The crowd goes vile
When a section of an Italian football crowd started chanting monkey noises at Inter Milan striker Romelu Lukaku, it wasn’t hard to identify where the simian comparisons really belonged.
Not with the man of athletic grace and high achievement. With his gibbering taunters. But then, racist sports fans don’t do irony.
It may be more correct to call them racists among the sports fans; those who are there for the sense of primitive tribalism rather than the qualities of the game and the people who play it.
Such types have been staining the news cycles lately; among them a pair of oafish Aussies ejected from the fourth Ashes test for abusing England fast bowler Jofra Archer.
European and British football has been where the worst of the squalor is. Of late the examples include the hateful Twitter messages to Manchester United’s Paul Pogba and Marcus Rashford after they missed penalties. Not just the n-word either; one red-eyed nostalgist threatened to hang Pogba with a rope.
And tens of thousands of discriminatory social media messages are aimed at footballers each year. According to the Kick It Out campaign, reports of discrimination in English football alone rose the previous season by 11 per cent to 520 incidents, more than half of which were classed as racist.
Social media platforms are being criticised for not doing more. The Professional Footballers’ Association has organised 24-hour social media bans and there’s talk from some of longer bans – perhaps unlikely, given some of the external promotional contracts so many players are on.
For its part, Twitter says it is now closely
monitoring the accounts of about 50 high-profile black players, intent on reducing the burden on people to report. The monitoring system will in these cases remove racist posts, block the abusers’ accounts and report them to the police.
If anything, though, the responses all around have been a tad too close to the automatic-pilot variety. Organisations such as Fifa and Uefa make a fair bit of noise about the problem and can point to penalty regimes that, in the former’s case, start with fines and, in the latter’s, with partial stadium closure. Hence the occasional spectacle, if that’s the word, of international games being played to partly or even completely vacant stadiums.
Still, there needs to be more mettle behind the marketing. The combinations of fines, bans, docked points and stadium closures are part of a tool box that needs to be opened, and updated, more often.
The question is whether there’s too much official tolerance for mere hand-wringing. The view that there’s always a few who will spoil it for the rest is being given too much weight, to the point of justifying under-reaction.
Vincent Kompany, Lukaku’s captain in the Belgian international team, made the point this week that part of the problem is that organisations like Fifa, Uefa and club boards lack any racial diversity. None of the decision makers whose job it was to set official consequences for the chants against Lukaku – the very people who ‘‘are trying to explain to Romelu how he should be feeling and what he should think about this’’ – were, themselves, remotely in touch with what he was experiencing, Kompany said.
Fair call.
The responses all around have been a tad too close to the automatic-pilot variety ... there needs to be more mettle behind the marketing.