Kneeling is a dangerous area to have an opinion on, but my strongly anti-knee, er... stance is that on the rare occasions I bother with sport (money ruins everything), I do so as an escape from the mess of problems that makes up my every day life. What folk do in their well paid spare time is their business, but on the pitch I want balls dribbling, not sagging to the ground.
The kneeling cult is doing absolutely nothing whatsoever to stop people getting stroppy and lashing out with the most convenient and hurtful of critiques when things go wrong or the opposition needs antagonising. If you're bald, like me, you'll always be "you bald git!" when tempers flare. And if you're black in a predominantly white environment, then it's all too easy for the lazy or ignorant to reach for epithets which reflect that obvious otherness. It's a soft, lazy, kind of racism in a world where the hardcore version exists in nations we trade with every day. Especially Qatar. Neither's right, but we're a lot further down the slow road to fairness than the culturally puritanical Chinese, who are busy taking over the world's resources while we squabble among ourselves.
I'm pretty sure the majority of booing is nothing to do with racism and everything to do with "get on with it, you're footballers earning a bazillion times more than me and I've forked out this ticket money for a football game, not a lecture!" But the UK has had a collective nervous breakdown since Brexit revealed the unwashed masses were bolshier than their masters ever dared guess (shows how much history they read!) Then covid came along to give us too long to think about things. So now every little pimple of discontent gets squeezed, poked and infected -- rather than sterilised -- by the scrutiny of mass and social media, until it becomes something dangerous to overall cultural health.
Racism will end when, inevitably, every street in every nation is populated by one homogenous blur of folk from all over the place and individual nationality/ethnic traits vanish... probably speaking Mandarin. We're all just lucky chimps at the end of the day, and chimps are nasty and tribal and genetically programmed to throw dung at 'the other'. Overcoming millennia of ingrained evolutionary behavioural biology is hard and takes time and patience. Both are in short supply because mass migration and then the internet have come along close together (in historical terms) like two halves of a crude atomic cultural warhead.
Kneeling is gesture politics, and is helping defuse nothing whatsoever. It's just another bit of grit in our shoes as we trudge along the winding path to a better future (or ecological oblivion).
Right, I'm off to my nuclear bunker to check the dates on my supply of long life rations and practice mixing metaphors until they blur together seamlessly in one gloriously puzzling paragraph.
TLDR: Just another irrelevant old white guy typing into the moral void. My heroes are scientists and engineers, not bladder-kickers, so what would I know?
