Why Do Footballers Kneel Before Kickoff?

Picture the tunnel emptying out, both sets of players walking to the centre circle, and instead of standing for the anthem or the handshake, they drop to one knee on the grass, heads sometimes bowed, for a handful of seconds before getting up and starting the game. That's the moment. It looks small on television but it's a deliberate, coordinated pause built into the pre-match routine.

The gesture is called taking the knee. It's an anti-racism statement linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, and Premier League players began doing it widely from 2020 onward. Kneeling together before kickoff was a way for a whole squad, and often the opposition too, to show solidarity against racism, without saying a word.

The gesture didn't originate in football. It was borrowed from a wider protest movement that had already spread through American sport and beyond, and English clubs picked it up as their own version of the same statement. For a stretch of matches it happened almost every week, home and away, becoming as routine as the pre-match handshake it briefly replaced.

That routine has faded. Taking the knee now happens far less often than it did at its peak. Clubs and players tend to save it for specific fixtures or high-profile matches rather than doing it before every single game, so a modern viewer is more likely to see it on a big occasion than on an ordinary midweek fixture. When it does happen, it's still the same simple picture: both teams down together, briefly still, then back up.

There's a second kind of kneeling in football that has nothing to do with any of this, and it's easy to confuse the two if you're only half watching. A player scores, wheels away, and drops to one or both knees as part of his personal celebration, sometimes sliding into it, sometimes just sinking down where he stands. This is a goal celebration, entirely down to the individual, and it carries no political or anti-racism meaning at all. It's closer to a trademark move, the same way another player might do a somersault or point to the sky.

The giveaway is context. Taking the knee happens before the match starts, involves players from both sides doing it together in a deliberate, unhurried way, and is a collective act. The celebratory kneel happens after a goal, involves one player on his own, and is over almost as fast as it started. Same physical position, completely different meaning, and the timing tells you which one you're looking at.

So if a broadcaster cuts to players kneeling in a line before the whistle, that's the anti-racism gesture, now kept for particular occasions rather than every fixture. If a striker drops to his knees after smashing one into the top corner, that's just how he celebrates, and it says nothing about the other gesture at all.