The examples of racial abuse at recent Sunderland, Manchester City and Swansea City proves we are getting nowhere with this issue in football.
It was a bad weekend for campaigners against racism in football with examples popping up in two Premier League matches to go with the recent incident at Sunderland. The incidents involve monkey gestures and racist chanting which suggest clubs have to do more to make sure these fans are not at football matches.
There were terrible scenes during the Manchester derby and it later emerged that the police had arrested one home supporter after an alleged racist chant. Add this to the gestures at Sunderland and Swansea and it doesn’t make for a very pretty picture. It almost suggests that current efforts to stamp this out of the game are pointless.
West Ham recently set the example well when they handed out bans for life to supporters involved in anti-semitic chanting during a match away at Tottenham Hotspur and other clubs have got to follow suit. It’s no good handing out a fine to the club because this has little impact, it’s time the guilty parties responsible were axed from football altogether.
Investigations over what happened at Swansea and Manchester City this weekend are still ongoing but the only way clubs will stop this side of the game is to take football away from the fans through bans. If clubs don’t have the sort of people at games who will start racist gestures, comments or chanting then eventually this won’t appear in the middle of games.
The natural instinct of football’s governing bodies is to fine clubs in the hope that they will take this matter more seriously. Fines are all well and good but not at a level where they have little impact on a club. If fines are going to be dished out then they need to be massive fans that will encourage clubs to ban racist fans from attending matches because their presence has a direct, and huge, impact on the club’s finances.
Derby games are always going to whip up certain personality traits such as some anger, resentment and aggression but Manchester City should be ashamed at themselves for the way their fans, and that one fan in particular, behaved over the weekend.
All it takes is for one club to create a zero tolerance policy like West Ham and follow it religiously. A dentist doesn’t remove a little bit of decay from a tooth, he drills it out altogether and replaces it with something stronger. It’s high time football did the same.
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