Dominik Szoboszlai, the greatest Hungarian football prospect of this millennium, has made a successful debut in the most competitive league in the world, the English Premier League. He put on two impressive performances against Chelsea (in a 1–1 tie), and against Bournemouth (a 3–1 victory, with the opposite side featuring fellow Hungarian international Milos Kerkez). He was even voted ‘Man of the Match’ by Liverpool fans in the latter game.
However, it was not only his promising start with his world-famous new team, but also an incident that also garnered ample attention in the Hungarian media. Ahead of the season opener against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, Szoboszlai ‘took the knee’, along with all of his teammates, as a stance against racism.
While the gesture, as per its ‘branding’, has nothing but good intentions, its controversial origin is still very vivid in most football fans’ memory. Most of them remember all Premier League players wearing the words ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ written on the back of their jerseys in lieu of their names in the first games after the league came back, ending the pandemic-induced break in June 2020. In the ensuing months,
the very same movement all PL teams endorsed went on to incite riots across American cities,
causing billions of dollars in damage and resulting in dozens of deaths.
As the movement’s popularity began to sharply decline—this was accelerated by the revelation that some of the leaders of the official BLM non-profit organisation had embezzled a large chunk of the donated funds and even bought lavish homes for themselves—the Premier League anti-racism campaign has been rebranded to ‘No Room For Racism’. That slogan per se is an inoffensive one at that.
However, quite unnecessarily, the pre-kickoff kneeling stayed, forever tying the Premier League’s anti-racist grandstanding to the ill-fated and often ill-intentioned Black Lives Matter movement.
Thankfully, the gesture is no longer performed before every game since the start of the previous, 2022–2023 season. It’s only done on certain occasions, such as the season starter earlier this month. Another time the kneeling was brought back for the games was in October 2022, as a response to the ‘atrocity’ of American rapper Kanye West wearing a shirt with ‘WHITE LIVES MATTER’ written on the back at the Paris fashion show.
This takes us to the 13 August league game between Chelsea and Liverpool, with Szoboszlai featured in the away side’s starting line-up. All 22 players on the pitch took the knee before the kick-off, including Szoboszlai.
Did Szoboszlai have the freedom to refuse? Yes, there have been cases of individual players refraining from kneeling in the Premier League.
Sadio Mané, coincidentally also from Liverpool at the time, and Wilfried Zaha from Crystal Palace are two players who have done so in the past, and they did not face the ‘social justice warrior’ backlash one might have expected if it had taken place in the United States. Across the ocean, former LA Galaxy player Aleksandar Katai was let go from the team after his wife (not even himself…) criticised the George Floyd riots on social media.
Szoboszlai did not have to fear such severe repercussions had he chosen to resist, however, he still likely would have faced a much bigger media backlash than the two aforementioned players for a simple reason: while Mané and Zaha are black, he is white. Also, both black ‘contrarians’ had been playing for their respective clubs for years before they made the call to not participate in the controversial custom. Szoboszlai, on the other hand, was making his Liverpool debut in a competitive match.
This was simply not a risk a 22-year-old young man should have taken at his first game after his club had paid €70 million for his services.
Previously, there were actually two occasions where Szoboszlai refused to take a knee before the game. Before the Hungarian National Team’s two Nations League games against England in the summer of 2022, the Hungarian players, captained by Ádám Szalai at the time, stayed standing while the English were kneeling—evidently, Szoboszlai too was among the ones wo remained standing. Famously, despite the odds, Hungary beat England in both games, 1–0 at home, then a thumping 4–0 in the away leg. Szoboszlai scored the winner from a penalty in the first game.
Since Szalai’s retirement, Szoboszlai, still only 22, has been wearing the captain’s armband in the Hungarian team. There is little doubt Hungary would not be taking the knee under Szoboszlai’s captainship either. Understandably, however, he did not take the chance of going against his teammates on his Premier League debut, and triggering intense media scrutiny while he is still just getting accustomed to top-tier English football.
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