Jim Ratcliffe’s shameless comments signal soccer’s turn toward total Trumpism | Leander Schaerlaeckens

Did British petrochemicals billionaire and Manchester United’s controlling minority owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, really mean it when he proclaimed to Sky News that “the UK is being colonized by immigrants”?

Is Ratcliffe simply a gutter racist or actually making a cynical political play that may redound to his benefit down the line when Britain faces down yet another period of political upheaval as the country’s old factions continue to fracture? There’s reasonable debate to be had there.

There’s also a good point about whether even engaging with this sordid rhetoric puts an unfair onus on immigrants by forcing them to tout their contributions and accomplishments – and it, too, has been made. You may even ask the question of whether prefixing someone with a royally conferred honorific in recognition of all their good work in superheating the planet makes them feel untouchable.

As far as soccer is concerned, however, the outcome of any of these discussions sort of doesn’t matter. Neither does Ratcliffe’s half-hearted walk-back of his comments in that actually-not-really-walking-it-back kind of way, doing the semantic I’m-sorry-if-you-were-offended non-apology. Nor does the swift backlash, or Manchester United distancing themselves from the words of the man ostensibly running the club.

Because the upshot is the same. The sport has taken another long stride towards total Trumpism. And perhaps its journey to that fetid place is now complete.

Ratcliffe has been in the public eye more than long enough to know that, when he speaks, he not only represents himself but also his pollution empire and the privatized public good, United, that has wound up in his care. He has offered Bad Takes before, from backing Brexit to promising that Ruben Amorim would serve out his three-year contract as United manager, and understands how they will be received. Still, he felt free to make his comments on immigrants before a TV camera and an audience of millions anyway.

Set aside, for a moment, that a member of the English elite has an opinion on colonialism, and the fact that United’s senior men’s team alone currently counts 19 players from outside the UK. Ratcliffe plainly thinks that there are no longer any limits to what can be uttered out in the open without getting expelled from polite society, or indeed damaging the brand of one of the world’s most popular soccer clubs.

In that sense, the sport remains in lockstep with our overclouded zeitgeist.

Just an inch or so beneath its veneer of beauty, soccer is an odious sport. It has historically turned a blind eye to all manner of abuses. It will take money from anyone at all. It will make money in any way it can. Clubs embraced NFTs when everyone involved should have known they were a fad. Whatever brings in the money required to win games.

The paranoid style has coursed through the sport for decades, but it’s been dialed up recently with Real Madrid TV going full tinfoil hat, while fans of every club appear to see any decision going against their team as a global conspiracy. To the list of sins already containing grifts and intrigues and swindles we can add performative political incorrectness. Because that barrier has been broken through now, no matter the intentions or merits behind Ratcliffe’s words.

Sound like any recent political movement you may have heard of?

If soccer’s tribalism made its slow creep towards this toxicity somewhat inevitable, it was knowingly led there by its putative leader, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, and his embrace of Donald Trump. Infantino’s kowtowing to Trump aligned soccer with the US president’s combativeness and scheming and nihilism from the top down. The generous view is that Infantino debased himself in the interests of pulling off a successful and maximally lucrative World Cup in North America in 2026, the better to safeguard his organization and the sport it stewards. But the outcome is all the same. And this trend will not be readily reversed.

The thing that is likely to long outlast Trump’s hateful political career is the blanket permission he bestowed on people to let their asshole flags fly. The effects of this unspoken edict are readily discernible throughout everyday American life in the erosion of its common courtesies. People are a little meaner, a little angrier, displaying a kind of road rage that spills out of them long after they leave their cars.

Whereas much of the soccer industry once took care to stay out of the politics of the day, hewing instead to more long-term values, many of the sport’s prominent figures have abandoned their studious apolitical stance. What was once ostensibly a gentleman’s game is now animated in no small part by grievance and wariness. The people in it feel less and less constrained in their behavior and speech, from the player verbally abusing the referee all the way up to the billionaire co-owner heaving up his anti-immigrant views for everyone to hear.

• Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.