Gavin Cooney

JAMES MCCLEAN HAS returned to Derry City, bringing to an end his 15-year career in English football. 

So now is a good time to reflect: has any footballer ever been treated so disgracefully for so long in Britain as McClean was? 

In response to an eloquent, well-reasoned and obvious explanation as to why he declined to wear a remembrance poppy, McClean was booed by sections of his own support, consistently barracked by opposition fans, and subjected to a slew of death threats, some of which he shared publicly.

In 2019, he posted a birthday card sent to him in the post reading, “Happy birthday and die on April 24, have an amazing death”, with the inside scrawled with lurid abuse, including a line referring to the Irish as “a race of subhuman parasites”.

In 2021, he and his wife Erin appeared on Claire Byrne’s radio programme to share further grotesque threats, including one that McClean’s home be burned to the ground with his family in it, and that McClean be set alight in front of his children. “We’re just a family over here trying to make a living for ourselves,” said Erin in response to Byrne’s genuine shock. 

McClean has done some moronic things in response – his balaclava-clad Instagram post was misjudged to say the least – and while he has accepted it wasn’t wise, he has also explained that exposure to such radioactive hate was bound to provoke an adverse reaction at some point.

“Put yourself in my shoes,” McClean told Claire Byrne in that same interview. “Some day, right or wrong, you’re going to react.” 

And while McClean can be abrasive and direct and uncompromising – I can remember my heart skipping a beat a few years ago when he looked just past me to label another journalist a “fucking weasel” for posting an unflatteringly edited collection of his involvements in a recent Ireland appearance – his nature is not remotely grounds for the scale of the abuse he has endured. Many of the people commemorated by the poppy, after all, died for people’s rights to hold uncompromising views. 

But it is over now, and McClean and his family can now reflect on life in Britain by distilling the good moments from the bad while taking pride in their collective resolve.

Also worthy of reflection is what the years-long hounding of McClean says about England, for it registered currents of English life and society that only years later became apparent to the majority of its politicians and journalists. 

The first was his making blatant that the wearing of the poppy had long since evolved from a recommendation to a prescription, which historian David Goldblatt said served a specific, contemporary purpose. 

“With Tony Blair’s government worried about a lack of public support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq,” writes Goldblatt in his latest book, Injury Time, “Blair was very clear about the need not merely for supporting, appreciating, and remembering the armed forces, but for acquiescing to their deployment.

“The British Legion, the right-wing press, the military and parts of the political class steadily ratcheted up the pressure on institutions of all kinds to foreground the poppy in acts of remembrance, and football was in their sights.” 

McClean’s treatment in his early years told a different story about the UK than the one the place was officially believing itself: only three months after the projecting of Britain to the world as a vibrant, multicultural place of “happy belonging” at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, McClean was being jeered and assailed with anti-Irish chants over his refusal to wear the poppy as a Sunderland player. (Sunderland, perhaps accentuating the national ignorance at the time, made things much worse for McClean by further isolating him in a statement that said the club supported the poppy appeal and that McClean made the decision solely by himself.) 

And for all that the Brexit vote can be attributed to economic deprivation and social alienation, it was undoubtedly fuelled too by a reactionary English nationalism that took much of the country’s political and media elites by surprise much later than it did McClean: he had been listening to rumbles of that nationalism in football grounds for years prior to June 2016. (The constituencies in which you’ll find McClean’s four clubs – Sunderland, Wigan, West Brom, and Stoke – all voted Leave in majorities ranging from 61.3% to 69.4%.) 

McClean’s career ultimately coincided with England’s belated wrangling with their own national question, something they had centuries avoiding given they were so busy running other countries.

But these difficult questions as to ‘who we are’ and ‘who we should be’ could not be outsourced forever, and it was McClean’s misfortune to be making a living in England at a time when swathes of the country were chafing at the answers that were being handed down to them.  Almost a decade on, it has resulted in the UK going it alone in a radically altered world; carved off from the EU at the same time their “special relationship” with the US has been outed to be that of a barnacle attached to the bottom of a warship. 

McClean, meanwhile, can write the final chapter in a fine career by ending Derry City’s long, long wait for a league title. “Home”, as he said at his unveiling, “is where the heart is.”