Last week, AC Milan signed one of the world’s premier soccer players in Mario Balotelli, who called it a dream come true that he was joining Italy’s most prominent soccer club. A week later, that dream isn’t as beautiful. Not after an Italian news station caught Paolo Berlusconi, an AC Milan vice president and the younger brother of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, calling Balotelli “negretto della famiglia,” which translates roughly to “the family’s little n—–.”

Balotelli, a black Italian, is no stranger to racism. During previous stints in Italy and at international club matches, fans have greeted him with monkey chants and bananas. Fans of one club banded together to tell him that “there are no black Italians.” But while Balotelli may be subject to the worst of racism, the kind that comes from his own countrymen and his own club, he’s hardly alone. Here’s a far-from-comprehensive timeline of racism in European soccer — just over the past month:

January 3: AC Milan’s Kevin Prince-Boateng, a Ghanaian, responds to racist chants from opposing fans by picking up the ball, punting it into the stands, and walking off the pitch. His teammates and opponents followed, and the match was called. Earlier in the game, fans assaulted Sulley Muntari, another Ghanaian, with monkey chants. “It’s not the first time in my life that I’ve heard these things, but I’m 25 now and I’ve had enough this bullshit,” Prince-Boateng, who threatened to walk off the field in future matches, said after the game.

January 29: Jozy Altidore, an African-American, faces monkey chants from fans of Dutch club FC Den Bosch during a club match in the Netherlands. Altidore shrugged off the chants, refused efforts from officials to stop the match, and played on. “It’s only going to make them stronger if we back down,” Altidore said afterward. “I just want to get on with it and play and win the game.” AZ Alkmaar, Altidore’s club, wins 5-0.

January 30: Barcelona’s Dani Alves, a black Brazilian, is the subject of racist chants in a Spanish cup match against rival Real Madrid. In a moment of brutal truth, a dejected Alves declares after the match that soccer’s long fight against racism is “a lost war.”

January 30: European soccer’s governing body fines three clubs — Italian club Lazio, English club Tottenham Hotspur, and Slovenian club NK Maribor, for fans’ racist and anti-Semitic chants during games in November. Lazio’s sanctions include one home game played behind closed doors with no fans in attendance.

January 31: Japanese player Yuki Nakamura quits his Slovakian club because of repeated racial abuse. Nakamura was frustrated because his teammates and club officials did little to protect or defend him.

February 5: FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, upholds sanctions against both Bulgaria and Hungary’s international teams for racist chants during World Cup qualifying matches. Both are forced to play one match behind closed doors, and FIFA warns that further incidents could result in expulsion from Cup qualifying.

In England, the Football Association has taken steps to combat racism that have been more aggressive than those in other countries. The FA suspended Luis Suarez for eight matches for racist taunts directed at Patrice Evra, who is Senegalese. It has banned fans from matches for racist taunts and levied heavy fines and sanctions against clubs whose fans exhibit racist behavior. John Terry, the English national team’s former captain, was charged with a crime for racial remarks he made in the course of play (he was found not guilty). Complaints have still arisen from black players like Rio Ferdinand, and racism still rears its ugly face far too often. But England’s serious and aggressive response seems to have thwarted much of the overt racism from fans that was once a daily feature of its matches, even if it hasn’t eliminated racism altogether.

England is hardly a total success story, but it has at least been successful enough to drive the perception among abused players that it should be a model for FIFA and other domestic federations to follow. FIFA and other governing bodies have long held the position that players who respond to racist taunts are the ones deserving of serious punishment, while the perpetrating fans and clubs receive only slaps on the wrist. That needs to change. There’s no reason that players like Prince-Boateng should have to threaten to continue walking off the field, that players like Nakamura should have to quit their clubs, that players like Altidore and Alves should be reduced to pretending they can’t hear the chants or to accepting that racism is a feature of the game they play. That they have should be viewed as no less than a tragedy, and one that’s worth addressing with more than t-shirts and advertising campaigns. If the war against racism in soccer is lost, it’s only because there’s been no serious effort to fight it.

The bridge is yours.

-I wasn’t insane about House of Cards, but this makes me like Kate Mara a whole bunch.

-Ethan Rayne is dead.

-It’s probably going to be a while before we learn more about the stand-alone Star Wars movies.

-Chris Pratt will be Star-Lord.

-Pretty excited for this Phil Specter biopic:

I wrote about this a bit yesterday in my review of House of Cards, but, while I respect the work of folks at MSNBC, I kind of think that the best way to take on cable news is not to go high-minded and triumphal a la The Newsroom, but savage and ridiculous. Fortunately, it sounds like Amazon, as part of their plans to expand into original programming* is planning to oblige me:

Amazon Studios has landed another big-name actor for one of its first six comedy pilots. I’ve learned that Jeffrey Tambor is set to star in The Onion Presents: The News. The project, from The Onion’s Will Graham & Dan Mirk (The Onion News Network, The Onion Sportsdome), is described as a fast-paced scripted comedy set behind the scenes of The Onion News Network that shows just how far journalists will go to stay at the top of their game. Tambor will play David Everett, ONN’s oldest and most respected news anchor. He is intellectual, highly ambitious, cutthroat and insecure as he believes his job is being threatened by the younger Cameron, whom David detests.

Tambor was actually quite good in Next Caller, a show NBC put into production about the employees of a satellite radio station that starred Dane Cook. The pilot itself was a little bit heavy on the wacky, and Cook’s appeal will always be limited to me. But Tambor, as the head of the station, embraced the ludicrousness of his position, which required him to program to niche audiences that ranged from the bros who tuned in to Cook’s show to people who really just wanted to listen to saucy Catholic nuns. And while it’s not as if the projects come from the same creators, or if Tambor is acting out his own ideas about media, his strong suit as an actor has always been characters who maintain a level of wounded dignity entirely inappropriate to their circumstances. That’s a nice set of skills to take to cable news as a subject, and goodness knows The Onion has a genius for finding examples of gaps and disjuncts between the reality of scenarios and the ways people comport themselves during them.

*Which includes an original series by Garry Trudeau about Congressmen sharing a rowhouse in Washington, for which I cannot wait.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took to his Huffington Post blog last week to review Girls. While I think he has some points worth considering about his show, I was actually more struck by his follow-up, in which he writes about the reaction to a professional basketball player writing cultural criticism—much of which ignored the fact that Abdul-Jabbar has both acted and written history. I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

Some questioned why a man my age would watch a show about girls in their twenties, as if they’d just discovered me hanging around a school playground with a shopping bag full of candy in one hand a fluffy puppy in the other. Of course, these critics are right. When I read Moby Dick I first had to convince the bookseller that I was a former whaler named Queequeg. When I read the poetry of Sylvia Plath, I had to pretend I was a depressed white woman with daddy issues. Don’t worry, I used a fake ID.

One of the strangest, and most persistently irritating assumptions in popular culture is, as I’ve written before, the idea that white men are general interest, while women and people of color are niche subjects. It’s bizarre to me that we would think that women are interested in stories about men, and how they view sex, work, and power, all subjects that affect us, whether we have male lovers and partners, male bosses and coworkers, or simply male relatives and friends, but that men wouldn’t be interested in what insights fiction can give them into their families, friends, lovers, coworkers, or objects of distant desire. It’s a framework that assumes that men are hopelessly myopic, which is awfully condescending, but it’s also one that gives men who pay attention to culture created by and about women extra points for reaching out beyond the range of their own experience. It’s nice to see Abdul-Jabbar give that thumb on the scale precisely the bemused side-eye it deserves.