Thank heavens for that. English football clubs will no longer have a minute’s silence for tragedies like floods, earthquakes and volcanoes across the other side of the world. Of course, it’s lovely for players and fans to show solidarity with their fellow human beings. But the whole thing has got out of hand, is horribly inconsistent and achieves next to nothing.

In September 2023, all English clubs held a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of an earthquake thousands of miles away in North Africa. But following the attacks by Hamas on Israel a month later, which led to the murder of 1,200 people, the FA chose not to light up the Wembley arch in the colours of the Israeli flag, though it did so for Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022.

The problem is that the bigger

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