AC Milan's Kevin Prince-Boateng (left) and Mario Balotelli during a match that was suspended because of racist chants in May (Credit: Reuters)

The sanctions, approved by 99 percent of FIFA’s voting members in a silent vote, carry two stages of penalties, which are extended now not just to FIFA’s international matches but to domestic club-level matches as well. Under the first stage, clubs whose fans or players show racist behavior will face a warning, fines, or the penalty of playing a match behind closed doors without fans. A second or major incident will result in the loss of points, expulsion from a tournament, or relegation — meaning a club could be dropped from a top league to one in a lower tier. Individual players, meanwhile, could face five-match bans for racist comments on the field, where a new official will be tasked with the responsibility of monitoring for such incidents.

Those are all positive steps, but FIFA has taken positive steps before and still racism persists throughout the game. How can FIFA ensure that the new rules work to eliminate racism from pitches around the world? Here are a few ideas:

1. Create strong buy-in from member organizations: It is a good sign that the vote received 99 percent approval, even if some FIFA officials expressed dismay that it wasn’t unanimous. Now the hard part begins: getting all 209 of FIFA’s member countries to adopt the sanctions and apply them. The larger nations and federations should be no problem: the United States has comparably few issues with racism, and the European federation (UEFA) has already adopted provisions that are stronger, at least in some areas, than FIFA’s. Individual countries, like England, have taken aggressive steps to combat racism on the pitch and in the crowd. But ensuring that countries that have been hotbeds of soccer racism — like Russia, Italy, eastern European bloc countries, and Israel, to name only a few — adopt and implement the sanctions in an aggressive manner is crucial to success.
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Reading through Forbes’ list of the 71 most powerful people in the world this afternoon, I was struck by something interesting. For all that we talk about the influence of culture on both society and individuals, there only two people involved in the production or distribution of culture or the arts on the list.

There are a lot of figures from tech companies, many of which are made more valuable by cultural content, on the list. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied for 20th on the list. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg comes in at 27th. Apple CEO Tim Cook is 35. Robin Li, who founded and runs Baidu, China’s largest search engine ranks 64th.

But in comparison to all of those tech titans, there are just two people involved in the production of entertainment or cultural content. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos comes it at 27th on the list. Joseph Blattner, who runs the International Federation of Association Football, is the 69th most powerful person according to the list, on the grounds that he “runs the world’s most popular sport–and unofficial religion.”

It’s notable both that neither of them are artists—they’re both on the business and distribution side of content. The people who have power, apparently, are not the ones who come up with the ideas, images, and sounds that reach wide audiences, but those who come up with the paradigm-shifting means of distributing them, whether it’s the broadcast deals for FIFA matches, or the Kindle. And while content is an important part of Amazon’s business, the company’s come a long way from being a book retailer. Instead of just eliminating local bookstores, it’s now going after big box stores.

Similarly, it’s telling that the only head of a an organization that’s primarily a content creation enterprise is Blattner, and that he’s involved with sports, rather than with movies, music, or television production. Obviously FIFA games reach an enormous number of people, and anyone who’s thought about the cable package in the United States knows how critically important sports, particularly football, are to maintaining the viability of cable as a subscription service. But that it’s sports and Kindle sales in the mix rather than a television network head or a movie director says a lot about what it takes to get on the Forbes list in the first place. Numbers, it seem, matter more than ideas.

Members of Nigeria's women's national soccer team

Nigeria is one of several African countries that have moved to legally ban homosexuality, and Nigerian club officials have boasted of driving lesbians from the game before, but under the new policy, lesbian players will be disqualified from competition and won’t be allowed to join the national team, NWFL chair Dilichukwu Onyedinma said, according to Inside World Football:

“Any player that we find is associated with it will be disqualified.

“We will call the club chairmen to control their players, and such players will not be able to play for the national team,” said Onyedinma. She said the governing body will work with clubs to stop the practice.”

While outright bans on lesbians are obviously (and thankfully) rare, discrimination aimed at gay female athletes is hardly limited to soccer or to Nigeria. The push for LGBT equality in sports has largely focused on men while gay women athletes get ignored, since the stereotypical female athlete is often already presumed to be gay. As Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky wrote when American soccer star Megan Rapinoe came out ahead of the 2012 Olympics, “An openly gay female athlete almost isn’t news. A lesbian in the locker room conforms to a stereotype, just as a straight male athlete is a stereotype.”

But in both American and international sports, there is “an amazing division between lesbians and straight women in sports” that persists because straight women don’t want to be stereotyped as gay, Dr. Pat Griffin, a professor and advocate for LGBT rights in sports, has said before. That has led to discrimination against female athletes who actually are gay and a culture, particularly in American college sports, where both coaches and players are expected to “be straight, or at the very least, act straight.” It’s no wonder then, that many lesbian athletes wait until their careers are over to come out of the closet.

So while Nigeria’s ban is uniquely horrific, and while FIFA will hopefully help put an end to it, it is emblematic of a larger sports culture that remains tilted against LGBT equality not just for men but for women too.

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.

Alex Morgan, one of the biggest stars of the U.S. Women’s National Team’s run to the World Cup finals and an Olympic gold medal, will be among the players in the new women’s professional soccer league that will launch this spring. But before she and the other players take the field, Morgan wants to ensure that the players have a strong collective bargaining presence.

Morgan, whose salary will be guaranteed by U.S. Soccer, the sport’s American governing federation, doesn’t have to worry about the money the league will pay her. Other women will, though, as concerns have arisen that some players will have to take second jobs to make ends meet. And those are the players Morgan is fighting to protect with the collective bargaining process, she told ESPN:

“We’re still looking to finalize our negotiations with U.S. Soccer, both the women’s national team contract and the [contract with the] league,” Morgan said of the details still to be worked out for the national team as a whole and the participation of those players, subsidized by U.S. Soccer, in the NWSL. “And we’re hoping that is going to be solved in a timely manner so we can focus all of our efforts on the league and getting it started in March.” [...]

“When I was drafted [in WPS], I wasn’t really sure what went on and what kind of salaries are given, what the quality of the team was — not only in terms of players, but coaching staff, training staff, training facility, that sort of stuff,” Morgan said. “Now being on this side of it, we really wanted to not only fight for us, but also those players not on the national team that didn’t really have a say. We had to be their voice. I think it’s finding that middle ground between sacrificing a little bit of what we want for the betterment of the league and for all of the players.“

Most of the focus on the new women’s league has been on how to achieve sustainability, and how to make it past the third season that doomed the previous two leagues. And as important as Morgan and other stars are to that success, people I’ve talked to who are familiar with the previous leagues have told me that sustainability ultimately relies on building an all-around brand separate from just the big names. So while Morgan and the stars may give the league some flash, the players you’ve never heard of will be as much a part of its backbone as anyone if it hopes to survive.

And if those players make up a significant part of the backbone, sustainability may also depend at least in part on making the league sustainable for them. Skimpy budgets and lower salaries may be an unfortunate reality in the league’s infancy, but achieving sustainability and giving women a professional place to play soccer won’t do much good in the long run if most of the players won’t make enough money to live.

Collective bargaining has played an important role in making sure that sports leagues benefit not just stars like Morgan but also the players on the end of the bench too. It’s encouraging, both for those women and for the overall future of the league, that a young star like Morgan already realizes that the league’s survival doesn’t just depend on her success, but also on the success of players who aren’t as gifted and well-known as she is.