Gavin Cooney

THE RETURN OF the Premier League has brought with it a jarring interlude on Sky Sports’ television coverage. 

Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage is brought to you by the British Army.

Wait, what? 

Sky have this season unveiled a suite of new “whistle-to-whistle” sponsors of their live coverage, and signing up alongside traditional partners – your Guinnesses, your Coca-Colas, your Uber Eatses – are the British Army. 

The army’s sponsorship on Sky has been explicitly linked to recruitment, with a pre-season press release quoting Major General Joe Fossey, who is director of army recruiting.

“The British Army is proud to sponsor Sky Sports’ coverage of the 2025/26 Premier League,” he said. “Many of our core values such as discipline, loyalty, courage and respect are shown every week in the Premier League. The sponsorship offers a powerful platform to highlight the exciting opportunities that we offer, while celebrating the spirit of belonging that football, its supporters and the army all share.”

There are a few perspectives from which this is worth looking at. 

The British taxpayer, for instance, might be minded to ask whether an appropriate use of their money is to add a few more bricks to the paywall behind which the professional leagues of their national sport have been sequestered.

Sky’s agreeing to the sponsorship deal also shows a profound disregard for their subscribers in Ireland, most obviously those living in the parts of Northern Ireland where the past atrocities of the British Army remain most raw.

(We contacted Sky’s press office earlier this week seeking comment on the sponsorship, and specifically whether they considered how it would be received among their Irish subscribers. They did not respond.) 

You can argue that Irish viewers seeking respect for their own history on a British broadcaster of an English league are watching the wrong channel in the first place.

But, first of all, Irish viewers wanting to watch the true matches of consequence in the Premier League have no legal choice but to subscribe to Sky, for whom Ireland has proved a lucrative market. 

Medium aside, watching English football should naturally be of importance to an Irish fan, given how deeply embedded Irish football has been within England for decades. Keith Andrews is merely the latest Irishman to hold down a prominent role in the English game. 

Plus, even allowing for this history, the Premier League effectively markets itself as a global entertainment product that just happens to be set in England, hence its codified allergy to allowing any political sloganeering on the pitch or within stadia. 

Promoting the British Army to an Irish audience is an unquestionably political decision, even if other parts of the English game have previously not believed it so. Ireland’s Nations League defeat to England at Wembley last November, you may remember, was prefaced by military personnel walking the pitch and unfurling the national flags.

We asked the English FA at the time why they had the military present, and why they did not believe this was a political statement, given the opponent. They replied to say they always invite the military to perform the “pre-game banner parade” before men’s and women’s senior internationals.  

This reply illuminates a couple of contemporary truths.

The first is the abiding provincial ignorance of the official England mind: that an act or symbol can be deemed apolitical solely because they believe it to be so.

This is the tension that has been so eloquently explained by James McClean: the poppy and other military signifiers may stand solely for respect and remembrance in Britain, but they have very different meanings for those who have inherited the memory and trauma of a community who were faced with the other end of the gun. 

Even Fifa have accepted this British reading of history. Where they justifiably cited their own rules in censuring the FAI for commemorating the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising on the Irish kit during a friendly with Switzerland, a year later they reversed on an earlier banning of the remembrance poppy, allowing England wear them on their shirts with the consent of the opposition. Their reasoning was that Armistice Day was a day of national significance. 

Lest readers accuse this column of its own provincialism of mind, the second truth the FA articulated is a broader one: the creeping militarisation of daily life. 

That the military would attach itself to professional sport is nothing new, and American sports writer Howard Bryant has led the way in arguing that the enormous military presence at NFL games post 9/11 was a means of folding them into a widely televised form of patriotism that would help endorse, among other things, the war in Iraq.

In his new book, Injury Time, historian David Goldblatt argues the poppy has served a similar function in Britain, as it has evolved from emblem of remembrance to something more enabling. 

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

Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage is evidently the latest slice of football within these sights. This is not solely an English thing, either, as we’ve seen other military/football collaborations across Europe too, most obviously with Borussia Dortmund’s recent sponsorship deal with German arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall. 

Given football is an effective lens through which to see the wider world, its aligning with the military is unsurprising in times like these, with NATO defence spending cranking up as war rages on Europe’s eastern edge. In years to come, everything we’ve mentioned here may stick out as staging posts on the way to a grisly destination. 

This is all to say: sitting down to watch football is not nearly as diverting as it used to be.