Big Story

Last season, Juventus were forced to play a game behind closed doors after fans racially abused Inter’s Mario Balotelli. On Saturday, Balotelli was abused again — this time by Cagliari fans — and the match went on, a decision criticised after by both Massimo Moratti, President of Inter, and by Italian Footballers Association president Sergio Campana. Campana believed the referee should have stopped the game, saying “Faced with this type of behaviour, referees should suspend the match, something which did not happen in Cagliari. In these cases the rules are very clear. Suspension of matches are part of the rules and rules have to be respected.”

Unfortunately, the referee can only do this if the official in charge of public safety at the stadium orders it and this is conveyed to the referee.  It would work better if this is a two-way process, as the referees (especially the fourth official) are best-placed to notice racial abuse of a player: they should be able to take the initiative to abandon a game.

Meanwhile, Cagliari president Massimo Cellino — who was not even at the game — has claimed the abuse was not because of Balotelli’s race. “It’s wrong to take the whistles and interpret them wrongly,” he said to Sky Sport 24. “It was just a small episode that should not be made more important than it is. In Cagliari people aren’t racist.” Many Cagliari fans have taken this tack, claiming the abuse was because of his personality.

If the authorities conclude otherwise, they should ensure precedent is followed from last season and force Cagliari to play behind closed doors as well as beef up the ability of referees to take prompt action.

Worldwide News

• Turns out the MLS Cup final isn’t a bigger draw for network television than Desperate Housewives: due to its primetime spot, Disney are putting MLS Cup on ESPN instead of ABC this year, the SportsBusiness Journal reports. It’s not news the game is on a Sunday night, and ESPN is hardly Mun2, so all the fuss about this seems a little overblown.
• Ronaldinho has denied reports he’s to quit the game. The Brazilian’s decline hasn’t had the dramatic serious substance-abuse drama of Maradona, Best or Gascoigne, but in its own way, his story in footballing terms is just as sad: a decline based on malaise and money cutting in its prime one of the sport’s greatest ever talents.
• Adidas and Puma have finally ended their feud! Meanwhile, Adidas extended their major sponsorship deal with UEFA through 2017.
• A touch of trouble broke out in Australia’s A-League, between fans of the Melbourne Victory and Adelaide United. The Roar points out just how minimal it was, but offers the familiar warning that just the whiff of violence could turn off the general public in Australia.
• It’s about time: the Football League have finally announced they are investigating the takeover of Notts County. We pointed out many weeks ago that the mystery behind the financing of the club needed to be solved by authorities.
• Which top flight European team has had the most disappointing start to the season?  It simply has to be Hertha Berlin, in title contention last season but now humiliatingly rooted to the bottom of the Bundesliga.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Seing Nazi symbols inside Polish stadiums always scares me. Why would anyone in Poland praise the people who, if succeeded, would gladly wipe the country and it’s people out? My first-hand experience is that this is very uncommon, although I can’t deny the problem exists.

During my five years on Wisla Krakow’s fanatic terraces, I’ve twice heard such disgraceful chants sung by a couple of isolated individuals. One is “Our role model is Rudolf Hess” and another “We have a hero — Adolf Hitler”, which sadly rhyme in Polish, making it even more grotesque. I did not hear these during games, but somewhere near the stadium. That would be it for any nazi connections. I’ve also seen a few photos in the press showing small banners with similar content, mostly during lower division games, where security is far from perfect and clubs are happy if anyone comes to the stadium at all.

Racism in general is, unfortunately, more common. Throwing bananas onto the pitch still happens occasionally — I recall a few cases during the last decade. Monkey chants also happen from time to time. These are, of course, deeply deplorable acts and need to be eradicated. The question, though, is whether racism is as wildly prevalent in Polish football as the BBC report ended up concluding, with the studio panel suggesting 20% of fans are racist.

Legia Warsaw

The central evidence related to racism in Bose’s report came from Legia Warsaw. The club’s chairman stated that 15-20% of Legia fans were racists, a remarkable figure if true. What you might not know is that Legia’s board are in deep conflict with the supporters’ association and the ultras group. Their war dates back to the Vilnius pitch invasion in 2007, which was also reported on Pitch Invasion. After this crucial game, Legia started banning fans from the stadium. Among 21 bans given directly after the disorder, only 14 were to those who took part in it. Others, as the club informed supporters, were given to people who “had been notoriously violating the stadium regulations”. These were to Legia’s ultras group “Nieznani Sprawcy” (Unknown Perps) responsible for flares and flags inside the stadium: nothing to do with racism. Some of their displays have also been shown here on Pitch Invasion previously.

This is the reason why the fans were protesting at the game shown on the report, and since they’re doing surprisingly well — managing to have most football fans nationwide on their side even some media support — it’s very convenient for the Legia chairman to paint them as racists en masse. But there was little evidence produced to support this assertion.

After the BBC report, the Polish newspaper Super Express accused Legia’s authorities of having no proof for their allegations, as did another of Poland’s biggest newspapers, Dziennik, which expressed doubts that the Legia chairman knew what he was talking about. Supporters have seen little evidence that Legia are really interested in tackling the problem.

The studio discussion after Bose’s report also blurred the issue. Scenes of chanting in the stadium, led by a capo, were portrayed as shocking. Yet this was not racist chanting. Players claim they love it when the stadium roars and almost 6,000 fans from “Żyleta” (“Razor Blade”- the terrace mentioned in the report as one not to go to) chant in unison. In the video shown, there are no Nazi/fascist/racist chants and, according to Super Express, Legia fans cannot recall last time when anything like that took place. It seems the BBC studio panel mistook a capo leading chants — something seen around the world in many leagues including MLS, but not in England — for some kind of fascist movement.

On the one hand it’s rather sad that the reporter only listened to the club chairman’s side of the story. On the other hand, it’s hard to blame him for only hearing one side. Supporters do not have much sympathy for journalists, who put them under constant attack, thus making it unsurprising the ultras did not wish to meet the BBC reporter.

The Background to Football Hooliganism

The BBC report also failed to examine the connection of racism and hooliganism in football to broader societal issues. This does not excuse any remaining racism on the terraces, but the solutions to the problem goes deeper than the panel suggested. Poland is a formerly homogeneous society undergoing a considerable change in terms of diversity. This is not a problem football can solve as easily as the panel seemed to think.

When compared to England, the BBC report failed to explore the legacy of 50 years of communism. One huge obstacle this period has left in Poland is a lack of trust for public institutions. Under the communist regime, the government was the enemy and police a tool used to smother any signs of inappropriate activities. At that time, football stadia were one of the few places with a relative freedom of speech. Football violence seemed honorable when opposed to the aggression of the police. This is still the case today. The rival fans of Cracovia and Wisla have united only a few times in history — once after the Pope’s death, for common mourning, and at other times, against the police. If there is any enemy worse than most bitter football rivals for fans, it’s the police. When a football supporter is attacked or robbed, the police are still the last institution he would turn to.

This makes addressing the issue of inappropriate behavior very hard. The police are still not gaining any respect, as even the Polish Ombudsman says that abuse of authority and unprovoked violence by police officers goes on today.

The Polish football association (PZPN) isn’t doing much better. Match delegates tend to have problems in the interpretation of symbols in some flags and banners and sometimes their decisions turn regular fans against them, not just the hardcore ones.

Laws similar to those applied by Margaret Thatcher are currently being introduced, like high fines, stadium bans and 24 hour courts for hooligans. The question is, will this really help if the whole system isn’t working right?

As the report also said, there has been improvement on the terraces over the years in any case. This week, when my fellow football fan saw the report, she told me: “Oh dear, I forgot these guys exist. The reporter was pretty lucky to find one that would prove his theory.” Nowadays, racism and nazi connections are not approved by most football fans. As the Polish sociologist and fan culture expert Jerzy Dudala said, this is more about showing off than about really knowing and understanding the meaning of certain symbols. Education is certainly needed to help eradicate all remaining racist behavior, even more than indiscriminate draconian action.

Euro 2012

As they discussed Euro 2012, I wondered why the report was mixing up league football with national teams. Poland has literally two kinds of audiences. The atmosphere at Poland’s games is hard to compare with league football. Each time a big tournament comes round, the media worldwide scare half of the globe with talk of Polish hooligans and afterwards it seems like the threat had been exaggerated in the first place. Did any violence or racism erupt at Poland – Costa Rica game during the last World Cup? There was nothing unusual, and all the media covering this event praised the atmosphere created by over 30,000 Poles.

The past few years have seen huge changes in Polish football. New stadiums are rising, standards of safety and comfort at football grounds are improving and so is the behavior of football fans. A protest of Polish ultras that might have evolved into a riot a few years back was now even backed by the media and resulted in a debate over what should and shoudn’t be allowed at football grounds. Whilst more progress need to be made, scaremongering reports with little informed opinion in them do not particularly help.

Photo credits: mbozkera and barket nowicki on Flickr

Can tolerance be sold? As we consider the embedded racism in Italian football brought up by Martha’s recent post on The Offside: Italy blog and Vanda’s follow-up post here on Pitch Invasion, we need to consider how it’s best addressed: will it be solved by an advertising campaign to kick racism out of football, by the levelling tendency of corporate globalisation, or does it need more radical and direct action by those on the pitch and in the stands?

Martha, like most of us calcio fans from outside Italy, got to the very heart of the question that often puzzles us. It’s not the why of the racism — it’s the why not, as in “Why aren’t there more measures challenging it?”

This is a difficult question for those of us dependent almost wholly on mediated images and sounds for our Italian football fix.

Why can’t we see people doing more to stop the offensive chants and the hate speech that crop up continually in stadiums across the peninsula? It’s agonising, as from this distance it seems it could be dealt with by a sustained and prominent campaign against racism.

But in our heart of hearts we know, ruefully, that advertising is not the answer to everything, even if it can help kickstart change.

Real change

I’m suspicious of the media industry that has sprung up around public forums on racism and discrimination. There is a give and take between social and brand awareness – but the imbalance of the two limits any potential success. Nor am I sure of the long-term value of commercial spots against racism. Maybe the nature of the cause celèbre industry is such that more money goes into pimping the brand than the cause. I’m reminded of the recent Apple/U2 anti-AIDS initiative, costing millions of dollars promoting Apple and Bono but a huge failure as no one turned up to buy their red iPods after all.

And the corporate social responsibility bandwagon is an industry. It’s far more edifying to see sportsmen advertise anti-racism measures than it is to see them do cola ads, but it isn’t less manipulative, for all its moral rectitude. I’m convinced that they are not the yardstick by which real social change can be measured. Is it really possible to sell the idea – and not merely the appearance – of tolerance?

Real change needs emotion and spontaneity, rather than an institutionalised campaign. Stadium violence in Italy is linked to a deep frustration with the failure of social institutions and a society in which offenders are traditionally suspicious of their government, their media, and their footballing establishment. A stadium ban, a fine, a police clampdown, and a multicoloured wristband can only achieve limited success.

In November, Juventus fans smuggled a banner into their game against Inter which called Zlatan Ibrahimovic a foul gypsy. The offenders were dealt with quickly, and the incident faithfully reported in measured tones by papers like La Gazzetta. And yet, apart from a short statement by Javier Zanetti in the post-match conference, the Juve case prompted little personal response. To the best of my knowledge, Zlatan’s own response to this demeaning abuse is yet to be recorded.

Which is fine; the man has the right to stay quiet, or simply decide that he doesn’t give a damn, if that’s what it is. After all, the Italian Football Federation seem to be doing a better job now in punishing such incidents.

But the ossification of these incidents into the administrative platitudes of Isolated Racist Behaviour and They Are Not Real Football Fans served up with a We Have It Under Control assurance is not what Italian football needs. It requires, instead of corporate social responsibility-fulfilling TV spots, the sight of a football team — or perhaps both football teams — refusing to continue a match until an abusive chant is silenced. It requires the players to walk up to the sidelines and ask fans what the fuck they think they’re doing: a popular rebellion is needed, and possible. One Marco Zoro may have been a lone voice in a storm. But four or five, acting with intent, can be effective.

Standing Up

Lilian Thuram once told of his experience playing for Parma around the turn of the century.

‘It was at a Parma-Milan match,’ he says, ‘when our Parma fans were chanting racist slogans against Ibrahim Ba and George Weah (both Milan players) that I thought how sick this was. The press officer tried to stop me, but I went to see the fans at our training ground and told them what I thought. The next week there was an apologetic banner at the match saying, “Thuram, respect us please!”

Of course, times have changed and naïveté has never been an excuse for bad behaviour, but the Thuram example remains important. The average racial abuser, in our imaginations, has a particular profile: he is white, male, often young, usually unemployed, or disenfranchised in some way (and usually, especially if you’re from outside Italy, in a Lazio jersey). The sort of guy who feels safe in a mob, who will duck and cower if you confront him. Accurate? Maybe, maybe not. Has anyone ever tried a confrontation, though? Not from behind a desk or a truncheon, but face-to-face, like Lilian Thuram with his home crowd?

Which is why football stadia should be good places for players themselves to set the ball rolling. There is a visceral connection between fans at a stadium and the team they are watching. And if, without choreography, without tokenism, without performing behind the safety screen of a symbolic gesture, someone stood up and asked for change, I think they could get it. Protest movements may not work against war and empires anymore, but they can work in sport. Perhaps a Newcastle player shushing his own fans would have stopped his team’s own fans calling Mido a ‘terrorist’. He might have made a difference where Rio Ferdinand holding a placard on a TV screen couldn’t.

Of course, footballers (and fans, who can make the same sort of grassroots-level difference, à la Perugia) are only human. It would hardly be easy, especially in a mob activity like football, to tip the world upside down.

But it’s dangerously wrong to expect the mass media to substitute for the visceral effect of individual actions. It’s just another way for corporations to subjugate political impulse. Perhaps it’s too Hollywoodish to expect a movement to awaken the guilt of privilege, so dormant in societies without a modern history of colonisation or oppression. But what is football but drama? And why not expect change that comes about in sporting arenas to percolate through the rest of the world?

Photo credits: watt.stuart; smuykpp1plaju

These people were all educated middle-class Italians in their early forties — architects, university lecturers, lawyers. All blithely unaware of having said anything remotely unacceptable.

This episode returned to my mind as I read Martha’s very interesting post over at The Offside: Italy, and the subsequent discussion, on the issue of racism in Italian football. The racist chanting by Parma fans against their former idol Adrian Mutu earlier this month was just one of many incidents which has illustrated that despite years of hand-wringing, racism is an enduring problem in calcio.

As several readers commented, this cannot be separated from the issue of racism in Italian society, any more than violence in Italian football can be considered wholly distinctly from other forms of casual violence. The same paper which reported the (mild) stabbing of three Catania fans outside the Olimipico before kick-off against Roma this Sunday also reported that a group of five youths set upon a municipal policeman who was attempting to enforce a minor traffic law elsewhere in the city, and kicked him into a pulp.

If we want to understand why there is senseless violence among young male Roman football fans, we might also want to consider senseless violence among young male Romans more generally. Nor do I think Rome is in any way remarkable in this regard. Football doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor do football fans; and racism in Italy is sadly not limited to the world of calcio.

A Racist Society?

Italy is not a multicultural society. It is barely a multiracial society. There are no black politicians, business leaders, newsreaders. The largest ethnic minority population is Albanian, chiefly living in the south, followed by Romanian; the largest non-white group is probably Chinese, chiefly visible via ubiquitous restaurants and a huge number of “99cent” shops, selling cheap plastic tat. Immigrant populations of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis can be found in large cities working in menial jobs and playing cricket in dusty piazzas in scruffy areas on summer evenings. The black population is largely visible as vendors of pirate DVDs and fake designer handbags. Non-Caucasian adults are almost always first generation immigrants, not Italians; and they are almost always socially excluded.

Not only is Italy not a multicultural society, but it is frequently a racist one. Racist rhetoric is deployed not only by the numerous fringe neo-fascist political groups but by mainstream rightwing parties, the Lega Nord in particular. Racist and anti-Semitic graffiti is a commonplace sight — looking out of my bedroom window I can see two swastikas and a fasces spray-painted on the building opposite. Gypsies and Romanians are a regular target of racism, as well as being frequently confused with one another. Racist beatings, stabbings and murders are sadly a regular feature in the news. So we shouldn’t be surprised that there is racism in Italian football: quite the contrary, it would be extraordinary were there not.

Action taken within the world of football isn’t going to radically change Italian society. But that’s not to let the footballing world off the hook, nor to say the football authorities haven’t got a role to play. After all, footballers are among the only black celebrities in Italy, a country obsessed with the antics of the celebrity world, and football is the arena in which Italians are most likely to have any sort of positive contact with people of other ethnicities. This year, punishment for racist banners and chanting has increased, as in Juve’s case after their fans called Ibrahimovic a “foul Gypsy”. But fines hit clubs not fans, and unless they make a greater effort to control their fans’ behaviour the exercise is pointless. A more effective tactic is closing grounds, or a section thereof; this was used against Inter’s Curva Nord back in October and at least directly tackles the people whose behaviour is being punished.

But the Inter incident raises another point. Pre-match announcements via the PA system and big screens remind matchgoers of the legislation against “all forms of racist or territorial discrimination.” The identification of territorial prejudice with racism is a forward-looking move in a land where regional divisions are at times virulently hostile. Napoli fans are particularly likely to be abused, with popular chants including such charming sentiments as “Neapolitan, dirty African, you are the shame of all Italy.” It was for this type of discrimination that Inter were punished, with banners suggesting the visiting Napoli fans were bringing cholera and tuberculosis with them.

But while linking territorial prejudice with more conventional racism is a laudable attempt to tackle the former, I can’t help but think that it merely serves in practice to downgrade the importance of the latter. Most Italians find the regional and territorial stuff innocuous; and the message seems to be “racism is no worse than regionalism”. Of course, the prejudices of the north against the south are borderline racist – elderly Milanese aristocratic types have informed me that “Africa begins south of Florence.” But I think the conflation of the two forms of discrimination may prove counterproductive.

Taking Action

Institutional efforts to tackle the issue are patchy and uneven. The reaction after the Zoro incident in 2005 was encouraging but all too soon it was business as usual. There is an Italian equivalent of the English Kick it Out! campaign, which indeed shares the same name: Dai un calcio al razzismo. But their website hasn’t been updated since May 2007, and I’d never heard of them before I went hunting for them. The Italian section of the FARE network (Football Against Racism in Europe) makes itself heard only intermittently.

Action is left to individual clubs – like Sampdoria whose players took to the pitch with a banner displaying an anti-racist message last year, while one of the club’s most important ultras groups organised a multi-ethnic fans’ tournament, having uncovered, implausibly, a north African supporters’ club: Maghreb Samp. Meanwhile many left-wing ultras groups, notably under the umbrella organisation Progetto Ultrà, have also organised demonstrations against racism in football.

These projects are worthwhile. But racism is a much wider issue in Italy than the world of football alone. The idea persists that racism is only a problem for those at whom it is directed: it would be good to see white Italians — and white footballers — speaking out about the issue for once. And as time passes and immigrant communities grow more integrated, the casual racism born of ignorance and unfamiliarity will diminish. Maybe, one day, a black footballer will turn out for the Azzurri: possibly Stefano Okaka, Roman-Nigerian. Then perhaps, neo-fascism and anti-Semitism won’t be flourishing in half the curve of Italy, either. But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be happening any time soon.

Photo credits: WeLcoME To mY L!Fe; maurobrock

The violence came after Spartak Moscow’s win over FK Moscow, but far from the stadium, and the catalyst for the violence seems to be unknown. Given the dead man and his friends were all “dark-skinned”, as the newspaper crudely puts it, a racial motive was brought up as a possibility in the report.

Yet the police spokesman was remarkably quick to rule out that possibility. “This isn’t a hate crime,” he said, the curious proof being that “After all, Nikolayev is a Russian citizen.”

This statement rang a bell with these quotes from a 2003 BBC report.

“We make monkey noises, or call the black players chocolate!” one young fan claims proudly, and his friends laugh in support.

“Russia is for the Russians,” he explains. “Foreign players are fine, but only if they’re white.”

Football journalist Alexander Bogomolov says this is a common reaction.

“The majority of supporters here don’t like black players at all,” he explains.

And it comes just weeks after Spartak were fined for their fans racist behaviour, after they unfurled a banner abusing their own new signing, leading the club to ask for tolerance.

The plea comes after a group of “right-wing” Spartak fans displayed a racist banner at the club’s match at Krylia Sovietov directed at Spartak’s new Brazilian forward, Welliton. The banner read: “The number 11 belongs to Tikhonov. Monkey go home.” Andrei Tikhonov is a former fans’ favourite who wore the number 11 shirt in the 1990s.