I've BEEN mad about this https://t.co/nrD6UXadV6 pic.twitter.com/g65rJO6fsm— Becky Taylor-Gill (@beckytaylorgill) June 14, 2026 Guess I'm not the only bothered by this. Lol.
Back when a DC United coach got (ridiculously) fired for the same circle game joke, under the absurd “white supremacy” reasoning, I thought about keeping a running list of all the times I saw people make that sign in non-race-related contexts, because it genuinely happens all the time. Either as a circle game or, even more commonly, an “ok hand” signal. These controversies are patently ridiculous. Intent matters, and anyone with a speck of common sense knows the intent has nothing to do with race. It sounds ridiculous to even type this out. That said, I don’t think it’s professional for a match official to be playing any kind of “games” while they’re working a match. But things need to be kept in proportion here. Any news article suggesting he’s a white supremacist should be shamed. The toxic media environment we live in is gross.
I am baffled by the repeated "you can't give a corner with VAR, but you can only take one away". If a mistake was made, correct the mistake. I don't understand the dichotomy.
I don’t think there’s a basis to assume one way or the other right now. Yes, it’s a symbol for the circle game, but it’s also a fairly well known white supremecist symbol at this point. I believe someone either in this thread or elsewhere confirmed that that’s known in Australia. I think it’s fair for articles to point that out. I’m not sure what basis there is at this point to just assume it’s the more innocuous explanation.
The explanation given is that they want to avoid goals being scored from wrongly awarded corners (similar to a foul in the APP). But I agree it’s not a very convincing distinction
It’s all about perception. No one (except us geeks) remembers a GK that should have been a CK. But everyone will remember a goal that scores from a CK that should have been a GK. (No one will ever know that then denied CK would have led to the game winning goal.) nonetheless, I agree it is a totally stupid decision by IFAB (who claim to support attacking soccer)
In one of the articles about the law changes, I believe there was a quote from somebody at FIFA or IFAB that they were confident they could get the reviews done before the average corner kick would be taken (I seem to recall 25 seconds as the number given for an average corner kick). Even if a team is a behind, they usually spend a fair bit of time getting their center backs forward and having their corner kick taker run across the field. The only semi-plausible explanation I can think of for the CK/GK discrepancy is that trying to reverse goal kicks would require things to get done much more quickly, because it is very possible that a team (especially if they're down a goal) takes a goal kick much more quickly than 25 seconds. On the other hand, the laws say that the game shouldn't be held up to reverse a quickly taken corner, so you could also say that if a team gets the GK taken quickly, good for them and there's no reversal. But I do think there's a pretty big difference between the minimum time needed for a corner and the minimum time needed for a goal kick, and that may have been a factor in the law change.
I saw the clip that caused all the hubbub about the white supremacist signal. Evans was just playing the circle game, what are you all upset about
"Working vacation" today, so I'm at home today with the games on. These rectangular referee watches look like bricks. I thought my Apple Watch Ultra was big. All of the officials will have one forearm larger than the other after wearing those suckers for a few games.
I considered not letting myself get baited into this nonsense but whatever: The basis is that the circle game is a widespread, extremely common game that most people are familiar with, while very few normal people outside of certain US-centric political bubbles have even heard of the “white supremacist” interpretation and an extraordinarily small number of extremists even use it in that way. And heck, even more people than the circle game use the gesture to say “ok.” Theres even an emoji named after that! If you think that the “white supremacy” connotation is anywhere near as common as the gesture’s other use cases, I don’t know what to tell you other than you may be hanging out with some bad people. Also, the circle game is almost always done by holding the gesture below the waist while posing for a photo. Which is exactly what we had here. Any media outlet drawing a false equivalence between the two possible interpretations is not doing their job. I’m sorry that I had to walk you through this in such detail.
Maybe, I don’t know. Probably he’s not a white supremacist. Probably he was just playing a game or signaling his kids or whatever. And surely I’m not going to take the FIFA racism partner all that seriously. One thing I think we can all agree on, though, is do not use this moment that you’ve been working towards for decades to be cute. His World Cup is over, and no one will be talking about this in a day, but what a silly way to go out.
I agree, it’s not professional of him at all. But there’s a big difference between running a story about a match official joking around before a game, vs running a story saying alleging that he could be a white supremacist.
One item that has so far been unremarked upon is the Temu-level quality of the corner flags, which look like someone ordered the cheapest dish towels you can find on Amazon and laid them on top of PVC from FIFA World Cup 2026 sponsor The Home Depot (TM).