![]() He caused an outcry five years ago when he made a comment about black players “eating bananas”, during his campaign to become president.Īddressing the subject of the lack of opportunities for young Italian players at professional clubs, he said: “In England, they identify the players coming in and, if they are professional, they are allowed to play. One of the most notorious incidents involved Carlo Tavecchio, who became head of the Italian FA. That may be, but it does not excuse the long list of racist remarks made by managers and coaches at the top levels of the game. “Verona fans once held up a banner saying ‘don’t be racist, hate everyone.’ They say they are not just against black players, they are against all outsiders. “I call it the Verona defence,” said Jones. Monkey chants are just another way of lampooning and belittling an opposition player to put him off his game, supporters claim. Teams from Puglia, on the Adriatic coast, are pilloried as “Albanians”. Southerners are derided as “peasants” by northern teams. ![]() If a player is bald, they will mock him for that. That may be hard to swallow, but fans argue that they dish out abuse to all players from opposing sides, not just black players. Italian fans routinely claim they are not racist. Clubs like Lazio are notorious for anti-Semitism and for displaying emblems of Fascism, from Celtic crosses to images of Mussolini. Add that to the fact that many “ultra” or diehard fans have Fascist sympathies, and you have a toxic mix. The mood against migrants has turned sour with the rise of the hard-Right, xenophobic League party, led by Matteo Salvini, who was deputy prime minister until his coalition with the Five Star Movement collapsed in the summer. The terraces are nowhere near as multicultural as the teams on the pitch. And that means there are very few black people going to stadiums to watch football. In many countries, working as a taxi driver is the first rung on the economic ladder for migrants, whereas in Italy the business is a closed shop occupied exclusively by white drivers.The dismal lack of economic opportunities means there is no black middle-class. There is bewilderment at the suddenness with which they have become a multi-cultural society,” said Tobias Jones, a commentator on Italian society and the author of Ultra - The Underworld of Italian Football. ![]() There were a few hundred thousand foreigners in the early 1990s, it was tiny. “Italy has only had mass migration since the 1990s. It was only in about 2000 that Italians woke up to the fact that the country had become a net recipient of migrants, after decades in which Italians fled the country in search of jobs and opportunities in the US, Europe, Latin America and Australia. The Italians did not experience the large-scale post-war immigration that occurred in the UK and France. Italy, unlike Britain and France, had a short-lived overseas empire, occupying territories such as Eritrea, Somaliland and Libya for just a few decades. And like any issue in sport, that reflects broader trends in society. Italian football has an acute problem with discrimination. Those two recent incidents are the latest evidence that skewed attitudes towards race are endemic and institutional. Instead, the paper doubled down, publishing a long editorial the next day in which it said it had no intention of striking a racist note. In much the same way, the editors of Corriere dello Sport did not understand why their recent "Black Friday" headline - about a match involving Romelu Lukaku and Chris Smalling - was condemned as ignorant and racist by anti-discrimination groups and by the players themselves. Using a picture of monkeys to denounce black players being likened to monkeys was simply not viewed as a bizarre choice of image by Serie A bosses. Italians – or at least Italians in football – just don’t get it. Nor was it covered by the country’s two mass circulation football dailies, La Gazzetta dello Sport and Corriere dello Sport. Not one mainstream Italian newspaper carried a story about the controversy on Tuesday. In the Italian press, however, there has been resounding silence. The initiative was swiftly condemned by some Italian teams and social media lit up with outrage from around the world. ![]() The image they chose to counter all the shameful incidents of black players being subjected to monkey chants and references to banana-eating? With great fanfare, Italy’s Serie A launched a new campaign aimed at combatting racism on the pitch and in the stadiums on Monday. It was the latest in a long list of episodes in Italian football that have left outsiders slack-jawed with disbelief.
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