Message claims football players can wear BLM on shirts but not Poppy? Fact Check

Messages online claim that football players in England were permitted to wear Black Lives Matter on the back of their playing shirts but had previously been banned from wearing the remembrance poppy on their shirts, highlighting a double standard.

MISLEADING

Examples of the message can be seen below.

So football players will display BLM on their shirts. But weren’t allowed to Display the Poppy Symbol
Equality??

So Football is supporting The BLM movement but will not support the Poppy.
Racist baskets. 😠😠😠
Share if you dare.
I did

The crux of the messages seems to be that there is a double standard in English football that has allowed players to wear a Black Lives Matter message on their shirts but not one that allows for wearing the remembrance poppy, but this is misleading.

It is misleading because English Premier League players – who in June 2020 wore the Black Lives Matter message adorned on their shirts – are indeed allowed to wear the remembrance poppy on their football shirts as well. In fact, since 2012, it has become common practise to have the poppy symbol sewn into playing shirts during the month of November, when the UK observes the Remembrance period.

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The Premier League is run by the English Football Association (FA) that does allow certain types of messages to be displayed on shirts, including both the Poppy and the Black Lives Matter message.

The confusion with these messages has most likely risen from an incident in 2016 when the English national football team were told were not allowed to wear the poppy on their football shirts during a World Cup qualifying match on November 11th, Remembrance Day. However international football has a different governing body than that of the English Premier League. It is FIFA that runs international tournaments and they have a different (and much stricter) set of rules regarding football kits than the English FA.

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As such, the messages above are comparing rules from two different governing bodies to try and demonstrate a double standard that doesn’t really exist. The English FA permits both the Remembrance Poppy and the Black Lives Matter message on playing shirts, while FIFA prohibits the Remembrance Poppy and would no doubt prohibit the Black Lives Matter message as well (though such an occurrence has not yet come to bear as far as we are aware since no country has made such a request.)

It is perhaps worth noting that England and Scotland did indeed both wear the Poppy during their 2016 qualifying matches on instructions from the English FA. Both teams were subsequently fined by FIFA.