International Patriots Fans Are Unhappy With Tom Brady’s Deflategate Punishment

White House spokesman Josh Earnest weighed in on New England Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady’s suspension Tuesday, reminding the American megastar that he’s a role model to “people around the world.” Turns out many of those people are very, very unhappy with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

To those uninitiated on the intricacies of the scandal dominating the American sports scene and widely known as Deflategate or Ballghazi: Brady is an Ugg-shilling celebrity who’s won five Super Bowls with the Patriots (his most recent title came this year), earns a $8 million annual salary, and is married to supermodel Gisele Bündchen, just three of the factors that lead American football fans outside of New England to generally despise him. This week, Goodell suspended him for four games for playing with footballs that weren’t properly inflated. Hence, Deflategate.

Goodell, who is also disliked by many NFL fans for inconsistent punishments, a hefty 2013 salary of $44 million, and general corporate buffoonery on behalf of the league, also slapped the Patriots with a million dollar fine and took away some of the team’s future draft picks.

As the rest of the football world celebrates, Patriots fans are incensed over the punishment, which they deem too harsh, and this outrage isn’t limited to American shores. As Earnest suggested, there are Patriot fans around the world. From the looks of things online, they’re as outraged as their American counterparts.

A group called Dutch Patriots Fans, which is registered as an official fan club on the Patriot’s website (all of the groups mentioned below are registered with the team, a loose affiliation that does not suggest any financial backing from the club), fired off a series of tweets condemning Goodell and and backing their embattled number 12. Check one out below:

The group followed also retweeted a series of images expressing support for Brady, who, up to this point, is defiant in face of the punishment.

The UKPatriots, a group based in United Kingdom, also took to media to express their outrage, rounding up all the hashtags being used to back Brady.

Then came this from a group called Patriots Sweden:

Translation: Disproportionate.

The Patriots España, a group based in Spain, calls the Well’s investigation a witch hunt in the tweet below (they condemned Goodell with harsher tweets that aren’t safe for a family Web site):

They then retweeted this image:

The Hungarian Patriots Fan Club isn’t happy either and posted this picture in support of their QB.

Goodell often likes to say the NFL is a global game, a notion many American fans scoff at. But at the very least, these tweets show some football sentiments are universal — strong feelings about Tom Brady, one way or the other.

Photo Credit: Billie Weiss/Getty Images