Making a pitch for change
Black Fire players share experiences with race in life and soccer, express hope for better future
Soccer has a long history of racism in nearly every corner of the world — a global problem for a global game.
Fire players have experienced it on the pitch and in life, everything from racial slurs to people crossing the street at the sight of skin color.
“The reality is that is just going to be what it is for now,” defender Andre Reynolds said. “Obviously it needs to change — and it is changing — but I was always raised with the mindset that I’m going to have to work for all of my opportunities because there’s going to be a bunch of barriers for me.”
The Tribune spoke to some of the Fire’s Black players about their experiences — and why new initiatives, education and coalitions give them hope for the future.
‘Some kid’s mother … ended up throwing out the N-word’
The epithet came out so easily during an argument.
And not just any epithet. The epithet. Directed at a child.
The target of the abuse was a 10- or 11-year-old Andre Reynolds, playing youth soccer before joining the Fire’s academy and later the senior squad.
It was during the run of play, when competitiveness and adrenaline can turn an aerial duel or a well-intended challenge for the ball into a confrontation.
The ensuing argument is something Reynolds, now 19, can remember “vividly.”
“Some kid’s mother got real mad at me and started arguing with my parents, starting arguing with me and ended up throwing out the N-word,” he said. “It was just a whole mess, but then we appealed to the league and they cracked down on it pretty quickly.”
Still, the incident left an impression, something Reynolds likely won’t forget.
“I kind of wish I was making this up,” he said.
Reynolds considers himself fortunate to have spent most of his life in the South Loop, the son of a father from Evanston and a mother from Englewood. A Jones College Prep graduate, he turned down an Ivy League education and soccer scholarship to Brown to go pro at 17 before the 2019 season.
But he said at times he has experienced the type of profiling and microaggressions that can be everyday occurrences for young Black men.
“I’ve had a fairly good experience, but the biggest issue hasn’t been blatant racism,” he said. “Everybody’s experienced different, but I’d say more so just stereotyping, talking to me in different ways than they talk to other people or thinking I’m not as knowledgeable on certain topics.”
Reynolds has an unique perspective on race and soccer, particularly as a Chicago native. He has had conversations with teammates and coaches — including a “long conversation” with Fire coach Raphael Wicky, a Switzerland native — about the history of segregation, redlining and police brutality in Chicago and the United States.
And despite about 30% of the city’s population identifying as Black, Reynolds and his brother, Justin, often stood out as Black players on their youth teams.
“It’s strange to me because there are so many Black people in Chicago,” he said.
The Fire are attempting to reach out to Chicago’s Black communities in part through their P.L.A.Y.S. (Participate, Learn, Achieve, Youth Soccer) Program. Yet when the club requested ideas and feedback on a new crest, residents in 65 Chicago neighborhoods initially responded. The majority of the neighborhoods that did not respond are on the West, far South and Southeast sides.
A greater outreach is something Reynolds, a member of the Black Players for Change that formed last season, hopes the Fire can rectify with P.L.A.Y.S. and greater awareness of Black Fires, a fan group that supports the Fire and Red Stars.
“If the Black community can really find soccer, it would love it,” he said. “We would commit ourselves to it because, at the end of the day, it’s a fun sport, it’s a global sport, it’s an opportunity for you to interact with all different types of people, all different types of races and nationalities.”
A banana — and a Christmas tradition of blackface
Black players in Europe for decades were the subject of racist abuse in the form of monkey chants and bananas tossed from the stands.
The frequency of such acts isn’t at the level it was in the 1970s and ’80s, though several high-profile recurrences the last few years — in Italy, England and Spain, among others — have brought it back into the spotlight.
Johan Kappelhof saw it firsthand in the Netherlands when coming through the ranks of AFC Ajax’s famed youth academy.
As Kappelhof tells it, he was 17 or 18 at the time, playing with Ajax’s second team on the road against Feyenoord — the biggest rivalry in the country, called “De Klassieker” in Dutch. While he and a teammate were warming up on the sideline, fans shouted abuse and tossed a banana at his teammate, he said.
“That was actually my first experience of ‘Whoa, they don’t care about someone’s feelings,’ ” the 30-year-old Kappelhof said. “It’s just a sport. That was a big eye-opener that there are people like this who are doing these things.”
The return trip was the teenagers’ attempt to process what happened.
“We didn’t realize,” he said. “On the bus back to Amsterdam, we kind of laughed about it because you’re young and saying, ‘These people are just crazy,’ and just laughing it off. But looking back, we were like, ‘This is really bad that there are people like this out there.’ ”
Kappelhof, who joined the Fire in 2016, is biracial — his father is a white Dutchman and his mother is from Ghana — and grew up in an inclusive family. He called his upbringing in the multicultural and largely progressive Amsterdam “positive.”
But throughout the Netherlands, protests have called for the country to reckon with its colonial past and role in the slave trade.
One tradition that causes division is Zwarte Piet — “Black Pete” in Dutch — a character in blackface, often depicted with oversized lips and a curly wig, that accompanies Sinterklaas during the Christmas season.
Movements against Zwarte Piet gained strength as the Black Lives Matter movement expanded globally in 2020.
“It’s a very bad, bad thing in Holland that divides the country,” Kappelhof said of Zwarte Piet. “There’s some people who want to keep that, and of course a lot of people want to stop that. There were a lot of protests against that.”
A crowded bus and an empty seat that goes unfilled
When Ecuador qualified for its first World Cup in 2002, two-thirds of La Tri’s squad was Black — a significant number considering Afro-Ecuadorians make up only about 7% of the country’s population.
Jhon Espinoza, who signed with the Fire in November, was only 3 at the time, one of seven children raised by his parents in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city and its main port.
Being in a large family helped him grow up faster, and by the time he was in his midteens, he already had moved in pursuit of a playing career that has included captaining the Ecuadorian national team to a third-place finish in the 2019 under-20 World Cup and earning his first two appearances with the senior squad.
Like many players of African descent in the region, Espinoza said he has experienced racism during away international matches.
“But regardless … it didn’t affect me because I already knew how to deal with it,” the 21-year-old Espinoza said through an interpreter.
Those previous incidents were less overt and more subtle, Espinoza said, such as an open seat next to him going unfilled despite a crowded bus ride.
Or simply walking down the street. “There have been occasions where someone was walking down the street and would cross to the other side when they see me,” he said.
In Guayaquil, an analysis by Ecuadorian news outlet Expreso found the port city to have the highest number of complaints of acts of discrimination in the country from 2018 to mid-2020. And the United Nations in 2019 found that Afro-Ecuadorians account for about 40% of those in poverty in Ecuador despite being less than 10% of the total population.
Leaving a hometown to escape violence
Carlos Teran considers himself lucky not to have encountered overt acts of racism in his native Colombia.
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen there’s a lot of indifference in football,” he said through an interpreter. “And not only in football but also off the field in everyday life. But thankfully I haven’t suffered any incidents.”
But Teran, 20, has seen the way violence and armed conflicts can affect Black communities.
The Colombian conflict between the country’s government, right-wing paramilitary organizations and left-wing guerrilla groups has been ongoing for more than 55 years, killing more than 200,000 people.
It has resulted in the internal displacement of more than 5 million, with Indigenous and Afro-Colombian people “disproportionately represented among those displaced,” according to a 2012 U.S. Congressional report.
Teran was born in Turbo, a port city in the Department of Antioquia that has a population of 163,000, 81% of whom identify as Black or Indigenous, according to a 2005 census.
But when he was 8, Teran’s family moved to Medellin to avoid the conflict, a move that also started him on the path that led him to the Fire last season.
“We had to leave because of some of the violence that was occurring,” Teran said. “We went to the big city, which is the capital of Antioquia, and that’s really where I started on the path that I am now. That’s where I started playing football.”
An overarching theme of hope — and pride
Juneteenth took on special meaning in 2020 in the wake of civil unrest and renewed calls for racial justice, and it was on June 19 that the Black Players for Change formed to give Black players, coaches and staff a voice in Major League Soccer and help fight systemic racism in local communities.
“The coalition is just trying to improve the experience of the Black American, the Black human being,” Reynolds said. “We’re doing stuff with inner-city schools in different cities, also trying to expose the game to the Black community, whether that’s building fields or places for players to play in Black communities.”
But any move for racial equality isn’t “only Black people to stand up for Black people,” Kappelhof said.
“It starts with teaching your kids,” he said. “If you teach your kids well, they are the future. That’s a very important thing. And in the schools too, to teach better and teach them more about equality.”
Meanwhile, Espinoza hopes soccer — a global, multicultural sport — can be a unifying force.
After Ecuador finished third at the under-20 World Cup, Espinoza said he found himself getting several requests for photos and autographs that he might not have otherwise.
“That really made me happy because that shows me how much football really unites people,” he said. “That’s where you see that football really brings people together, it unites them.”
And though the fight for justice is in some ways just beginning, there is an undeniable amount of pride among the Fire’s Black players.
“My family has always taught me to be proud of my color and where I’m from,” Teran said. “It’s something that is immutable, it’s something that you can’t control. I’m very proud of the color of my skin. I’m proud of being Colombian. I’m proud of where I’m from and who I am. The color of your skin is beautiful, whether it’s white or brown.”
Said Reynolds: “Obviously we share an experience and we’ve been through the same struggle. We’ve always rallied behind each other, we’ve always been there to support one another and have each other’s back, which I think is super powerful. That is a pretty powerful message that you can share.”