Despite decades of efforts to eradicate racism from “the beautiful game,” international football has been at times the unfortunate venue for displays of unabashed bigotry.
So it would surprise almost no one at the World Cup, currently underway in Russia, to see partisans in the stands gleefully wearing blackface to mock African players on the opposing team — or even more offensively, tossing bananas onto the soccer pitch.
There’s more than the usual concern about the potential for abuse during these particular games because they are being hosted by Russia, a country whose fans are notorious for heaping racial scorn on black and ethnic minority players.
“Russian racism and general intolerance of non-white foreigners are likely to be especially prominent” at these games, two longtime students of soccer and race, Richard Arnold and Andrew Foxall predicted last week in an article for the Washington Post.
Last month, the group Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) released a report which found that the number of racist incidents in Russian football had been on the decline for the past few years.
But the report, co-written with the Moscow-based SOVA Center for Information and Analysis, which keeps tabs on discrimination in the sport within Russia, also showed a worrying increase in bias incidents over just the past year, with offensive behavior such as monkey chants, neo-Nazi songs, and homophobic slurs on the rise.
2018 and still racists monkey noises in the stands … really ?! 🤦🏾♂️ hope you have fun watching the rest of @EuropaLeague on TV while we are through 🙊🙈🙉 #SayNoToRacism #GoWatchBlackPanther ✌🏾
— Michy Batshuayi (@mbatshuayi) February 22, 2018
Examples of such bigotry in Russia are almost too numerous to name. Guilherme Marinato, a Brazilian-born Russian citizen and a goalkeeper for the national team, recently was taunted with cries of “monkey” by fans of Spartak Moscow, a club whose fans are infamous for abusive chants against black players. (The club, which recently came under fire for making racist comments about its own players on Twitter, is perhaps not setting a good enough example.)
And just last April, FIFA, the international soccer authority, charged Russia with fan racism after the French national team’s black players were subjected to racial jeers from the crowd at a stadium in St. Petersburg. The Russian football union, however, was fined a mere £22,000 (roughly $29,000), a paltry sum that was hardly likely to deter similar offense in the future.
In an effort to combat this problem, FARE is enlisting crowd monitors at each of the World Cup games over the next month, tasked with keeping an eye out for behavior that violates the sport’s code of conduct with respect to racism, political extremism, and homophobia.
So far, so good — at least at this point, just a few days into the tournament. Nigeria and its all black squad were considered something of a test case for Russia, although there are numerous players of African ancestry on many World Cup teams, France, the Netherlands, Germany and various Latin American teams among them.
No untoward incidents were reported Saturday when Nigeria — the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to play at the games — took the field against Croatia in the Russian city of Kaliningrad. All the same, some black players at the games have been bracing for the worst.
Making it to the World Cup has been a career highlight for England defender Danny Rose. But he has been so unsettled by the prospect of racist abuse that he has warned his family not to attend.
Rose, who is black, worries that they might be subjected to harassment or even physical attack. Britain has its own fraught history with hooliganism and race-based violence in soccer, which led to the creation of the Show Racism the Red Card initiative about two decades ago.
« Its just monkey noise who cares ? » 😂😂😂 2018 guys …
— Michy Batshuayi (@mbatshuayi) March 29, 2018
Rose is not feeling as worried about racist displays back in Britain however as in Russia, where he believes his relatives would be in real danger if they were to attend his matches.
“I’m not worried for myself,” he told the British newspaper Standard Sport. “But I’ve told my family I don’t want them going out there because of racism and anything else that may happen. I don’t want to be worrying when I’m trying to prepare for games for my family’s safety,” Rose said.
“If anything happens to me, it wouldn’t affect me like it would if my family had been abused,” said Rose, who added that he and his fellow England team members have even talked about walking off the pitch en masse if there is an act of racial abuse.
“We’ve discussed it,” he said. “Until it actually happens and under what circumstances, it’s hard to say what you’d actually do.”
Some observers believe that the racist acts are linked to a lack of exposure to people of other ethnicities and cultures. Russian teams are arguably the least diverse in Europe, and have been resistant to importing ethnically diverse talent from other countries, a common practice in the sport’s most competitive teams elsewhere in Europe.
But as Mother Jones reported, fans from Zenit St. Petersburg in 2012 wrote a manifesto to club officials insisting on maintaining the racial homogeneity of their all white team.
“We’re not racist,” Zenit fans wrote, “but we see the absence of black players at Zenit as an important tradition. It would allow Zenit to maintain the national identity of the club.”
In fact, some degree of overt racism remains a sad, but immutable feature of international soccer, with some countries, Italy among them, having particularly bad reputations.
Michy Batshuayi, has tweeted about his experience with the racist chants he heard from the stands while playing in Italy during a UEFA Europa league match between his German team, Borussia Dortmund and Atalanta.
Italy also has the shameful example of Mario Balotelli, an Italian of Ghanaian descent, who over the years has suffered shocking abuse from fans. Just last month, Italians unfurled a racist banner during a game in Switzerland rejecting his candidacy to become captain of the national team, and insisting that the role should go to someone of “Italian blood.”
Experts who track racism in soccer — and who hold out hope that the situation may one day improve in Russia, Italy and elsewhere — say that while there was a time when overt racial abuse was just as common in Britain, it is less present in the sport today than it was two or three decades ago.
“The sons of migrants from the Caribbean grew in a culture in which soccer was a staple, so, logically, they learned to play,” Ellis Cashmore, a university professor who has studied racism in the sport, told ThinkProgress.
“When they began to appear in professional teams, some factions of the overwhelmingly white fans initially resented what they considered a ‘contamination’ of a white man’s game,” Cashmore explained.
“It died away in the late 1980s, early 1990s when there were so many high class black players, it became ridiculous to castigate them.”
Cashmore, co-editor of an acdemic textbook on the game titled “Studying Football,” said the persistence of acts of overt racism in soccer stadiums across Europe shows a lack of will at sport’s highest level.
One possible course of redress is a more aggressive use of the red card. Under FIFA rules, racist language and abusive gestures by a player is a red card violation punishable by immediate ejection from the game.
Cashmore said another way to rid the sport of racist displays would be to more aggressively fine clubs whose fans are found to be in violation.
“Soccer’s governing organizations could end racism tomorrow if they had the political will,” Cashmore said comparing the relatively small fines levied against teams whose fans are accused of racial abuse to what happens in America’s National Basketball Association.
A sociology professor at Aston University in Birmingham England, Cashmore pointed to the well-known example of Donald Sterling, the former Los Angeles Clippers owner whose team was stripped away from him after he was found to have used racist language.
“Compare how the NBA reacted to Don Sterling’s remarks: an outrageously large fine and a total expulsion from the league. In contrast, UEFA (the European football governing federation) and FIFA (the world football authority) issue extraordinarily light fines on the clubs,” Cashmore said.
If UEFA had disqualified teams whose supporters showed egregious behavior for a couple of seasons “there would be no more racism among fans,” Cashmore said.
“Peer group pressure on any fan would be intense,” he said. “It would cease immediately.”