News has emerged that football’s governing bodies will consider giving foreign players cultural lessons about the English game, with a look back to the Luis Suarez situation last season. It’s a flawed idea aimed at stamping out racism.
Racism is still rife in football in England and across other parts of Europe. The best way of dealing with the issue is not to marginalise foreign players that come into the Premier League but to try and address basic issues of prejudice and hatred among many sections of the British public.
These new ideas are aimed at helping players coming into the English game to understand it better and what’s acceptable. The plans are basically a blueprint to stop repeats of the Luis Suarez – Patrice Evra affair from last season, they won’t actually do anything to get racism out of the game.
The issue needs to be addressed within the supporter community, the large groups of fans that go to games together and the fathers who take their sons to football matches from an early age. The Manchester derby produced an incident where a 15-year-old boy was sending racist tweets and that is something that ‘cultural lessons’ for foreign players will have no impact on.
Hatred and prejudice cannot be engrained onto the minds of young fans from a very early age because they will maintain that throughout their teenage years and into adulthood.
The best way to deal with racism altogether is to get those supporters out of the game and prevent them from enjoying football and live football because of the beliefs they hold. It’s a massive challenge to try and change these beliefs but plans would be better invested in local communities.
How on earth can it be productive to almost shift the emphasis onto the very players being verbally abused at various grounds around the country. It may be a good idea to get racism out of the game at a playing level but those players may quickly change their views on English culture if they are routinely subjected to abuse.
It seems a bit of a bail out due to the fact that 60% of the players in the Premier League at the moment are not from the United Kingdom and over 20% in the Football League are from outside the UK. Therefore, as far as the higher powers are concerned, it’s easier to tackle these numbers than the problem of trying to address a national problem and not just in football.
It needs a rethink in a major way because this seems like a poorly thought out idea which is just going to be a waste of tax payer money.
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