UEFA and Racism in Europe
By Thomas Dunmore • Aug 12th, 2007 • Category: Hooliganism, News & Notes, Politics and Economics • one response
Earlier this week UEFA finally took action against Partizan Belgrade, expelling the club from the UEFA Cup after rioting in Mostar that left 36 injured. They had won their tie against Zrinjski 11-1 on aggregate, a result now entirely academic. It’s about time: as Pietro Paulo Virdis noted in the comments previously, it’s the 25th time they’ve been penalised for some crowd-related disturbance since the 1989/90 season.
So what will UEFA do with FK Zeta, whose fans racially abused DaMarcus Beasley and Jean-Claude Darcheville of Rangers this week? Given it’s their first offense, it’s hard to see them being kicked out. Some argue that UEFA must take a zero tolerance approach and expel clubs immediately for these kind of problems; UEFA themselves, as this interview with William Gaillard on the New York Times soccer blog reveals, seems likely to continue to argue that the problem belongs to society, not football.
NYT: How big is the problem of racism in European football?
Mr. Gaillard: It’s about as large as the problem of racism in Europe. Football mirrors society in quite a variety of ways. Of course, minority extremists may use football for their own propaganda purposes, and we’ve seen in some countries, in particular in the South and East of Europe, very marginal neo-Nazi or neo-fascist groups using football and football supporters as a means of conveying their messages in an organized fashion.
We have to distinguish between two types of behavior: One is organized and that has a purpose which is to campaign for a [group’s] extremist ideas by infiltrating supporters groups and sometimes getting hold of them by discouraging normal people from getting involved, even physically….
The second type is societal… places that are behind in awareness of the problem. That’s what we get in the Balkans and other parts of Eastern Europe. One person starts booing a black player and stupidly the whole stands start doing the same thing.
These are societies that are still traumatized by other events, like the war in the Balkans, and not aware of how other areas of Europe behave in the 21st century… We’re trying to fight both phenomena, but they both require different measures.
That all seems true enough to me, but is it just a mealy-mouthed excuse for taking watered-down action? FK Zeta’s apology for the incident was tepid at best, and seemed to follow the same theme: Zeta director Valdo Sisevic said that “The problem with racism is not a major incident. These are the actions of a few individuals and is nothing to do with the football club.” Yet remarkably, UEFA delegate Jean-Marie Phillips has revealed that it was a bottle thrown from the FK Zeta’s director’s box that launched the hail of missiles from Zeta fans.
What do you think UEFA can and should do about the problem of racism in European football? Should Zeta be expelled, or is the problem too big outside of football for UEFA to throw-out every club involved in such an incident?
Photo credit: ormondroyd on Flickr.
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It is a very difficult issue that doesn’t lend itself to simple solutions, particularly given the misguided, yet still very strong, sense of victimisation in many of the communities exhibiting such behaviour.
I would agree with Gaillard’s general assessment of the situation, and suggest that UEFA needs to be measured in its response. Their goal here should be to send a clear message that chants of the sort are completely unacceptable, and that clubs will be held responsible should they not take any action to stop it once it starts.
I didn’t see the Zeta-Rangers match and don’t know how widespread the chanting was, but it seems to me that expulsion from the competition is a sanction that should be reserved for very serious offences, along the lines of what happened with Partizan (or Feyenoord last year). Unless this particular incident was especially horrific, I would think a ground suspension for one or two games and fine would be more proportional. Of course, if someone in the director’s box really did throw a bottle on the pitch, then that is a completely separate grounds for banning Zeta.
One also hopes that UEFA will start talking to its individual federations about taking this problem seriously, now that Platini has rightly made it a clear priority. They can start with Spain.