Next thing you see, Kevin De Bruyne’s popped up, ‘Troy’s absolutely spot on, I’m with Troy.’ Jordan Henderson, Seamus Coleman, before you knew it I had all the teams saying, ‘I’m with Troy.’
“Kevin came up with the Black Lives Matter across the back. Jordan was like: ‘That’s great let’s do a badge’. I was like: ‘My missus designs badges, let me design that.’ And within 24 hours it went from try and avoid the conversation to having Black Lives Matter on the back and the Premier League badge changed.”
Deeney credits Sheffield United captain David McGoldrick with first suggesting that players take a knee, an act they still do before matches. “It just shows how powerful it can be when everyone does something. People at the top will never want to change things because why would you change something that’s profitable and doing well?”
What’s different now? “This time you’ve got the hearts and ears – and this is going to sound really bad – of middle-class white people. They’re now going: ‘Well that’s bang out of order.’ That is what stokes change.
“If Troy and Wes Morgan spoke about it, it wasn’t going to happen. But when I got Kevin De Bruyne, Harry Kane, Jordan Henderson going, ‘We’re with Troy’, it made change. It needs everybody to pull together just like we did with the Super League. Look at [how] all the fans come together and it fell down like a pack of cards.”
‘I’m having a bad time of it, but I’m in a good place’
Not that you can tell, but Deeney is having one of his bad days. They happen often around this time of year, have done for the past eight years. Since his dad, Paul Anthony Burke, died of oesophageal cancer aged 47.
The bad days can last a week, five weeks, five days. He gets through them. Partly by speaking to his therapist, who he sees regularly. Previously, he has used alcohol to suppress the emotions; not in an obsessive, wake-up-and-drink way, but by drinking more than he usually would. This, however, is the first year he’s been totally sober.
“I have bad days regularly but I call it the joker mask – you have to paint the smile on and pretend to be the image that every body else wants to see,” he says.
His situation is different, he explains, to that of heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury, whose public disclosures about his depression have received widespread public sympathy. “If you’re just a normal person, or someone trying to be a normal like myself. I always have a rough time this time of year. It’s close to when my dad died. And for about four weeks, I feel like shit. I genuinely feel like shit. I can’t really tell people that. It just happens and currently I’m going through it.”
He adds: “I think as I’ve become more quote-unquote successful, I always have this little bit in the back of my head that goes, Dad would’ve loved this.”
There is much to love: Deeney becoming a recognisable face in football, a Premier League goalscorer, an entertainer, an outspoken anti-racism advocate sitting in more meetings than he cares to count to force change.
He is not, by his own admission, a natural talker. “I’m telling you stuff I’ve not even told the missus yet,” he admits.
That may come as a surprise to people who regularly hear him on Talksport giving his opinions on the game. It may come as a surprise to the celebrities he has recently interviewed – including Sir Elton John and Anthony Joshua – for the Deeney Talks podcast he has launched.
It comes as a surprise to me, as he talks with searing honesty and at length about his extensive work behind-the-scenes of football’s fight against racism, the social media boycott, why the platforms are still inherently good, the problems with state education, the decision to start a podcast.
He is still, of course, only 32 years old; still captain of a Watford team recently promoted back to the Premier League, still plans to kick a ball around on a football pitch for a few more years yet, but the rest points towards a carefully orchestrated plan for life after retiring from playing.
“The plan is I have absolutely no idea,” he says, chuckling. “I snowball into things and they get bigger and bigger and I’m somehow stuck in the middle with my arms and legs poking out of it.”
He mentions the comments made by Patrick Bamford, the Leeds United striker who, when asked on TV about the breakaway Super League after their match with Liverpool before the plans collapsed, immediately questioned why the game did not unite in the same fervour when it came to tackling racism.
“He had to really love football to get to it,” he says of Bamford, who went to private school and turned down a place at Harvard. “That grounding made him brave enough to speak out when everyone is talking about their Super League, to say: ‘Where’s this energy when it comes to racism?’ That, to me, points to a good, solid upbringing. Yes you went to nice schools, yes you went through the system, but you know what you’ve got a good set of parents behind you and good family values that meant ultimately he was brave enough to do it, because nobody else did.”
Deeney has seen both sides of education. He attended a state school until he was 16, but football has provided him with the wealth to send his kids to private school. And he questions why state school children are taught endlessly about the Tudors but so little about black history.
“In regards to race, everything has to reset and reboot,” he says, adding: “The bigger picture for me is that everyone needs to update. Things that kids are being taught now do not set them up for what’s going to be happening.”
The National Curriculum was last updated in 2014. “Kids aren’t taught at state school how important IT is, about coding, about any of those things.” He points out that languages in state schools are still not mandatory despite the acceleration of globalisation. “My kids are six and can speak French.”
His kids are also the first generation growing up in world plugged into social media. It can, at times, feel as though the platforms cause more harm than good. But would life be better or worse without them?
Again, he has experienced both sides. “I grew up in an age where you used to have to phone a girl’s family [to speak to her] – the nervous call! I’m showing my age a bit there.
“Social media has wonderful tools. Look how many kids are now millionaires from streaming and showing people what they do. There’re so many positives but like anything that has positives – this world is a beautiful world we all live in, but there are some ugly sides to it we don’t like, and that’s what we’re trying to eradicate. Will you eradicate all of it? ‘Course not. Can you potentially do it to a point where you are happier and it’s less obvious and there’s some accountability for what people say? That’s the key thing for me.”
That’s why English football is boycotting Twitter, Facebook and Instagram from 3pm on Friday to midnight on Monday. It’s the first major sporting boycott of its kind. The world is awaiting the companies’ responses.
Some predict it will have little impact, others point to the fact that in the UK during weekends football matches are consistently the main trending topics on Twitter. It will “put their feet close to the fire”, Deeney says, and warn them “this is what we did for four days, imagine if we did it for a month.
“All we want to do is promote change. How can you not post a Justin Bieber song to a video you’ve created because the algorithm says, No, that’s copyrighted, we’ll get sued. But you can call someone a n****r and it’s not a problem.”
Finally, after an avalanche of conversations, Deeney has to go. Our time was up a while ago. If this is one of Deeney’s bad days, you wonder what it’s like if you catch him on a good one.
“I’m having a bad time of it, but I’m in a good place, if that remotely makes any sense,” he says. And after an hour in Deeney’s company, it really does.
Troy Deeney’s “Deeney Talks” podcast is available on all major streaming platforms now.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3vsoJAf
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