The dark side of football is something all too often that finds its way to the fore and it appears that there is a murky relationship between Standard Chartered, the Wayuu community that Luis Diaz is part of and a coal mine in Colombia.
It’s all part of a long and interesting read from Simon Hughes for The Athletic and shows how our main shirt sponsors are funding a coal mine that is helping destroy the indigenous group that our No.23 and his family are part of.
One short excerpt from the story reads: ‘Whenever Diaz wears a Liverpool shirt, whether training or during a match, he is inadvertently advertising a sponsor with links to the Cerrejon mine’.
It seems unfair to associate the 25-year-old with this story and almost seems to encourage him to boycott the sponsors (Ted Lasso style), putting the forward in a tough moral position.
If our shirt sponsors are indeed funding a mine that is said to have “seriously damaged the environment and health of the country’s largest indigenous community”, then it’s something that needs to be addressed and on a much larger scale.
This shouldn’t be something on the shoulders of the former Porto man and would need to be tackled on a club-wide scale.
However, this news of their funding of a coal mine won’t be something that the people in charge of renewing the sponsorship deal of the British multinational banking and financial services company won’t have heard before.
We have had the same shirt sponsor for 13 years now and that’s a moral and financial decision that has been made by the club; if one player decides they don’t agree with it – it could do huge damage to the relationship we have with them.
Nobody would stand in the way of Luis Diaz if he wanted to protest against the company he helps advertise and it’s likely his teammates would also have his back, as well Jurgen Klopp and his coaching staff too.
It doesn’t look like we are on the cusp of a player revolt against a shirt sponsor but this article suggests there’s enough ammunition for them, if our Colombian forward decided to do so.
You can view the story via @Simon_Hughes__ on Twitter:
Liverpool’s shirt sponsor Standard Chartered has provided £6.18bn of financing to a company which owns a mine that is causing “irreparable damage” to Luis Diaz’s village and surrounding areas. Investigation from @jwhitey98. https://t.co/N4IFJTCC2K
— Simon Hughes (@Simon_Hughes__) September 5, 2022
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