When English football was shamed by the racist abuse of players in the 1980s, the response by both the government and football authorities was robust. The Football Spectators Act of 1989 introduced banning orders of up to ten years for anyone found guilty of using racially threatening, abusive or insulting words. In 1993 the Kick It Out campaign was established by the English game’s governing bodies, including the Premier League and Football Association, to tackle discrimination at a grassroots level and provide a facility for fans to report incidents of abuse. No one would claim that the English game today is perfect — racism abounds on social media — but incidents of racist abuse at matches are now extraordinarily rare, and English football has become a model of diversity and inclusion for the rest of the world.
Compare this record with the shameful scenes in Spain at the weekend when fans chanted insults at a visibly distressed Vinícius Júnior, Real Madrid’s 22-year-old star Brazilian forward, during a match against Valencia. Nor was this the first time Vinícius had been the target of such abuse. The Spanish league has made nine formal complaints for racist abuse against the player over the past two seasons, most of which have gone nowhere. While some fans have been fined and banned from stadiums, so far only one faces a possible trial.
Vinícius has clearly been let down at every level of the Spanish game: by a referee who failed to take the players off the pitch on Sunday in line with international protocols and even ended up sending off Vinícius in the 97th minute after an altercation; by La Liga, which runs the league, and the Spanish football association, which have conspicuously failed to tackled racism in their sport; and by the police and prosecutors who have failed to bring any of the player’s tormentors to justice. Yet when Vinícius wrote on Instagram that “racism is normal in La Liga”, the response by Javier Tebas, La Liga’s president, was to attack the player for not turning up to meetings to discuss the problem.
Nor is Vinícius’s treatment an isolated case in Spanish football. Other black players have been subjected to abuse. That points to a wider problem in the Spanish game. Unlike football authorities in other countries, La Liga does not have the power to hand down punishments to fans on its own, but can only pass racism cases to local prosecutors. La Liga expressed “tremendous frustration” yesterday at the lack of sanction and convictions by the sports disciplinary bodies, public administrations and jurisdictional bodies to which it has reported racist incidents. It says it will request a change in the law to give it more sanctioning powers, including the right to require the partial or complete closure of venues, the ability to ban individual fans and impose financial penalties on clubs.
The government would do well to give La Liga these powers, if that is what it takes to drive racism out of the game. Spain is preparing to bid alongside Portugal and Morocco to host the 2030 World Cup. It is surely unthinkable that Spain could be chosen for the tournament unless and until it takes decisive action to drive racism out of the domestic game. After all, La Liga is second only to the English Premier League as the richest football league in the world. Its matches attract a global audience. What kind of signal does it send to the world if it cannot protect a prodigious young talent such as Vinícius from abuse by fans? Thirty years after Britain, Spain needs to Kick It Out. (The Times, Tuesday May 23, 2023)
