I don’t know if you’ve noticed (and in many ways, it says a lot of good things if you haven’t) but there are many footballers around who aren’t… what you’d call… could be described as… white. Some of us remember when Luther Blisset played in the 60s and 70s, and Clyde Best and they suffered terrible abuse from their own fans, never mind everyone else’s. Mainly because the world was filled with morons and now the terraces are full of brilliantly clever egalitarians and equal rightsists. And any morons left over have now been sent away and banished from these shores. To Spain.

Where it is perfectly acceptable and normal to make monkey chants at black players. As happened to Real Madrid’s Brazilian superstar Vinicius, on Sunday at Valencia. And, apparently, at virtually every other ground he’s graced with his magical feet, virtually every week. And I get that everyone in Spain hates Real Madrid and so to ‘get at’ one of their star players is ‘the thing to do’. ‘Wind him up’. But, really? With juvenile racist tropes?

So Vinicius ‘lost it’, and to be honest, he has every right. Real Madrid have made legal accusations against Valencia and attacked this horrible culture, rife in Spanish football.
At which point the Chairman of La Liga himself, Snr Javier Tebas, came out and made everyone feel much better by stating that, no, there is no racism problem in Spanish football. Not at all.

Ok, so if its not Valencia that have a racism problem, as viewed by the governing league body, then its that view that’s wrong. And if the Spanish government then agree that there’s no problem, then the only conclusion is that the whole nation is institutionally racist and thus finds tolerable and acceptable what the rest of the world finds abhorrent. Its like Corbyn with his antisemitism. If you deny the abuse that is pretty obvious to everyone else then you’re saying such things are perfectly fine. Whereas you’re just trying to normalise racism.

And when I say ‘the rest of the world’, I mean the relatively civilised bit. Go east of Berlin and it all goes downhill rapidly. Croatia, Serbia, Poland, Russia (obviously, they hate everyone), and its a shit-storm of racist abuse at every opportunity.

“Stamp it out” should kind’a work everywhere. That’s, sort of, the point?

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx