Well, I wanted to write something about this, but then I came across this article by José Félix Díaz in El Confidencial, and it basically says everything I wanted to say, so here’s the translation.
Anything goes in sports, or actually, football. If you had a bad week, if you were fired from work, if you had an argument with your husband or your wife, there’s a solution. And it’s even free. The solution is very simple. Buy a ticket for a football game and you can insult, shout and wish death upon whomever you want, with no additional fees required.
The worse part about what happened in the Vicente Calderón when a section of the fans wished death upon Mourinho and Ronaldo, and called Marcelo a monkey, is that no one reacted. The first people who can act are the referees. The Federation told the referees that they should reflect in their match reports any acts of insulting, whether it’s racist or not, that occurs during a game. Texeira Vitiens must have been the only person in the Calderón who didn’t hear the chants from the crowd. To date, no team has been sanctioned by the Competition Committee of the federation for similar incidents. It’s a vicious cycle. The referees don’t report it and Competition doesn’t punish it.
Sources from the federation say that everything will change when a referee makes the decision himself, or responds to the request of a player, to suspend a game for insults from the stands. There are very few referees who dare to do write these things in the match report. Pino Zamorano, in the second division, did try to do this in a Betis-Cartegena game last season. Ramirez Domínguez also noted the shouts in a Mallorca-Barcelona game.
Samuel Eto’o is one of the few players who has taken a stand against racist insults. In a game against Zaragoza, he decided to leave the game after people in the stands repeatedly made gorilla noises. Only the intervention of his teammates prevented him from leaving the field in the middle of the game. The same thing happened last season while he was with Inter. It was in Cagliari and the game was stopped for three minutes. What’s more, a judge decided to close the ultra section of Juventus for racist insults against Balotelli in 2009.
The Consejo Superior de Deportes approved a law against violence and xenophobia in sports in July 2007. The problem is that it’s not applied, at least not as how it was intended. The law permits the referee to suspend any type of sporting event in which there are racist insults or attacks against the honor of the athletes or referees. There are also punishments that range from fines of €150-6,000 or a jail sentence, as well as a ban on going to any sporting arena. But what happens is that if no one speaks up, there is no possibility of a punishment.
The Antiviolence Commission has proposed punishing fans or clubs that don’t comply with the norms, but always after the police reports things. Now the question is clear. Why does football look the other way? In basketball, games have already been stopped due to insults against the referees. No more reason is needed.
The curious thing is that the players are trying to do something about it. Just yesterday, Keita, Piqué and Messi participated in a UNESCO video against racism, as players from Real Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla and Atlético had done before. The problem is that the message does not reach some of the fans.
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This type of thing happens way too much with Spanish fans in sports. I think another big problem is that some Spanish people don’t perceive these types of things (making monkey noises, for example) as racism. They just don’t get it; they’re either in denial or just not that smart.
And I didn’t like what David de Gea said yesterday: “it’s not nice to hear such shouts in the Calderón, but it happens in a lot of stadiums.” Why couldn’t he just have stopped after the first part? The second part makes it sound like he’s saying it’s not that bad, because it happens everywhere, so in a way, it’s okay. No, it’s not okay. And it never will be.