Denis Walsh: Sport has no filters, the best and worst of human nature are at play here too

Just before the start of the Premier League season a new crackdown was announced on so-called tragedy chanting in football grounds. It came three years after the Crown Prosecution Service in Britain warned that tragedy chanting could lead to prosecutions. Nine people were arrested for that offence at a Liverpool-Manchester City game later that season. The practice, though, continues.So, songs about the Munich air disaster, the deaths of two Leeds fans in Istanbul 26 years ago, Hillsborough and the Bradford City fire, chants about Gary Speed, who died by suicide, and the paedophile Jimmy Savile – who was from Leeds but who had nothing to do with the football club – continue to be heard at grounds around Britain. This is just a selection of the vile ditties that host broadcasters mute during live matches.This is not just a British problem. Last week, in the Saudi Pro-League, the Portugal international Rúben Neves was subjected to chants about his late friend Diogo Jota, who was killed in a car crash last summer; an image of Neves embracing Jota is tattooed on one of Neves’s legs.Last month, in the MLS, Dor Turgeman, an Israeli striker with the New England Revolution, was subjected to “Death to Israel” chants at an away game against CF Montreal in Quebec. Both clubs joined in their condemnation of the fans. READ MOREA year earlier, when Turgeman was rumoured to be on his way to Glasgow Rangers from Maccabi Tel Aviv, a group of Rangers supporters wrote an open letter to the Rangers chief executive urging the club against such a move in response to the genocide in Gaza. Maybe their voice was heard.In Israeli football, racist chanting is on the rise. In the season before last, Kick It Out Israel recorded 367 incidents of racist chanting at Israeli Premier League matches; the greatest number, 118, were observed at Maccabi Tel Aviv games. The Israeli FA said this was a global football problem.And so, the vicious circle turns. Tragedy chanting and racist chanting and homophobic chanting are on the long list of toxic behaviours that we swear have nothing to do with sport. When we romanticise sport, which we do every time that winning is close to home, we portray it as an elevated space. Not pure, but full of goodness; not divorced from the world, but, at the same time, another place; some kind of ante chamber to the grind of daily existence and our vale of tears. But, of course, there are no filters. Whatever pollutes society turns up in the watercourse of sport. The separations we try to apply have no traction. For convenience we make allowances; not as a matter of principle, naturally.The most lucrative events on the European Ladies Tour are sponsored by Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Peter Parks /AFP via Getty Images For example, the Saudi money that sponsored the disrupter LIV Golf league is leaving the men’s game, but the women’s game is desperate for the Saudi money to stay. On the cash-strapped European Ladies Tour the Saudis sponsor five events, one of which is co-sanctioned with the LPGA Tour in the United States. Those tournaments are by a distance the most lucrative on the European circuit. In the men’s game, the Saudi money was condemned as a sportswashing project for a regime with an appalling human rights record; Graeme McDowell was widely pilloried for joining LIV and Shane Lowry was carpeted for playing in the mega-bucks Saudi International tournament a few years ago.In the court of public opinion, though, our women golfers have been given a free pass to fill their boots with Saudi money. Saudi Arabia’s basic purpose for sponsoring women’s events was the same as their motive for establishing LIV, only the scale was different. As lovers of golf, we railed against one sportswashing scheme and turned a blind eye to the other. [ Malachy Clerkin: LIV Golf should be a cautionary tale to other sports – but we won’t hold our breathOpens in new window ]Sport is a vessel for all kinds of everything. There was outrage among a constituency of Liverpool fans when Jeff Bezos bought a stake in the club during the summer, just as there was push back from a rump of Newcastle fans when the Saudi Public Investment Fund bought 80 per cent of their club five years ago. Jim Ratcliffe, a man who has expressed repulsive views on immigration, owns nearly a third of Manchester United. [ Conor O'Callaghan: Why I have decided to quit supporting Liverpool after 50 yearsOpens in new window ]All of those stadiums are still full. The television viewing figures are not under threat. A tiny number of conscientious objectors might have walked away but everybody else holds their noses, or, more likely, doesn’t give it a second thought.Ben Healy in the 2025 Tour de France. Photograph: Dirk Waem/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images Did you watch the Tour de France this summer, the fastest edition of the race in its history? Do you think it’s clean? Did you dwell on that while the TV screen was filled with spectacular shots of the French countryside and whirlwind cyclists flashing by? Or were you happy to be entertained by the speed and endurance and not scratch the surface? Sport grants that permission. It prefers it that way. No awkward questions, please. So, while every sport has rules, sport has no moral code. Why have Russia been banned by Uefa and Fifa, but Israel has not? Why were Russia only ostracised by the global sports community after their invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but not after their invasion of Crimea in 2014? Who decided that one of those events didn’t meet the required threshold? What is the threshold? Who says so? For years, the global sports community – to use that term as a loose, incoherent collective – has tiptoed around China’s persecution of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang. The United States and Australia refused to send diplomats to the 2021 Winter Olympics in Beijing in protest at China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, but they stopped short of withdrawing their athletes. It was a worthless gesture.[ Israel captain Dor Peretz says Irish players should visit Israel then ‘can judge and think’Opens in new window ]Elite sport is not apart from anything: not from politics, not from business, not from corruption, not from the venality of its corporate partners and their greed, not from the double-dealing of international diplomacy, not from moral equivalence, not from the best and worst of human nature. It is the Garden of Eden, and it is the snake.