Racism in football: Turning the beautiful game ugly, Footballer’s join anti-racism campaign “Stand Up-Speak Up”
Football prides itself on its global appeal and its status as a true international sport. It is played by people of every kind, ethnicity and religion. Whether it is Europeans or Africans or Americans everyone plays football and loves it.
There are some developments especially in modern football over the past decade that have stained football’s global reputation. People have become intolerant while watching the sport and as a result they have reacted in racist ways towards different kinds of players.
These incidents have mainly taken place in Italy and Spain but there have been some distasteful incidents in England as well. Given Italy’s political history under General Franco and Mussolini, one would expect the people there to learn from their historical mistakes and behave in a better manner. However this is not the case in reality.
Italy is notoriously known amongst modern footballers for racist chants and abusive language from the crowd during league and cup matches. Fans should realize that football is a unifying game rather than a dividing one, it brings together people from different backgrounds and places to play together and encourages civilized and respectful competition amongst various teams.
In the past decade, some of the fans have used it to promote their racist agendas and violent actions.
In the Italian league there are numerous players who have suffered racial abuse from the fans. One of these players is the Brazilian star Amauri. Amauri plays for Juventus, one of the most popular clubs in Europe let alone Italy. Even though Amauri has now received Italian nationality, the Brazilian striker was ridiculed by the Italian media for not being a “pure Italian”. The Juve striker has been called “oriundi” which means “an outsider”.
Another race related incident surfaced in 2004, when Thierry Henry became the target of a racist outrage by then Spanish manager Luis Aragones. Aragones was addressing Jose Antonio Reyes during the Spanish teams training session, during which he referred to Henry as “Black s**t”. This caused massive outrage at the time against the Spanish team’s manager.
There were calls from all media outlets, especially from the English media to fire Aragones as the manager of the Spanish national team but these went unheard. Henry himself was surprised when Spanish football association took no action in the beginning against Aragones and later on even when they did, it was just a minor fine for his truly despicable actions.
Spanish fans have not been behind in showing off their true colors as well. In the year 2005, in a match between Barcelona and Real Zaragoza, Zaragoza fans mocked and disrespected Samuel Eto’. The Barcelona striker who is still one the finest football players on the planet suffered tremendous amounts of race related abuse.
Whenever he got the ball the fans would make monkey-like noises and also throw banana peels from the stands. Eto’ took severe offense to these gestures and threatened to walk off the field if they continued. Eventually the fans were banned from attending any Real Zaragoza games for five months and were also finned heavily by FIFA.
Mario Balotelli, a Ghanaian born Italian suffered racial abuse in April 2009 during Inter Milan’s game against Juventus. Balotelli who plays for Inter as a center forward and is an Italian national was mocked again and again by the fans inside the stadium as they chanted that “a black Italian does not exist”. Juventus fans continue to abuse Balotelli every time they play Inter Milan despite the fact that their club was punished with a partial stadium closure and a heavy fine.
The affect of such incidents on players has been huge, they have at times threatened to quit playing football and even leave the field in protest during matches. Such racist gestures are condemned by almost everyone. FIFA took a big step toward eliminating racism by allotting the 2010 FIFA World Cup to South Africa, the tournament itself is under way now and has been a spectacular hit so far with the fans and the players.
Professional players who suffered from racial abuse in their careers, joined hands with Thierry Henry to initiate an anti-racism campaign in 2005 which is called “Stand Up-Speak Up”. This campaign encourages football fans to speak up against racism.
Many famous professional players such as Lionel Messi, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo have joined the “Stand Up-Speak Up” initiative and Football as a whole is recovering from this dreadful trend.
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