Uefa has failed to monitor any of this season’s games for racism

Every match in Uefa’s competitions this season has gone unpoliced for racism by undercover spotters, after the European governing body’s contract with its anti-discrimination partner expired.

In what has proved to be a key weapon in football’s crackdown on bigotry in the stands, the Fare network has been supplying Uefa with intelligence on discriminatory abuse since 2013. But it emerged yesterday that this covert surveillance had ceased this season, risking such abuse going undetected.

The importance of such observers was reinforced last month when England’s players were subjected to monkey chants during their World Cup qualifying win in Hungary.

Fare did have spotters at that game through a separate contract to operate Fifa’s anti-discrimination monitoring system.

Hungary were handed a stadium ban after an investigation that would have included evidence supplied by the network.

Uefa said in a statement: “The contract with Fare for providing match observers is currently being renewed and therefore no external observers were deployed at Uefa matches.

“Nevertheless, Fare continues to submit reports in cases of alleged incidents to Uefa. Similarly, all Uefa officials (eg Uefa delegate, Uefa security officer etc) submit a postmatch report with incidents to Uefa.

“Once the discussions with Fare have been concluded, their normal service will resume.”

Fare said in response: “Fare can confirm there have been no observers at matches in Uefa club competitions this season. We look forward to further discussions to begin the process of rebuilding trust to deliver on anti-discrimination and inclusion in European football.”

Piara Powar, Fare’s executive director, last month publicly accused Uefa and Fifa of having “allowed racism to flourish” following the Hungary stadium ban, claiming the governing bodies had failed to ensure that the country’s previous offences were fully taken into account.

Fare has trained 180 observers since teaming up with Uefa and up to 80 of them are used throughout any season.

The network estimates that there is significant discrimination by way of chanting or banners at almost 10 per cent of European games.

Monitors are assigned to these games, agreeing to put their own safety at risk in order to feed information to Uefa.