Mesut Özil, Arsenal & China
Tifo Football Podcast
The Athletic
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2019
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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How one tweet from Mesut Özil lead to his digital footprint being virtually inaccessible in China. James McNicholas joins Tifo to explain the situation and the potential ramifications; from Arsenal's disappointing response, to the question of where politics stops and morals start.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast. My name is Joe Devine and today I am very briefly joined by Seb Stapha Blore. Hello, Seb. Hello, Joe Devine. How are you? I'm well, thanks. How are you? Yeah, not bad. Oh, good. But for the bulk of the episode, I was joined by James McNicholas of the athletic. And we were talking about the situation which is a couple of weeks old now with |
| 0:23.3 | Meza Erzal, the Uyghurz, the Uyghur, China, the Muslim world and also the cowardly West. |
| 0:31.2 | Is that fair? |
| 0:31.6 | And Arsenal's response? |
| 0:32.2 | Yeah, I think that's fair. |
| 0:33.1 | And Arsenal's response, which, well, there's a lot to talk about. |
| 0:36.7 | Before we get started with James, we've got Seb here just to give us a kind of little brief preface to our talk |
| 0:45.2 | by reminding us all of what happened with Darrell Morey, Houston Rockets GM of the NBA, about, what, a month or two ago? |
| 0:53.6 | It's just a little bit longer than that actually Joe. |
| 0:55.4 | I think it was let me just look it up. It was right at the beginning of October. Right. Okay. Yeah. So when are we releasing this? End of December? We're releasing this on Christmas Eve. Right. So it's going to be sort of two and a half months. Now for anyone who does remember, obviously, Houston Rockets GM, Darry, |
| 1:11.2 | during the middle of the Hong Kong democratic protests, |
| 1:16.1 | which became increasingly acrimonious, |
| 1:19.5 | he tweeted his solidarity with the protesters, |
| 1:24.0 | and that set off a chain of reactions, |
| 1:27.3 | which involved Hong Kong, and that set off a chain of reactions, |
| 1:31.7 | which involved Hong Kong, |
| 1:34.7 | Chinese business partners of the NBA. |
| 1:38.9 | Obviously, there's sort of the NBA is hugely popular, |
| 1:41.0 | particularly the Houston Rockets, |
| 1:43.9 | because Yao Ming played for them, NBA Hall of Famer. |
| 1:48.0 | And there was... The Wall of China. |
| 1:49.7 | I mean, I want to use words like cowardly, because that's how I feel people are free to |
... |
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