Football has fought a long campaign to fight prejudice in the game, but the reaction of two clubs to recent allegations has been shortsighted and damaging
The pictures above were taken less than five months apart. The first shows Liverpool lining up before their pre-season friendly against Valerenga on 1 August, the players holding aloft signs reading “Show Racism the Red Card”, a response to the shooting and bombing attack by the far-right gunman Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers, last July.
The second is part of the club’s officially sanctioned public response to the decision by the FA’s independent tribunal to ban Luis Suárez for eight games after finding him guilty of racially abusing Manchester’s United’s Patrice Evra. The contrast is extreme, the contexts, admittedly, make for a risible comparison. But somewhere between these images is a fault line down which the disconnect between football’s flagship position as a beacon against racism in British society, and what actually happens when a major institution is confronted with evidence of such behaviour in its own ranks, has tumbled this week.
It is probably no more than the coincidence of random events that sees two high-profile cases of alleged racial abuse played out alongside each other. Suárez and the accusations against Chelsea’s John Terry are separate if similar incidents and using one to predict the outcome of the other is a speculative dead end. What does and should bear comparison, however, is how both have been handled by the clubs involved from the moment the accusations became public, and how this squares with what has been a consistent and laudable campaign by virtually the entire body politic of British football to eradicate racism, sectarianism and, latterly, Islamophobia from its ranks over the last 20 years.
As its players became rich beyond imagination, as its core fanbase found itself priced out of gleaming stadiums, as the oligarchs snaffled up clubs for fun, as the ability to watch games on television was closed to those unwilling to pay through the nose, football’s publicity machine has required a narrative to shield it from well-founded charges that the game’s values have descended to little more than a brazen assault on the pockets of a captive fanbase.
Most big clubs run well-established charitable programmes and star players, largely enthusiastically, make themselves available for various hospital visits or publicity events for community projects. But against charges of increased alienation from normal society, football has had need of a well-structured counter-narrative. It is little exaggeration to say that in the past decade, anti-racism campaigns have formed the principal plank of the game’s efforts to present itself as a force for cohesion and solidarity in the often uneasy melting pot of British life.
This is not to deride those efforts as a cynical exercise. The atmosphere inside grounds is unrecognisable from the 1980s, where the sense of incipient violence and exclusionary hostility made attending a football match a dangerous proposition for most people of colour, and black players found abuse from the terraces and the thinly veiled prejudice of coaches a constant adversary. Campaigns such as Kick it Out and Show Racism the Red Card would be justifiably enraged at the notion that they are merely part of a fig-leaf to mollify the perception of football’s deeper
