But also: American footballer Colin Kaepernick, pioneer of the “take a knee” protest, was named GQ magazine's Citizen of the Year; it was revealed that English Football League grounds will later this month fly rainbow-coloured corner flags in solidarity with LGBT fans, players and staff; and a Barbie doll modelled on hijab-wearing US fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad was launched.

I cannot believe that sport has ever provided a more fertile medium for initiatives encouraging a more tolerant and diverse society.

Sport, moreover, has never enjoyed a more prominent place in the liberal western democracies that I, and many of you, inhabit.

And yet a number of these democracies strike me as angrier and more divided than for many years.

This juxtaposition of circumstances poses a challenge to those of us who think part of sport’s value is its capacity to bring people together, to foster better mutual understanding of cultural, social, even spiritual differences.

What conclusions should we draw?

Is sport - for all its megabucks, rapt global audiences and, at times, pompous verbiage – still only of marginal significance when it comes to shaping how we interact with one another in day-to-day life?

Does it, in fact, tend to divide people more than it unites them, by providing a metaphor for conflict and a common language in which to hurl insults at one another?

Or is there some other disconnect preventing a sector whose good intentions are manifest and I think largely sincere from influencing thinking and general behaviour to a greater degree?

One fairly obvious starting-point is to acknowledge that sport only has out-and-out control over its own activities.

It has a range of more or less effective tools for influencing messages emitted by athletes and administrators while engaged in their sport-related tasks.

However, to be a really powerful force for good, it is its billions-strong audience that sport needs to be influencing.

This, clearly, is an altogether bigger ask.

Yes, it can exert some degree of authority over the actions, and perhaps ultimately the thinking, of spectators actually in the arena.

But as for the millions who watch the biggest events on TV and other portable and/or interactive devices, the sector’s scope for influence appears far more limited.

This issue was underlined for me by a recent conversation I had with Kashif Siddiqi, one of very few British South Asians to have played professional football in the UK.

I was interested in meeting Siddiqi, who has become quite well known for various humanitarian initiatives including Football For Peace, because of the urgent need to foster better mutual understanding between the predominantly white populations of liberal democracies such as the UK and their growing South Asian-origin minorities, in particular Muslims.

It seems to me a problem that sport could help with.

But how?

At a certain moment, our conversation turned to a particular place in England and Siddiqi recalled a story he had been told recently by a dinner companion.

This woman had said that she cannot go out on the streets of this particular place “without being called a white slag”.

At the same time, a friend of hers who is Muslim and who wears a hijab cannot go out on the same streets without being told to “go back to your country”.

She estimated that those responsible for these taunts were in each case in the 15-17 year-old age bracket.

Siddiqi said the story left her in tears.

Now this place happens to have a Premier League football club, which poses the obvious question, Could the club do anything to change the attitudes underpinning such obnoxious and unacceptable behaviour?

Given the proportion of 15-17 year-old males who take an interest in football, one’s instinctive reply would be, Yes – even though the story did not directly concern football, or indeed sport.

Yet when we then sought to pinpoint what specifically one might want the club to do, certainly I, and to an extent I think it is fair to say Siddiqi, had trouble formulating a prescription.

Displaying messaging at the stadium and other club premises was, I think, the best I could come up with on the spur of the moment, while acknowledging that such a step seemed unlikely to make much difference.

Mulling the problem over subsequently, I settled on what in the long run would be a far more effective response – and, yes, it may be that the club and others like it are doing this anyway, in which case, more power to them.

It boils down to setting a good example: the club should employ people from all sections of the community in which it is based and demonstrate – and energetically promote - how they can and do cooperate to forge a winning team.

Needless to say, this policy would be most effective if it were also applied to the first-team squad.

I can still remember the impact in a country already flirting with the far-right Front National of the World Cup victory achieved in 1998 by an exceptionally diverse French squad, starring the likes of Zinedine Zidane and Lilian Thuram.

Of course, the notion of top-flight clubs drawing the bulk of their players from their local communities died out decades ago.

But every Premier League team today is, nonetheless, an example of individuals from a richly varied selection of backgrounds and ethnicities pooling resources and pulling together for their common good.

This dovetails relatively neatly with the narrative.

Setting a good example – it should be easy enough: respect your opponent; adjudicate impartially; have a drink or a chat with opposing fans.

It should be easy enough, and if all of us connected with sport, however tangentially, did so consistently, it would, I fancy, do more over time to reduce friction in our societies than just about any other action it is in sport’s gift to take.