The European football championship will kick off today when co-hosts Poland entertain Greece at noon EDT. The Euro 2012 finals will be the last time only 16 teams compete for the trophy, making it one of the most fiercely contested competitions in sport — many teams in the top ten will not even make it out of the group stage. With such an exciting display of the beautiful game, one would hope that football would be the most popular topic of discussion — or at least the enormous sums of money paid out to the players, corporate sponsors and, at least in Italy, bookies and the gangsters who own them. Unfortunately, the buzz on everyone’s lips is racism.
Let’s start with perennial punching-bag and laughingstock England. Queen Lizzie’s boys don’t have much chance at winning the tournament (pug-faced Manchester United star Wayne Rooney is suspended for the first two games of the tournament, but they brought him anyway), so to make up for it England’s Football Association is making sure they embarrass themselves in other ways.
The Worst Man in Football, Chelsea’s John Terry, previously famous for cuckolding a teammate and missing a crucial spotkick in the 2009 Champions League final, was stripped of the England captaincy last year for allegedly racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, who is black, during a premier league match. The hearing for the incident takes place this month. Anton’s brother Rio, who plays for Manchester United and replaced Terry briefly as captain, was passed over by England coach for “footballing reasons” (despite his 14 championship rings) in favour of Terry for the Euros, as well as Ferdinand’s understudy at United, the 22-year-old Phil Jones.
This might have passed the smell test had England not suffered two key injuries to its defensive set-up. Not exactly spoilt for choice, England’s manager Roy Hodgson again passed Ferdinand over for, incredibly, Liverpool’s back-up right back Martin Kelly, who started just 12 minutes for the Reds last season and has played a grand total of two minutes for England. Ferdinand, understandably, was incensed. He tweeted “What reasons????!!!” when he learned of his latest snub, and his agent has called the decision disgraceful. It’s clear to most observers that Hodgson and the FA, regardless if Terry is vindicated or not (and the evidence points strongly to the latter) are siding with the abuser at the expense of racialized players in England’s squad. So much for Madame George and roses.
If that wasn’t bad enough, UEFA, the governing body of European football, makes England look like bell hooks. The Euros are co-hosted this year by Poland and the Ukraine — German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already promised to boycott the tournament if Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko isn’t released from prison (!). Jan Tomaszewski, a former goalkeeper and now an MP for the fascist Law and Justice party in Poland has said the co-host national team “lacks only a cannibal from Africa, who once ate a Polish missionary. This is not a Polish team. There are Colombian and German stray dogs.”
Neo-Nazi groups in both host nations have threatened to target racialized players from all attendees to the point where the families of two black England players have opted not to come to the tournament. England has set up an “England-only” zone with English police officers out of fears of assault. Italian striker and notorious hothead Mario Balotelli has threatened to “kill” any fans who racially abuse him. In response, UEFA has said that it will order referees to yellow card any player who protests racial chanting by walking off the pitch.
This is the same UEFA who fined Spain a whopping 100 000 Swiss Francs (about $85 000) in 2004 when its fans yelled monkey chants at three English players during an international friendly. They asked Serbia for about $32 000 when fans shouted racial abuse during an Under-21 tournament in 2007. True to form, when Dutch players were festooned with monkey chants yesterday during a training session (!!), UEFA first denied the abuse was racially motivated and then stated that the “isolated incident” would not be investigated — before reiterating that UEFA had a “zero-tolerance approach” to racism. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.
Dutch captain Mark Van Bommel responded incredulously to UEFA’s absurd claims. “You need to open your ears,” he said. “If you did hear it, and don’t want to hear it, that is even worse.”
It’s hard to believe that racism at the Euro finals won’t come to an ugly roiling boil at some point in this tournament. And UEFA will have no one to blame but itself.
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