Soccer and racism

[stunninglyAsian]

BUENOS AIRES - Fans wave swastikas, coaches denigrate black players, and teams are forced to play before empty stadiums because of unruly crowds.

A year before soccer's World Cup is due to kick off in Germany, concerns are growing that Pelé's "beautiful game" is being marred by racism. As a result, soccer authorities, athletes, and sponsors in South America, Europe, and Asia are looking for ways to improve crowd and player behavior before the sport's reputation is permanently damaged.

Soccer officials have long kept their eye on the sport's worst "hooligans" - disruptive fans who often drink heavily and try to incite violence before, during, and after matches. During the 2002 World Cup, the host nations, Korea and Japan, sent dozens of known troublemakers back to their home countries. Now officials are focusing on acts of racism.

Here in South America, the issue received renewed attention last month when Leandro Desabato, an Argentine defender with the Quilmes club team, was detained by Brazilian police after making derogatory remarks toward the player known as Grafite, a black Brazilian player.

Less than a week later, fans watching a club match in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, were seen waving flags with swastikas on them. Argentina has a large Jewish population.

But according to antiracism activists, recent events go beyond a handful of unruly and intoxicated fans.

"Hooligans and racism have traditionally always been linked," says Leon Mann of Kick It Out, a British organization dedicated to eliminating racism in soccer. "But it would be naive to assume that this is a problem caused exclusively by skinhead hooligans. [These days], racist chants can be heard by a range of different supporters - young, old, rich and poor."

Kick It Out is part of a network of nine organizations with contacts in 35 countries calling itself Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE). Funded in part by national soccer organizations and players' associations, FARE is trying to raise awareness and to change attitudes.

Among antiracism activists, Spain, Italy, and Eastern Europe are often singled out as the worst bastions of racist crowd behavior. They cite, for example:

• Spain's national coach, Luis Aragonés, was recently heard using a racial epithet during a World Cup qualifier against Belgium. Spain's soccer federation fined Mr. Aragonés 3,000 euros ($3,850).

• In November, black English players were mocked with racist chants by fans during a match with Spain, prompting British Prime Minister Tony Blair to protest the treatment to Spanish officials.

• In the Netherlands, anti-Semitic chants by a group of Dutch fans against referee Rene Temmick led to the cancellation of a game in progress between club teams PSV Eindhoven and Den Haag.

FIFA, soccer's international governing body, condemns these and other incidents. In 2001, the organization began to require soccer organizers to refuse admission to fans who take part in racist acts or violence, and ordered coaches and clubs to "impose effective punishment" on players who indulge in racist behavior.

More recently, FIFA announced plans to create a group of antiracism "ambassadors." A FIFA spokesman said that the group's activities are still being defined but that they will be led by Thierry Henry, a black player on France's victorious 1998 World Cup team and one of Europe's top soccer stars. He will likely be joined by Pelé, the former Brazilian star.

Mr. Henry, currently playing for Britain's Arsenal team, has criticized the fine against Aragonés as "laughable" and helped persuade his sponsor, Nike, to undertake an awareness campaign dubbed "Stand Up, Speak Out" in Europe.

In addition to television ads featuring European soccer stars, the campaign has created a black and white interlocking wristband which it is selling through European sports retailers. The money raised will be distributed by an independent foundation to support anti-racism projects and initiatives.

Europe's soccer federation, UEFA, has also gotten involved, fining teams in Britain, the Czech Republic, Spain, Italy, and Hungary for racism-related issues in recent years. The league has even forced some teams to play games in empty stadiums as punishment for racist crowd behavior. Earlier this year, the federation sponsored a conference in Slovakia to examine discrimination against Roma, or gypsies, in Eastern Europe.

Can soccer contribute to solving a much more general problem in a society?" asks William Gaillard, a spokesman for UEFA. "That's the question we're asking ourselves. We don't know the answer, but we're trying."

I'm kind of shocked since these days teams are multiracial. I think it's because the sport is increasingly becoming a melting pot, so the fans aren't used to seeing such a diverse group of players. I always thought the World Cup made things worse since a win against a country is more than just a result in a game. Imagine if China beat Japan.

[yoMAMA]

I'm kind of shocked since these days teams are multiracial. I think it's because the sport is increasingly becoming a melting pot, so the fans aren't used to seeing such a diverse group of players. I always thought the World Cup made things worse since a win against a country is more than just a result in a game. Imagine if China beat Japan.

I heard that in europe soccer is largely a working class game, and working class whites are more easy to get into the racist skinhead game.

[yoMAMA]

U.S tycoon gains control of manchester united (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7829433/)

the skinheads are not gonna like this...a jewish american owning the brit's most fabled soccer club.

:tongue:

[Grasshopper]

Imagine if China beat Japan.

Good. Keep the tribal warfare - racism, nationalism, etc- on the soccer field.

Nowadays they kick a ball around a field and yell racial slurs. So what. Throughout most human history people didn't kick a ball they probably used the actual head of an enemy tribe after they massacred a village. :eek:

So it's progress. :wink:

[yoMAMA]

Good. Keep the tribal warfare - racism, nationalism, etc- on the soccer field.

Nowadays they kick a ball around a field and yell racial slurs. So what. Throughout most human history people didn't kick a ball they probably used the actual head of an enemy tribe after they massacred a village. :eek:

So it's progress. :wink:

but you are comparing what happened now to what happened throughout history.

that's apple to oranges.

now days people should act more civilized.

[Grasshopper]

but you are comparing what happened now to what happened throughout history.

that's apple to oranges.

No, I was actually comparing chopped off heads to soccer balls. :biggrin:

now days people should act more civilized.

Yep, should, should, should. People are wild animals in clothes.

People should behave in a way that would make police and courts and locks on doors unnecessary. But they don't.

I'm just being realistic. I'm talking about sport as a potential release for innate group aggression. It's not going away just because some people think it should.

Now sports could redirect the group aggression or unfortunately it could increase it.

[Faithless]

Boy, FIFA president Sepp Blatter is a feisty dude.

World Cup Subject to Anti-Racism Rules (http://www.kfmb.com/sports/story.php?id=47052)

Last Updated: 04-19-06 at 8:03AM

Teams at the World Cup will be subject to FIFA's new anti-racism rules, which include a possible three-point penalty in the standings for misbehavior by fans.

FIFA's new rules took effect April 4 and will govern domestic competitions starting next season.

"The regulations will also be applied for this World Cup," FIFA president Sepp Blatter told Sky TV in an interview aired Tuesday. "At the first sign (of racism) there will be a deduction of three points, then we are finished with the problems of discrimination."

The measures for domestic leagues include a deduction of three points for a first offense, six for a second and relegation for a third. Fines can also be given to fans or officials for "any act or expression of a discriminatory and/or contemptuous nature."

Blatter said the FIFA Congress will discuss the matter when it meets before the World Cup opener in Munich, Germany, on June 9.

"We go now to the Congress in 45-50 days and then it will be by decision of the Congress ... to give FIFA the authority to intervene in case of non-application," he said.

Blatter also declined to join calls to bar Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from attending the tournament. Ahmadinejad has drawn criticism for labeling the Holocaust a myth and calling for Israel's destruction.

"If any head of state wants to travel to Germany, this is a matter to be dealt with by the German authorities and definitely not by FIFA," Blatter said. "I would be happy that any head of state would accompany his team and to be present in Germany."

Blatter was abrupt when asked about reports that 60,000 women from Eastern Europe would be trafficked into Germany for use in prostitution during the World Cup.

"We in FIFA, we are not responsible for the morality and the ethics of the whole population of the world," Blatter said. "We should go against gambling. We should go against drugs. We should go against religion. We should go against weapons, and so on. This is not our duty, our duty is football."

[thaite]

Soccer is modern tribalism.

How soccer explains the world (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060731427/)

[Chad]

the only problem with the anti-racism rules is that they could be used by spectators to sabotage a team's game. for example, if you wanted Brasil to lose, you could put on a Brasil jersey, go to the game and start a race riot.

[Yumika]

yeah... Soccer I think is a LITTLE too hardcore....

[yoMAMA]

soccer is for eurotrash.

[BeTheReds]

soccer is for eurotrash.
I disagree, it has taken Asia, Africa, and the Americas by storm (except the USA) after originating in Europe.

If MLS could be at the point financially where they could attract the best players in the world and rival the Euro leagues, you'd see the new dawn of US Soccer.

[yoMAMA]

If MLS could be at the point financially where they could attract the best players in the world and rival the Euro leagues, you'd see the new dawn of US Soccer.

the galaxy league (or whateer it's called) used to have Pele, the best player ever.

[thaite]

Yeah, after he peaked. Pele was signed onto the league because US soccer needed a big name. His best days were behind him, and, he badly needed the money after some bad business deals and getting ripped off by people he trusted.

[Powerful T]

Jesus, I love Soccer almost as much as I love autosports.

ALE' SANTOS!

[Flow to Live]

I love playing soccer, but I hate watching it.

But damn, Argentina has a high Jewish population, but they are waving swatika flag over a soccer game. There are too many people who take sports too seriously.

[yoMAMA]

The New York Times

June 4, 2006
Surge in Racist Mood Raises Concerns on Eve of World Cup
By JERE LONGMAN

HAMBURG, Germany, June 3 — As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust his arm in a Nazi salute.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a barrier and punched him in the face.

International soccer has been plagued for years by violence among fans, including racial incidents. But FIFA, soccer's Zurich-based world governing body, said there has been a recent surge in discriminatory behavior toward blacks by fans and other players, an escalation that has dovetailed with the signing of more players from Africa and Latin America by elite European clubs.

This "deplorable trend," as FIFA has called it, now threatens to embarrass the sport on its grandest stage, the World Cup, which opens June 9 for a monthlong run in 12 cities around Germany. More than 30 billion cumulative television viewers are expected to watch part of the competition and Joseph S. Blatter, FIFA's president, has vowed to crack down on racist behavior during the tournament.

Underlining FIFA's concerns, the issue has been included on the agenda at its biannual Congress, scheduled to be held this week in Munich. A campaign against bigotry includes "Say No to Racism" stadium banners, television commercials, and team captains making pregame speeches during the quarterfinals of the 32-team tournament.

Players, coaches and officials have been threatened with sanctions. But FIFA has said it would not be practical to use the harshest penalties available to punish misbehaving fans — halting matches, holding games in empty stadiums and deducting points that teams receive for victories and ties.

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany and eastern Europe.

"For us it's quite clear this is a reflection of underlying tensions that exist in European societies," said Piara Powar, director of the London-based antiracist soccer organization Kick It Out. He said of Eastern Europe: "Poverty, unemployment, is a problem. Indigenous people are looking for easy answers to blame. Often newcomers bear the brunt of the blame."

Yet experts and players also said they believed the racist behavior would be more constrained at the World Cup than it was during play in various domestic leagues around Europe, because of increased security, the international makeup of the crowds, higher ticket prices and a sense that spectators would be generally well behaved on soccer's grandest stage.

"We have to differentiate inside and outside the stadium," said Kurt Wachter, project coordinator for the Vienna-based Football Against Racism in Europe, a network of organizations that seeks to fight bigotry and xenophobia in 35 countries.

"Racism is a feature of many football leagues inside and outside Europe," said Wachter, who expects most problems to occur outside stadiums where crowds are less controlled. "We're sure we will see some things we're used to seeing. It won't stop because of the World Cup."

Particularly worrisome are the possibilities of attacks by extremist groups on spectators and visitors in train stations, bars, restaurants and open areas near the stadiums, Wachter and other experts said. To promote tolerance, he said his organization would organize street soccer matches outside World Cup stadiums.

Recent attacks in the eastern Germany city of Potsdam on an Ethiopian-born engineer and in eastern Berlin on a state lawmaker of Turkish descent, along with a government report showing an increase in right-wing violence, have ignited fears that even sporadic hate crimes and other intolerant behavior could mar the World Cup, whose embracing motto is A Time to Make Friends.

Far-right extremism is isolated on the fringe of German society, and the German government has intended to confront its Nazi past while preaching openness and tolerance. Germany has one of the world's lowest rates of violent crime. Still, an immigrant group called the Africa Council said it would publish a "No Go" guide for nonwhites during the World Cup, particularly for some areas of eastern Berlin and for surrounding towns of the state of Brandenburg.

In mid-May, a former government spokesman, Uwe-Karsten Heye, caused a furor when he tried to assist visitors by advising that anyone "with a different skin color" avoid visiting small and midsize towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere in eastern Germany, or they "may not leave with their lives."

These remarks received blunt criticism from high-ranking German officials. Wolfgang Schäuble, the minister of the interior, said there were no areas in which World Cup visitors should feel threatened, calling Germany "one of the safest places in the world."

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, has warned that "anybody who threatens, attacks or, worse, kills anybody because of the color of his skin or because he comes from another country will face the full force of the law."

The Bundesliga in Germany is one of the world's top professional soccer leagues, and has not experienced widespread racism. Incidents involving racial abuse of black players are more prevalent in semiprofessional and amateur leagues in eastern Germany. One of the cities playing host to the World Cup, Leipzig, is in the former East Germany. Another, Berlin, was partly in East Germany.

After making a Nazi salute, which is illegal in Germany, Ogungbure of Nigeria was investigated by the authorities. But a charge of unconstitutional behavior against him was soon dropped because his gesture had been meant to renounce extremist activity.

"I regret what I did," Ogungbure said in a telephone interview from Leipzig. "I should have walked away. I'm a professional, but I'm a human, too. They don't spit on dogs. Why should they spit on me? I felt like a nobody."

Gerald Asamoah, a forward on Germany's World Cup team and a native of Ghana, has been recounting an incident in the 1990's when he was pelted with bananas before a club match in Cottbus. "I'll never forget that," he said in a television interview. "It's like we're not people." He has expressed anger and sadness over a banner distributed by a right-wing group that admonished, "No Gerald, You Are Not Germany."

Cory Gibbs, an American defender who formerly played professionally in Germany, said there were restaurants and nightclubs in eastern Germany — and even around Hamburg in the west — where he was told "You're not welcome" because he was black.

"I think racism is everywhere," said Gibbs, who will miss the World Cup because of a knee injury. "But I feel in Germany racism is a lot more direct."

Racist behavior at soccer matches is primarily displayed by men and is fueled by several factors, according to experts: alcohol; the perceived "us versus them" threat of multiculturalism in societies that were once more ethnically homogenous; the difficult economic transition of eastern European nations since the fall of the Berlin Wall; and crude attempts to unnerve opposing players during bitter, consuming rivalries.

Other observers say that the soccer stadium in Europe has become a communal soapbox, one of the few remaining public spaces where spectators can be outrageous and where political correctness does not exist and is even discouraged.

"Nowhere else other than football do people meet someplace and have a stage for shouting things as an anonymous mass," said Gerd Dembowski, director of a Berlin-based antiracist organization called Floodlight. "You can shout things you would never say in your normal life, let out your frustrations."

Not all the misbehavior can be traced to fans or to Europe. Players and coaches have also been transgressors.

Luis Aragonés, Spain's World Cup coach, was fined in 2004 after making racial remarks about the French star Thierry Henry. In March, in the Brazilian league, the defender Antonio Carlos was suspended for 120 days, and 4 additional matches, after an incident in which he shouted "monkey" at an opposing player who was black. But it was an incident in Spain on Feb. 25 that galvanized antiracist sentiment and prodded FIFA into taking a tougher stand against bigoted behavior. That match, in Zaragoza, was temporarily halted in the 77th minute by the referee, who threatened to cancel the remaining 13 minutes after Samuel Eto'o, the star forward for Barcelona, was subjected to a chorus of racial taunts. Eto'o threatened to leave the field. His coach and teammates eventually persuaded him to continue, and last month Barcelona won the European Champions Cup.

Eto'o has become one of the sport's most outspoken players on the subject of racism. "I'll continue to play," Eto'o, whose national team, Cameroon, did not qualify for the World Cup, said this week through his agent. "I'm not going to give up and hide and put my head down. I'll score goals against the teams whose fans are making rude noises."

Under pressure to curb what it acknowledged was an increase in racist incidents, FIFA in late March announced a stricter set of penalties that would apply for club and national team matches. The sanctions would include suspensions of five matches for players and officials who make discriminatory gestures, fines of $16,600 to $25,000 for each offense and two-year stadium bans for offending spectators. It also said teams, which receive 3 points in the standings for a victory, would have 3 points deducted on a first offense by misbehaving players, officials or fans.

Blatter, the FIFA president, told reporters that the 3-point deduction for abhorrent fan behavior would apply during the World Cup, then backed away from his comments in April. Blatter declined to comment for this article. And it remains unclear exactly what penalties will be levied against World Cup teams for offensive behavior by fans, coaches and players.

Nicolas Maingot, a FIFA spokesman, said World Cup sanctions would be made public later. But in an e-mail response to questions, he said: "Only racist abuses in the field of play will be punished. For fans, it will be impossible, due to the multinationality of the audience. In other words, it would be impossible to identify from which side would potential racist abusers come."

Critics counter that spectators are supposed to have their names on their tickets, so identifying offending fans should be relatively easy.

Onyewu, the American defender who was punched by an opposing fan in Belgium, said the man was identified through an anonymous tip and was barred from attending matches for two years. He said he did not retaliate because he believed that racist behavior reflected acts of a minority of fans.

"I'm anticipating a more professional environment in Germany because it's the World Cup," Onyewu said. Even so, he said, although antiracist efforts could restrict public behavior, "that's only helping the exterior."

He added, "The interior mind thinking, you can't really change that."


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company