Last Sunday the star studded Barcelona Football Club made their way into one of the biggest sports arenas in Europe to face off against Las Palmas. Normally the roar of the crowd at the Camp Nou is deafening, but on this occasion the players entered the stadium to complete silence. The decision of the club to play without a crowd came after hundreds of Catalans were injured in conflicts with Spanish police over the recent referendum for Catalonian independence from Spain.
Professional athletes often have the largest platform with which to make a political statement or send a message to their fans. It is interesting that the Barcelona Football Club chose to make a statement through eliminating their audience. What can American athletes looking to make a statement borrow from the Catalans?
For months now, NFL players have been kneeling during the national anthem and linking arms, in a show of solidarity and defiance. Defiance against the unjust treatment of certain groups in our country, and solidarity against those who seek to belittle them and their methods of protest. It is ironic that these shows of solidarity are followed by four quarters of violent contact sport, pitting two teams and thousands of fans against each other.
The club officials and players of Barcelona felt that in light of the current political situation, it wasn’t right to play for a crowd. They thought that an amusement event was somehow out of place and that creating an atmosphere of contention between two teams, however insignificant, was wrong given the very real violence going on outside the stadium.
The reasons for the NFL protests are very different from the protests in Catalonia. Nonetheless, there is something that NFL players can learn from the decision to play in an empty stadium. I do not suggest that the NFL players should stop protesting or even choose to play before an empty stadium. Rather, I think that they should rethink their protest strategy. If NFL players can learn something from Barcelona it’s that there is more than one-way to make a statement. NFL players could wear different uniforms, cut their hair or even change the way they play. Now, these don’t even have to be replacements for kneeling during the anthem, they could be complementary.
If there’s one criticism of the NFL protests we haven’t heard it’s that they have the potential to garner incredible amounts of attention, while not attracting any for the issues themselves. Americans especially are excellent at accepting the status quo. If the players continued to alter the way they protest, fans will be forced to constantly reconsider the reasons for the protests.
Indeed, so much has been said about the methods of protest and the rights of protesters, that few people are talking about how to fix the problems that led to the protests in the first place.