Friday 17 February 2012

Racism Within Football

By Archie Barnett

As you will all agree, racism within football is a huge problem at the moment and it can jeopardise the beautiful game. We have seen numerous examples recently, but lets start with the one closest to our hearts and the most recent.




Reports suggest that last night, during Manchester City's 2-1 first leg victory at Porto, recently returning City stars Mario Balotelli and Yaya Toure were racially abused by the home fans. This is totally unacceptable and we are in a society where racism is not tolerated, yet people still think it is an acceptable thing to do? The punishments may be too soft, too lenient. Mario and Yaya did nothing to the Porto fans at the Estadio Dragao, yet they were still subject to racially motivated abuse just because of their skin colour. I personally find this disgusting and it is a serious matter that needs to be addressed. Manchester City have lodged an official complaint to UEFA however Porto have strongly denied reports. Even if this matter is not true, racism is still a serious issue that needs to be addressed soon.

Secondly, Micah Richards recently left twitter due to constant racist abuse. Twitter provides a link for Micah and the fans, yet this is destroyed by mindless people who think it is OK to abuse someone just because of their skin colour. Now Micah cannot get in touch with Manchester City fans and this is unfortunate as he is massively missed on the social networking site. Both fans and Micah loved to interact with each other and Micah has felt so strongly abused that he feels that it is necessary to leave Twitter because of these, I say again, mindless people. The police of investigating this matter.

Further back, we have the incidents of John Terry and Anton Ferdinand and then the clash of words between Luis Suarez and Patrice Evra. These people are role models for children and if they cannot play the game fairly and can't keep their comments to themselves then I do not think they should be allowed to play the game. Now, Suarez was punished for his part, but is an 8 match ban really enough for racism? John Terry has a court case over his alleged racist comments to Anton Ferdinand, and I personally feel that Suarez should have also been investigated by the police.

These kind of comments can seriously affect people deep down and it can have other effects. Going back to John Terry, the resignation of Fabio Capello, I feel has come from this reported racist incident. John Terry was stripped of the England captaincy a few weeks ago and Fabio Capello obviously disagreed with this. This lead to him coming out and criticising the decision from the FA, which ultimately lead to the resignation of the manager. This leaves England in a horrible state, the FA now have to deal with their captaincy and managerial issues as well as cracking down on racism.

So, I feel that racism is completely unecessary, as I'm sure many of you will agree and it seriously needs to be addressed. The issue of racism should be non-existent within football, as it is not needed. The players provide a role model for children of all ages, and if they are racist, what's to say the children won't turn out that way.


@ArchieeeB

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