Woke change to England flag.

Sorry/not sorry for the multiple posts but I just read a comment on a football fan site that made me chuckle.

(paraphrasing) ‘Replace the Welsh Red Dragon with a Big Yellow Horse!’

Regardless of woke or trans or progressivist ideas or Nike
being an nasty, hypocritical corporation, what it boils down to is that flags are generally pretty simple things and if you tinker with it too much it ceases to be the flag and becomes something unspecific, and many people who care about the nation/team/sports event where that flag is traditionally used find it unnecessary/insulting/ annoying.

The St George Cross is a red cross on white background. Make either element a different colour and it’s no
longer the St George Cross.

Stella M’s Olympic outfits were criticised because removing the red part of the Union Jack is symbolically erasing England and NI from the Union. If the design has been all red and no blue, it would’ve symbolically erased Scotland from the Union.

St George 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 + St Andrew 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 + St Patrick Saltire (which doesn’t seem to have an emoji) = 🇬🇧*

of course, the Union Jack (see also 🇺🇸 ) is specific enough that you can desaturate it to black and white or make it entirely pink and still get the gist of it what it’s communicating but the St G is pretty plain so making it a purple-blue-gradient on a purple or red shirt collar background makes it too unspecific to still be a St G.

*sorry Wales! I know you are technically supposed to represented via the St G cross but I’d happily chuck a bad ass dragon 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 (or a Big Yellow Horse 😬) in the middle of the Union Jack, that’s a flag update I could support!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_Kingdom#:~:text=The%20flag%20consists%20of%20the,(patron%20saint%20of%20Scotland).

Still glad they’ve improved the womenswear fit tho - has anyone noted if they’ve moved away from
white shorts? I recall some of the women’s team pointing out how playing a televised match in white shorts whilst on one’s period was an unnecessarily uncomfortable experience!

You must have been living somewhere where news media were completely unobtainable in 2012.

There was a big fuss, quite a few athletes publicly criticised the design ….one said he thought they might be mistaken for French competitors ( and I don’t think he meant that as an aspiration)

From the Middle Ages, that’s a lot of history, good and bad. Why does everyone think St George flag is so bad? Why the embarrassment?
Why can’t we accept that shit happened but we carry on evolving and trying to get better.
Im not going to start hanging one from the roof but there is nothing wrong with St George’s flag. It doesn’t need to be changed by an American company to make money.

YouGov even ran a poll on it:https://yougov.co.uk/sport/articles/4016-stella-mccartneys-team-gb-olympic-kit-designs-you-

but ‘NoOnE cRiTiCisEd StElLa mCcArtNey’

maybe the internet has destroyed people’s capacity for memorising things from 10 plus years ago?

There has been for a long time, yes

https://amp.theguardian.com/sport/2012/mar/22/stella-mccartney-team-gb-london-2012

https://fashionunited.uk/v1/fashion/stella-mccartney-olympic-uniforms-met-with-criticism/2012032311602

Perhaps the thinking went:
'Bloody Terfs on Terf Island > how can we show England that Trans Rules OK? > oh yeah they like football over there > let's get our secret guy on the inside in Nike to change their uniform's flag - that'll show 'em!😂

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/style/stella-mccartney-responds-criticism-her-british-olympic-team-uniforms-poll-303393/amp/

The colours aren’t a messy mix up

Do people buy and wear replica Olympic kits?

Did we all have a smart phone via which we could easily publish our opinions in 2012?

Is Team GB culturally the same as events where the U.K. split into our 4 nations?

Have you bothered to read the criticism that Stella McCartney received for those outfits or are you just blindly repeating something you read elsewhere on the internet having done none of your own research?

Because we didn't blame everything we didn't like on woke people back then.

Doubt it, Nike probably have multiple thousands being made in foreign sweatshops already.

Why is this causing such a problem?

This was the team GB Olympic strip for London 2012. I don't remember such a fuss about the colours then.

It still looks like a DEI mess even if you don’t buy one

Wonder if they can drop the whole design

The price is definitely controversial!

I'd give more of a shit if it was going to be affordable for most football fans

YABU to link GB News.

I cant see anywhere online that states this is a trans issue.

it's literally multicolour parallel stripes with angle breaks.

Hate it. Pretty basic tenet of national football is a kit with your flag on it.

No other country would stand for a 'playful update' of its national symbols.

I also find it nasty that a large brand is so keen to provoke and exploit national divisions. There's something incredibly mean and low about that.

I also find the endless whinging about Britain extremely tiresome. No, it's not perfect. But tell me, where is this perfect place you'd like to live?

To be charitable if your main interaction with flags has been all the various tumblr-origin flags of the last few years, which are constantly tinkered with to cater to smaller and smaller subgroups, you might well feel a bit baffled when a bunch of people outside of your social ingroup kick off about a tiny recoloured flag on a football shirt?

Whereas in football culture, colours and badges have fixed meanings, to the point where a colour name is used a a personal descriptor, eg Manchester United fans are Reds and City fans are Blues.

Why didn’t they just say that the St George flag would no longer be printed on the shirts? At least then they would have been honest about it. Instead, we have a multi coloured design of a cross.

As for the side panels…. 🙄

In the U.K. I think a large part of why it was adopted was because people adopted a rainbow as a symbol of hope and the NHS during the Covid pandemic.

That's not a flag. Where's the white part? Is it rectangular? It's a motif, not a flag. They'd make a headline out of anything to get people going.