Marcus Rashford says football ‘going backwards’ in fight against racism
Marcus Rashford believes football is “going backwards” in the fight against racism and social media companies have not done enough to combat abuse on their platforms.
The Manchester United forward is one of many players to have been racially abused this season, after missing a penalty against Crystal Palace, and his former teammate Romelu Lukaku was subjected to monkey chants when taking a penalty for Internazionale at Cagliari last weekend. Rashford admits the rise in racist abuse is “unbelievable” and says social media companies have been ineffective in their response to the problem.
“It seems to me like things have been going backwards rather than forwards,” the England international said. “It’s tough, but like you’ve been seeing all around the world, people have been standing together and I think in this moment that’s all we can do. We have to rely on the campaigns and stuff like that to deal with the situation because our voice only has so much power.”
The 21-year-old questioned the level of influence that footballers alone can have in challenging racist abuse within the game. He added: “To be honest, I’ve always said that the more we speak about it, it doesn’t have much of an impact. We’ve tried. There’s been examples everywhere where people have spoken out and I wouldn’t say they’ve been ignored, but nothing has really changed. To see it spike in the last couple of months has been unbelievable, so we want to nip it in the bud while it’s happening.”
Twitter’s proposal to monitor the account of 50 black players was dismissed by the United striker. Rashford said: “That doesn’t change anything. As I said before, the number of accounts that are out there is ridiculous. The way to sort of control it is that everyone in the world who uses these platforms can only have one account. That’s one way of sorting it, because a lot of them aren’t doing it from their own accounts, they’re just dummy accounts.”