James McClean:

'For my son, who is 7 years old and watches every Wigan game - either being at stadium or on Latics TV - to be asking his mother, 'Why are they booing and singing that song at Daddy?' And to have to tip toe around answering him is something which should not be happening.

'This post is not one for sympathy (trust me, it is not wanted) but one of anger. Considering every single year we have an FA representative come into each club to discuss the same old crap they spew to us about discrimination. Every single year, I challenge them on the abuse. Every single year, they do nothing.

'This clip is one [from] yesterday, which can be heard clearly of one particular chant, as well as other chants of 'f**k the pope and IRA', being sung by the majority of the 30k crowd, as well as numerous individual chants of '* *, * c**t', 'you dirty Irish c**t'.

'[This was] while displaying a tribute before game honouring Niall Quinn, who is also the same nationality as myself. Couldn’t make the stupidity up. Now, everyone who attended the game would have heard this loud and clear including the referee, match officials and other officials! I should not have to report every single incident when clearly they can all hear what I hear, and they should be doing their job by taking action!

'I would be lying if I was to say I expect anything to done about this by the FA and EFL ( history shows this) but here is ANOTHER CHANCE, sure. And I certainly don’t expect any action to be taken by Sunderland themselves, given they did nothing when I was their player.

'For the uneducated, which will always cling on to a certain picture to justify their argument to say 'he’s brings it on himself', this picture, which turned out to be not my best joke, occurred in 2020. Myself as well as my family have been on the end of sickening abuse since November 2012. For those you can’t grasp that, that is eight years of sickening abuse.'

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CjyEFfHoPwr/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

 

Too late now, but he is one of those players i would of loved to see play for us. He would wind the huns up on a whole other level.

 

I like him. One of the few who stands up against this hypocrisy.

 

I would have as well but the * he would have endured if he played for us would be on a different level to what he's had down there so for his sake, probably for the best he didn't.

 

I have to say it is disappointing that we have not seen much public and vocal support for him from other Irish internationals plying their trade in the English leagues as well.

 

A dirty senile orange plastic faced *..

Won't be long..

 

I’m sure he’s said he’s tried to make a move here a few times, we’ve never showed the interest in it and couldn’t really afford it either

but 1 million * percent, if he was Bosman and wanted just £5k appearnce fee or something, Lawwell would never have allowed that.

 

There’s a thing of projecting the oppression that happened in Ireland onto the Palestine/Israel stuff the now, but what Hamas done was revenge and slaughter, and it was always going to end with the oppressed people in Palestine being pretty much wiped out now Israel have an excuse not to do it slyly.

The statement here from McLean whilst being spot on largely in general, doesn’t include the fact that Hamas are fundamentally Islamic extremists who aren’t wanting to strike against oppression its revenge and wanting to slaughter Jews because its their ideology, and the leaders of them are sitting in other countries like Iran in mansions directing it because they won’t suffer the repercussions

 

Seems like there’s a really thin blurred line between supporting the Palestinians and supporting a terrorist group in Hamas, and it’s starting to make me feel quite uncomfortable and questioning where I actually stand on it.

I support oppressed people no matter where they are, but this is all seeming a bit too much like supporting the actions of Hamas now.

The RA and Hamas are not the same.

 

I don't support any killing of innocent civilians. Setting off car bombs is obviously going to kill innocent people, whether intentional or not, so there is comparisons to be made. Just Hamas are far more extreme in their actions.

There is plenty of support for Hamas but probably a lot from young people with no kids or that, folk that couldn't comprehend the suffering these families are going through. Or just idiots.That's how I feel anyway. My whole outlook has changed since having kids anyway and would guess the same applies to most people.

Can imagine they have a lot of support in Palestine though. If you were being bullied your entire life and someone came along and took some revenge, you would probably be grateful, most of us would I think.

Easier for us looking from the outside and being a bit more level headed. More difficult when you're on either side of the divide and been brought up seeing it all and hearing stories, whether they are true or made up to justify your actions, brainwashing basically.

 

Said it already Dev but hamas/its leadership genuinely give no more of a * for the well being of the population of Palestine than we give a * for the well being of the orcs. While what the Israelis plan on doing in Gazza is utterly wrong/illegal for hamas to tell the population to ignore the evacuation just confirms this.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...ation-palestinian-hamas-latest-news-lw8twprcc

We can disagree on the how we as a support have gotten involved/dragged into this but showing any signs of support for hamas, either accidentally or purposefully, is utterly abhorrent and needs stopped.

 

100% mate.

 

https://theathletic.com/4618457/202...suffers-more-abuse-than-any-other-in-england/

 

It's behind a pay wall mate. Any chance you could cut and paste it?

Edit: found a copy!

 

It came at a corner kick, as it so often does. James McClean trotted over and, as he got closer, he heard jeers, shouts, catcalls and horribly familiar words cascading down from the terrace behind the goal.

“Fing Irish c”, “* b******”, “F*** off, you Irish * c***”.

One guy near the front got up to walk to the next block and taunt the Wigan Athletic midfielder by waving a large flag at him — the Northern Irish flag, the Ulster Banner, representing the country of his birth but, as his provocateur must have known very well, not his sense of national identity.

McClean looked at them, the individuals spouting this bile from behind a barrier, and gave them his usual death stare.

He then turned to a steward and one of the assistant referees and told them what he had just heard, but the abuse continued. So, as advised in football’s anti-discrimination protocol, McClean walked over to the referee, Thomas Bramall, to tell him what was being shouted. The crowd jeered. One guy in the front row made a “crybaby” gesture.

Bramall noted the complaint and then told him to carry on with the game.

McClean trudged back over, pulling up his shorts, giving his detractors a flash of the “Free Derry” tattoo on his left thigh, and then — along with some kind of object — a chant rained down from the terrace, backed by a drumbeat.

“F*** the pope and the IRA, f*** the pope and the IRA.”

[Linked video of abuse at Blackpool away] ()

It got louder and louder. This wasn’t just a handful of fans, it was a substantial minority. But McClean had been told to get on with the game, so he did.

The same thing happened when he took another corner from the same position just before half-time.

“F*** the pope and the IRA, f*** the pope and the IRA.”

Just another Saturday afternoon in the life of James McClean, who, as he prepares to win his 100th cap for the Republic of Ireland on Monday evening, is adored back in his home town in Derry but claims to be the subject of “more abuse than any other player in England”.

The date was April 15, 2023, and the place was Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road stadium, the stage for a fraught six-pointer in what was, ultimately for both clubs, a losing battle to avoid relegation from the Championship.

But it could have been almost anywhere, really. Because this stuff — variations on the same deeply unpleasant theme — has followed McClean up and down the country for more than a decade in English football.

It isn’t always as blatant as it was at Blackpool, where the chants were so loud, so clear and so explicitly anti-Catholic that the English Football Association announced an investigation.

Blackpool have since been charged with misconduct by the FA, who allege the Championship club “failed to ensure that its spectators (…) conduct themselves in an orderly fashion and do not use words or otherwise behave in a way which is improper, offensive, abusive, indecent or insulting with either express or implied reference to religion”.

Blackpool said the club “strongly condemns any discriminatory language, particularly in relation to religion or race” and will work alongside the FA and Lancashire Police on the matter.

It is only the second time a club has been charged in relation to abuse of this nature. The previous case, three years ago, saw Barnsley fined £20,000 for sectarian chants directed at McClean when he was playing for Stoke City.

But McClean would say these two cases — plus when Kirk Broadfoot, then a defender for Rotherham United, was banned for 10 matches for using “abusive and/or insulting words” towards him in a match in 2015 — were merely the tip of the iceberg.

Over the past year or so, The Athletic has witnessed it at Wigan matches against Sunderland and Stoke, two of his former clubs, and Bolton Wanderers. To that list, McClean would add matches against Luton Town, Millwall and even a game against Bristol City, where he claimed people in the Wigan end (not necessarily Wigan fans, he said) shouted “sectarian abuse”, including “a song that celebrates the death of Catholics”.

Accrington Stanley, Queens Park Rangers, Barnsley, Portsmouth, Rotherham, Plymouth Argyle, Huddersfield Town… north and south, cities and towns, the list of alleged flashpoints goes on and on.

And nothing — almost nothing — is done about it. And beyond McClean’s Instagram account, almost nothing is said.

Because, as Roisin Wood, the former chief executive of the Kick It Out anti-discrimination charity, tells The Athletic: “It’s something the football industry and the football community doesn’t understand.”

Brings it on himself, doesn’t he?

Sometimes he does. Some of the things he has said and done over the years — most notoriously an egregious social media post in which he wore an IRA-style balaclava in a joke about giving his children a “history lesson” — have inflamed the situation and invited opprobrium.

Watching him at Stoke in April, winding up the home fans he once labelled “uneducated cavemen”, he looked like someone revelling in the hostility.

“I’ve said to James he doesn’t help himself at times,” says his former Sunderland and Ireland team-mate David Meyler. “There have been times when he has reacted and it has got worse. There have been times when I’ve told him I wish I could take his phone off him to stop him jumping on social media.

“But at the same time, I can understand him reacting because the level of abuse he gets — anti-Irish, anti-Catholic — is beyond belief. For a long time, it has been swept under the carpet and it’s sickening to think it has got to this level and carried on for such a long time.

“No higher authority has spoken up for him. As a friend and a team-mate, I wish I had done more to speak up for him publicly and say: ‘This abuse he’s getting is not acceptable. This needs to stop.’

“And this goes all the way back to 2012 when he was a young player at Sunderland. And the poppy.”

For the first 15 months of his career in England, McClean’s was a feel-good story.

He had been a late developer, coming through the youth ranks at Institute, a semi-pro club in his home town of Derry in Northern Ireland before moving on to Derry City and then, aged 22, getting a move to the Premier League and joining Sunderland in a £350,000 deal in August 2011.

He forced his way into their team and made his debut for the Republic of Ireland two months later. He had represented Northern Ireland at youth level but switched allegiance to the Republic — always a controversial move but one that had been taken by Darron Gibson and Shane Duffy, also from Derry, over the previous years.

Upon being called up for the Republic’s Euro 2012 squad, McClean explained that, as a Catholic from Derry, he had never felt he belonged in the Northern Ireland setup and that it had been “hard to stand for that national anthem (* Save The Queen) and see all the flags, the sectarian flags and the chants as well”.

You don’t feel part of that,” he said. “Especially me, from where I grew up.”

That attracted a backlash on social media, with one Twitter user calling him a “dirty * b******” and telling him “I’ll make sure you get shot when you set foot back into gods country” (sic). Another said he deserved to be shot.

McClean, typically, had a go back, mocking Northern Ireland’s failure to qualify for those Euros. It got a lot of publicity in Ireland, but in England, the media coverage focused more on his reaction — hastily deleting his Twitter account — than on the nature of the abuse that had driven him to do so.

Everything changed for McClean later that year. Sunderland were playing away to Everton on November 10, the day before Remembrance Sunday, and both teams were given shirts with red poppies embroidered on the chest — the red poppy being worn, according to the Royal British Legion, as a symbol of remembrance and a show of support for the Armed Forces community.

McClean immediately objected, saying he would not wear a shirt bearing the poppy. He said that doing so would offend people from his community in Derry, the scene of the * Sunday massacre in January 1972, when 14 men, all Catholics, were shot dead by British soldiers during a protest march.

During the game, it was spotted that McClean’s shirt had no poppy. Journalists sought clarification from Sunderland officials, who confirmed the player’s decision and said it had been his “personal choice not to wear a poppy on this occasion”.