English hooligans make themselves felt in Lille, France, during the 1998 World Cup.
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Ducking the issue
FIFA’s Executive Committee responded to the incidents in Spain and Italy by declaring
that it “vigorously condemns these public demonstrations of racism. This type of
behaviour, whether visible on the pitch, the terraces or outside the stadium, is
unacceptable.” While this may be a laudable development, such statements do not disguise
the lack of action against football administrators such as the president of the Turkish
team Trabzonspoor, Mehmet Ali Yilmaz, who called the black English striker Kevin
Campbell a “cannibal” and “discoloured,” forcing him to go on strike before he was
transferred to the English team Everton.
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Trouble in Strasbourg
For the manager and directors of Strasbourg’s Racing Club, the season could not
have started in a worse fashion. Following a string of bad results, an estimated
50 fans of the club in France’s Alsace-Lorraine region barracked manager Claude le
Roy and grunted like monkeys at two of the club’s African players. Days later, a
wall of the club’s stadium was adorned with a swastika and the words “Le Roy, dirty
Jew.” The Racing directors immediately filed a complaint for inciting racial hatred
against the suspected culprits, sparking an investigation by local prosecutors.
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The terraces of some of
Europe’s biggest football clubs have become stomping grounds for racist abuse, though
the problem stems far beyond match day
 Three days into England’s new football season
and Patrick Vieira, France’s World Cup and Euro 2000 winning midfield player, is
dismissed while playing for Arsenal against Liverpool, earning his second red card
in as many matches. The British press is quick to speculate that he will quit the
English game, invoking the player’s own accusations that he has been subject to “racist”
intimidation from players and officials alike. According to Vieira, he is being singled
out for abuse not because he is black, but because he is French—a complaint previously
made by expat footballers like Eric Cantona, Frank Leboeuf and Emmanuel Petit. Only
months before, a defender playing for West Ham faced disciplinary charges after allegedly
calling Vieira a “French prat” and joking that “he could smell the garlic” when the
midfielder spat at him. “What a load of nonsense,” commented West Ham manager Harry
Redknapp at the time. “There is no way he should be punished. What for? For having
a joke?”
The true
colours of fans dancing with a swastika flag
In England, the cradle
of football hooliganism, the debate over racism in football has evolved. Overt racism
among supporters and abuse directed at black players, both of which flourished in
the 1970s and 1980s, have declined steeply in recent years in the face of vociferous
public campaigning, though residual pre-judices against foreign players have evidently
been unaffected. Elsewhere, in contrast, much less trivial manifestations of racism
plague the game. Throughout much of Europe, football grounds have become hosts to
deplorable displays of supporters’ bigotry, providing outlets through sporting rivalry
to attitudes that are either dormant or concealed in society at large.
The recent conviction of Ricardo Guerra for the murder of Aitor Zabaleta, a Real
Sociedad fan from Spain’s Basque region, is a case in point. Zabaleta’s death came
in the aftermath of the stoning of an Atletico Madrid supporters’ bus after a cup
tie played in San Sebastian, during which Atletico’s notorious Bastion group of hooligans,
of which Guerra was a member, had chanted “Fuera, fuera maricones, negros, Vascos,
Catalanes, fuera, fuera” (Get out, get out, queers, niggers, Basques and Catalans)
to the tune of the Spanish national anthem. While the official line is that Zabaleta
was killed only because he followed a different football team, the public perception
of the Bastion’s political sympathies was re-enforced during the return game when
they were captured on film bouncing up and down with a swastika flag.
Several commentators have suggested this racial hatred can be explained by the influence
of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups inside football grounds. Along with Atletico,
extreme racism has resurged among fans of Real Madrid and Espanyol in Spain, Lazio
and AC Milan in Italy, Paris Saint-Germain in France and Red Star Belgrade in Yugoslavia.
In Italy, Udinese’s attempts to sign the Jewish player Ronnie Rosenthal were abandoned
after anti-Semitic slogans were daubed on the club’s office walls, while Lazio fans
unfurled a banner reading “Auschwitz is your country, crematoria your home” along
with swastikas prior to a game with local rival Roma.
The labelling of particular clubs or fans as prototype fascists or racists, however,
is in fact deceptive. While Germany has one of the worst reputations for far-right
influence amongst its fans, many claim that this image, fostered by the German media,
does not accurately reflect reality. Professor Volker Rittner of the Sports Sociology
Institute in Cologne for example, argues that “Nazi symbols have a provocative role;
they break down taboos. But the point is not political—it is to get noticed and mentioned
in Monday’s newspapers.” Even where there is evidence of politically motivated racist
behaviour amongst fans, it is often unstable, contradictory and secondary to football-related
enmities. During the World Cup Finals held in Italy in 1990, when Napoli fans abandoned
the Italian national team to support their local Argentine hero Diego Maradona, “ultras”
from northern Italy demonstrated their hostility towards Maradona, Napoli and the
southern region by supporting any team playing against Argentina. As a result, the
“racist” elements amongst northern fans had no problem cheering in passionate support
of the black African team from Cameroon when they played Argentina—the then embodiment
of all that the northerners detested.
Race as
a weapon in the arsenal of ritualized abuse
In short, the racism on
display in European football matches is more often than not dependent on the traditions
and historic rivalries within white fans’ cultures. Here the concept of an “effective
insult” proves useful: fans will tend to use the abuse that is most effective and
pertinent, in an effort to cause the most harm and provocation. Supporters of English
clubs who have rivalries with clubs from Liverpool regularly sing “I’d rather be
a Paki than a scouse (Liverpudlian)” for the same reasons Italian fans throughout
the north often refer to fans and players of southern clubs such as Napoli as “blacks.”
In each of these cases, the effective insult is chosen on the basis of racial outcasts
despised by both groups of fans, with the obvious aim of making the insult as hurtful
as possible. To state a preference for the racial category “Paki” over the white
identity of the “scouser” might be seen to add venom to the insult, while the association
of southern Italians with “blackness” plays with internal insecurities relating to
the region’s proximity to Africa.
These insults only work because of the stigma that these racial groups still suffer
in the minds of large swathes of white European society. As such, race often stands
on the sidelines, ready to be mobilized in circumstances where it is deemed appropriate
within the ritualized abuse of a football game rather than forming the political
core of fans’ identities. The fact that many of the Italian ultras’ chants are adapted
from traditional communist and fascist songs is, in itself, no more evidence of political
sympathies than the extensive use of hymn tunes among British fans is evidence of
ecclesiastical affiliation.
Comparisons between the insults levelled in football grounds across the world only
goes to prove that racism emerges against a backdrop of shared prejudices among supporters.
In Brazil, for instance, where many fans are from ethnic groups who are themselves
marginalized and discriminated against, racist abuse is rare (and is substituted
by sexist derision). In England, the success of black players has shifted prejudice
to the kind of race-fuelled denigration mentioned above or to the xenophobic “humour”
endured by Vieira. In Eastern Europe, and to some extent in Germany and Italy, a
comparative lack of black players has left racist insults of these footballers as
a potent weapon in supporters’ armoury of abuse.
The spectre of racism in the football ground certainly is appalling, but its roots
lie neither in far-right factions nor in the particular characteristics of fans.
Violent footballing antagonism is the circumstance, but European society is the cause.
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