Racism in football: a global backwards culture

The dark cloud of racism loomed ominously, fit to burst, over this English Premier League season. Several incidents threatened to overshadow what turned out to be one of the best seasons in the league’s history before enough was done on the pitch to seemingly sweep it under the rug.

Liverpool’s Luis Suarez reminded the country of a problem many had thought, or at least hoped, had been close to eradication when he was banned for eight games for racially abusing Manchester United defender Patrice Evra. But after the expected outbursts of outrage and his rightful condemnation, football stole the show again. The cloud may still produce a downpour next January when Chelsea’s leader and former England captain John Terry goes on trial for alleged abuse of QPR’s Anton Ferdinand. But in the end, the season escaped largely unharmed – its most dramatic of curtain calls ensuring that it will, in years to come, be remembered by Manchester City’s incredible maiden Premier League winning campaign, and the cloud will most likely disappear into the realms of forgotten history.

Outside of the British Isles however, it is an entirely different story. With the European Championships currently being held in Poland and Ukraine, there are serious concerns, highlighted recently in an episode of BBC’s Panorama, entitled Euro 2012: Stadiums of Hate, that the tournament will be entirely destroyed by racism.

It is undeniable that English football still has a problem with racism and this will require a great deal of work to eradicate. If ever it were possible for problems regarding such a sensitive issue to pale into insignificance, they do when placed next to what has been recorded in Poland and Ukraine. However, the two situations should not be separated, nor placed side-by-side, but viewed as a collective problem. This is not an issue of which country has the most serious problems with racism in their footballing community, but an issue of the footballing world being plagued, even in this day and age, by this most ugly form of prejudice.

The football world as a whole seems to be behind the times when it comes to the prejudices which our modern society is working to eventually eliminate for good. The actions caught on camera by the BBC in Stadiums of Hate simply do not match up with the world outside of the arenas, even in these Eastern European countries where racism is widely regarded as having a larger presence than in the West. Thankfully, as a whole, Poland and Ukraine are not represented by this minority of football hooligans. Black players were filmed emerging from the tunnel and onto the playing field amidst a chorus of monkey noises, not just from a small section of fans but from entire stands, writhing with mirth at the ‘hilarity’ of their abuse. Worryingly, it was the young children who revelled in the abuse most of all – a sign that the problem will not simply die out with age – it is being ingrained within the next generation of football supporters as not only acceptable, but amusing.

In Poland, the world ‘Jew’ has now come to be used as an insult in the dark, underground word of football hooliganism, and this underground is now escaping from the stadiums and hang-outs and into the streets in the form of racist graffiti. The so-called fans chant sickening slurs from the terraces: “Death, death to the Jewish whore,” to take one example, and as you watched these events unfold before you, there was the feeling that these people were not really here for the football, but because they believe that the stadiums are an acceptable place vent their prejudices in the most brutal of fashions.

Of all places, of every country the world over that you could call to mind, Poland is perhaps the last place you could understand a revival of Nazi tradition, Nazi ways of thought. Inside the country’s football stadiums however, this is exactly what appears to be going on. Whole stands full of supporters unite in acting out fascist salutes, some even idolising Hitler in a country in which almost the entire Jewish population was wiped out by the very same man and his Nazi followers. These people are using football as an excuse to live decades behind society, to exercise views whose damage it took a world war and millions of deaths to quell, and yet it is to these very stadiums that the crème de la crème of European football have travelled, along with its supporters, to witness the continent’s largest international football tournament.

The abuse documented in Poland and Ukraine by the BBC is not limited to vocal forms, but spreads often into outbursts of inexplicable violence. Derby games in both countries were seen to turn into what can only be described as a battle between the two sets of fans. With one person justifying the actions of he and his fellow ‘fans’ with claims that their rival team was founded by Jews, and therefore deserved the abuse. Perhaps most shockingly of all was a piece of film made in Ukraine, which saw a set of supporters tire of abusing the opposition and turn on a group of their own fans. More explicitly, an Asian group of their own fans. The men were shown on camera senselessly beating this innocent group of people who had come to sit in the family section of the ground and cheer on the home team, simply because of the colour of their skin. In a subsequent interview, the victims described the authorities, the people who were supposed to be protecting them and preventing these kind of actions, as “useless.”

Here, as much as in the ingrained prejudices of the stadium-goers, lies the problem. The Ukrainian services deny any kind of racism being present in their stadiums. They pass off the Nazi salutes as the fans merely pointing to the opposition supporters, and seem to brush the violence under the rug all together. This attitude makes this most unacceptable form of abuse out to be almost conventional, as something that comes part and parcel of going to watch a football match. As soon as you enter the stadium, you travel back in time.

Despite all this, there is still a good chance that with the help of UEFA officials and with the spotlight being shone so brightly upon Poland and Ukraine, Euro 2012 will pass without racist incidents, and the whole issue will disappear once again from the forefront of society’s consciousness. In a very twisted way, it may actually be beneficial for the footballing world in the long term if this year’s tournament was marred by racism. It would make it impossible for the issue to be swept under the rug again; would overtake all footballing issues as the priority for change in the sport and begin in earnest the extermination of a problem that we in Britain do not see anything close to the full extent of, even with our current situation.

Indeed, despite the recent case concerning Luis Suarez and John Terry, combined with the swathe of racism that struck Twitter seemingly in the midst of these events – Stan Collymore and Fabrice Muamba receiving abuse among others – it has taken an exposé with the shock factor of Stadiums of Hate to really create an atmosphere of disgust around the British public. The individual incidents we see crop up from time to time are regarded as just that – individual incidents, not further chapters in a wider on-going issue.

Mario Balotelli, a player who attracts attention wherever he goes and whatever he says, has again hit the back pages recently by saying that if he is racially abused on the pitch during Euro 2012 he will walk off during the game. Balotelli then went further by adding: “If anyone throws a banana at me in the street, I will go to jail, because I will kill them.” The footballer has been subject to racist abuse in the past, often being the victim of chants when playing in Italy from his compatriots for being the only black player in the national team. In February earlier this year, he and his Manchester City team mate Yaya Touré were subjected to monkey chants by fans of Portuguese team FC Porto.

In Russia, the hosts of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Congolese centre-back Christopher Samba’s recent move to Anzhi Makhachkala from English club Blackburn Rovers has been marred due to abuse from fans as the player had a banana thrown at him from the stands. “I try not to think about racism,” said Samba after the incident, “I just want to believe that such problems do not exist on a global basis. Maybe I am mistaken but I do want to believe in it. As a rule any scandal of this kind is a result of a misconduct committed by one silly person. I don’t want to react to this.”

This is another example of someone trying the conceal the issue of racism within football, but here it is not the authorities or the public that are trying to cover up the problem, but one of the victims. Naturally, Samba wants to believe that the problem is not one that spreads worldwide, just as he wants to believe it is caused by a few stupid people and nothing more sinister. The unfortunate truth is, given what we’ve seen on Stadiums of Hate, this is quite simply not the case.

There is a backward culture of racism within the depths of the world of football – a culture that, although brutally exposed in Poland and Ukraine, is not limited to any particular country or footballing region. Incidents crop up all over the world, and not that infrequently.

Brazilian legend Roberto Carlos suffered exactly the same fate at Anzhi before Samba, having a banana directed at him from the stands, and the two events led to the Russian Football Union launching an anti-racism task force back in March. This is a necessary move for a country that is due, following an unexpected result in the voting, to host the biggest football tournament on the planet in six years’ time.

However, action taken against racism should not be geared towards simply avoiding catastrophe on the big stage; it is the underlying culture that produces the incidents in the smaller games, the incidents that go unheard of until the spotlight gets shone forcibly upon them when an event of magnitude is looming that are in the greatest need of eradication. A programme along the lines of Stadiums of Hate could have been filmed in many more countries outside of Poland and Ukraine, it just so happens that current circumstances mean that the spotlight is presently on these two nations. It would be naïve to suggest that the problem is limited to Eastern Europe.

If an investigation were launched into racism in English football, shocking evidence would no doubt be found beneath the tip of the iceberg that returned to view this season. Thankfully, it would not be to the same level we have seen exposed in Poland and Ukraine. The authorities have done superbly in cutting levels of football violence in our country, and we would never see fascist salutes coming from the English terraces, but the problem is still there.

Back in January of this year, a Liverpool fan was arrested following a racist outburst from the stand directed at Oldham Athletic player Tom Adeyemi. The offender was wearing a t-shirt in support of the recently condemned Suarez – perhaps of the opinion that support for his club’s players goes beyond the bounds of both moral code and the law. This, is some ways, is no different from the Eastern European supporters who believe it necessary to abuse their rival players and fans because of the origins of their club.

In Spain’s La Liga, widely considered as one of the top two footballing leagues in the world, along with the Premiership, Barcelona’s Dani Alves spoke to the Folha de Sao Paulo in February 2011, saying: “I live with racism in every game, but I’m not offended. Fans insult me and call me ‘monkey’. At first I was quite shocked, but now I don’t give it any importance. I have learned to live with it.” This is no different to what Christopher Samba has suffered in Russia – nowhere is exempt from these issues.

Racism in football therefore, must not be viewed club by club or country by country, but as an international issue – as an issue within a sporting society which must be tackled as such. There are organisations set up to do this – Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) was set up in 1999 and has since been a part of the biggest anti-racism in football campaigns in the continent, campaigns that have included anti-discrimination campaigns at the last two European Championships.

Though they are slowly doing a good job in helping the problem, perhaps it is time for some stronger action to be taken, action that may unfortunately be to the forced detriment of the sport. Seeing fans, players, even clubs banned from the game would not be a pretty sight, and would be painful to watch, but some things are bigger than sport.