Op-Ed: I support Chelsea and I hate racism

First of all let’s make one thing abundantly clear. I am a Chelsea fan.

However what happened in Paris following last Tuesday’s Champions League game versus Paris St. Germain is completely indefensible. It was disgusting, it was moronic, and it was worrying that in this day and age people still have this kind of mentality. The kind of mentality that says “it’s ok to chant it, because it’s at the football” or “it’s just banter between fans.”

The fans that were racially abusing Soulemayne S on the Paris Metro are not Chelsea fans. Actually, they’re not even soccer fans. They are fans of hatred. They are fans of stupidity. They have also done incalculable damage to the sport, the club and the country whose flag they so moronically shove in the faces of foreigners given any opportunity.

It really is as simple as that.

They belong to a group of people who just cannot let go of the life that they led when they were twenty or thirty years younger. It’s sad. It’s got to stop.

“These people do not represent the club” said Jose Mourinho, “I am a proud Chelsea manager because I know what this club is. I left in 2007 and I could not wait to be back, and it is not because of people like this.”

Chelsea are not exactly the most popular team in the world because of some isolated incidents like this, and because of the John Terry/Anton Ferdinand debacle from 2011.

But also, and it’s no longer worth sweeping under the carpet, because of a significant number who tarnished the name of my club, as well as Leeds, West Ham and Millwall among others, in the 1980s. Evidence from last week suggests these people just grew older, not wiser.

Chelsea are trying to be a model for what modern football clubs should be, despite the actions of small pockets of thugs. They are partnered with “Football v Homophobia” ,the “Kick it Out” campaign, and are the only Premier League club to commit to pay their staff a “Living Wage”. But events in Paris set those efforts back years.

Chelsea have co-operated with police to find the people involved and have banned them from Stamford Bridge for life. On Saturday afternoon when Burnley were the visitors, Stamford Bridge was littered with signs stating “Black or White, We Are All Blue,” and “No racism at the Bridge. That’s the way we like it.”

The clash vs Burnley was also a designated a “Game for Equality” with the focus being on a number of discriminatory issues, not just racism.

That may not be enough and Chelsea may have to go an extra mile. That’s easier said than done but the club has to show they mean it and that may mean more than banners and cards being held up.

They could ask fans to report on racist chanting at away games or on public transport, rewarding people who turn in videos with seats or merchandise.

They could issue tannoy and program messages at every opportunity.

They could even (just as Barcelona did with Unicef) forego shirt advertising for one year and replace a corporation’s name with a tolerance message.

The weekend after the grotesque scenes in Paris, West Ham United fans filmed themselves welcoming a black person onto a train carriage with the title “this is how we do it at West Ham.” (You can see the video at the top of the page.)

It was a tongue in cheek swipe at Chelsea fans and we can’t complain this wasn’t coming. Honestly, I saw it as a largely empty and manufactured video especially given West Ham’s dubious and shared history on this issue. But I couldn’t say Chelsea didn’t deserve it.

Sadly it backfired on the East London club’s fans in two separate and unrelated incidents.

In a video taken on a train by a Tottenham Hotspur supporter before West Ham and Tottenham’s derby clash, West Ham fans are filmed while riding on the train through a Jewish part of North London called Stamford Hill. Stamford Hill is not just Jewish, it’s Orthodox Jewish.

They are singing “I’ve got a foreskin, haven’t you? F****** jew.”

It has been reported to the police. I choose not to embed the video here in this article. It is hardly an isolated incident as both West Ham and Chelsea fans have a long history of using matches with Spurs as a pretext for anti-semitism, another issue I’d like to see Chelsea tackle openly.

The Hammers have confirmed anybody found guilty of singing this song will be punished, there is the option to ban the fans from the Boleyn Ground for life and Tottenham have stressed that any kind of anti-semitic chanting should be heavily condemned.

The second is something a little more subtle, but still just as grotesque.

Former Republic of Ireland international Kevin Kilbane made a formal complaint against West Ham United Football Club about a chant the West Ham fans aimed at Tottenham’s Harry Kane. Kilbane alleges that the chant used offensive language that mocked handicapped people.

The chant was “Harry Kane. He talks like a mong, and plays like one too.”

The word “mong” is a derogatory “slang” term for a person that is handicapped, short for Mongol. Kevin Kilbane’s daughter has Down’s Syndrome, and Kilbane is a patron of the Down’s Syndrome Association charity. Kilbane reported the incident after learning of the chant through friends who attended the game.

West Ham like Chelsea have moved to condemn the actions of their fans.

With the easy availability of video footage taken by passing witnesses, it may well be that these idiots think twice before bombastically displaying their ignorance in public places.

That may eventually assist us in ridding English football of a 40-year-old problem.

North of the border though in Scotland, we are dealing with a totally different animal. And it has powerful friends.

In the Scottish League Cup Semi Final this season, Rangers played Celtic.

Former Liverpool and Aston Villa striker Stan Collymore posted a video from the game showing the majority of Rangers fans chanting the sectarian “Up to our knees in Fenian blood” chant from the song “Billy Boys”; itself a perversion of the US Civil War tune, “Marching Through Georgia” – ironically a Union army tune that they sang as they fought to abolish slavery and racism.

Collymore himself started a petition on change.org to support his call for Rangers to be taken off the air until the offensive chanting stopped.

He came under sustained fire by many Rangers fans on twitter, some of them replying with racist remarks themselves or threats, although most restricted themselves to personal attacks on Collymore or the traditional ‘whataboutery’ which tries to deflect debate to someone else’s misdeeds.

Astonishingly one of the more sinister communications came, not from some drunken anonymous lout, but from a Rangers employee, IT Manager Allan Davis.

Collymore gleefully drew attention to it.

 

Imagine if a Chelsea or West Ham employee had tweeted what Allan Davis tweeted at Soulemayne S (the victim of the racist fans on the Paris underground) or at Kevin Kilbane?

You might think that the establishment, the administrators and the broadcasters would be unified against the racists. You’d think wrong.

Stan Collymore was recently taken off a broadcast for BT Sport because of the reaction to his stance against sectarian chanting.

As a result of the attention Collymore’s opposition to sectarian chanting received and a subsequent broadcast of Rangers vs Raith Rovers, the SPFL have decided they will investigate the sectarian chanting with many fans thanking Collymore for his contribution toward this end. It was clearly audible during the BTSport broadcast with Raith, actually, within the first half-an-hour.

In the end, the SPFL decided to once again ‘take no action against Rangers‘.

The SPFL had also previously done nothing when both Rangers and Celtic fans polluted the airwaves during their League Cup semi final with sectarian, pro-terrorist, and racist songs.

In 2013, ESPN Commentator Ray Stubbs actually highlighted Rangers’ fans sectarian chanting, stating that ESPN would be reporting the incident to the police. However, despite his bravery, that soon boiled over.

BTSport have released a statement that says they “Abhor all forms of racism,” except they found Collymore’s debate on twitter so toxic they took him off the air. BTSport say they should be “discussed in the correct manner” and they should, but why not involve the man who has started the debate?

As if they hadn’t pandered to Rangers fans enough, their replacement guest was Paul Gascoigne. Gacscoigne once famously mimicked playing an orange flute in an “old firm” derby. He had ignorance as an excuse the first time but he performed the same act a second. What message does it send out when you replace a man for voicing anti-sectarian views, with a pundit who pandered to them? You just cannot make this stuff up.

In a searing piece on the BBC website. journalist Tom English compares the swift and unequivocal reactions of both Chelsea and West Ham to the bland and token inaction of Rangers.

“Compare and contrast the way Chelsea and West Ham reacted to supporters shaming their club with their untrammelled racism and the way Rangers behaved in the wake of sectarian chanting at Raith Rovers on Friday.

“Chelsea suspended three fans. Later, Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea manager, said he was “ashamed”. Through the club’s press officer, Roman Abramovich, the owner, said he wanted to make it clear how disgusted and appalled he was. The chairman, Bruce Buck, met with the anti-racism group Kick It Out a few days after the incident.

“Like Chelsea before them, West Ham asked their own supporters to pass on any information they had about the guilty. West Ham emailed every one of their fans who had bought a ticket for the game to remind them they were all ambassadors for the club. They came across as a club that was serious about tackling this issue.

“And Rangers? Not a peep from anybody inside Ibrox on Friday night, or Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday.

“The club issued a statement on Tuesday and to say it was lacking would be putting it mildly. Where was the acceptance that sectarian chanting from their supporters has made an unwelcome return? Where was the urgency to punish the guilty? Where was the plea to decent Rangers fans for information? Where was the anger and the embarrassment and the contrition? Their statement was from an unnamed spokesperson. It wasn’t good enough. Not even close.”

If Scotland may be a lost cause due to the establishment’s fear of the reaction of Old Firm fans, we can at least hope for better in England although I freely admit that at international level, it’s the Scots who have become the role model while English fans, though greatly improved, have still got some fence mending to do.

Student Liam Stacey was jailed for 56 days in 2012 for racially abusive comments about Bolton Wanderers player Fabrice Muamba on Twitter, after Muamba had suffered a cardiac arrest during the game.

This isn’t “The Football Factory” or “Green Street Hooligans,” this is real life. Things like the Chelsea “Headhunters” and West Ham’s iconic “Firm” have been effectively nullified due to cultural change, but a few unsavory individuals will always try to cling on to that lifestyle.

On the streets of England you would be arrested for chanting some of the things that get chanted on terraces, and rightly so. Having been a Chelsea Football Club season ticket holder I can tell you there are some things most fans would never dream of repeating outside of a soccer stadium. I heard them from Chelsea fans – and it sickens me.

The most encouraging thing to come from all of the hatred, and the idiocy, and the stupidity is the way that the majority of fans have reacted to the incidents — the outpouring of shame has spilled out from members of all clubs, not just the ones involved. The incidents have kind of “self-policed” themselves — a massive win when you consider we now feel these actions are automatically socially unacceptable.

The “Kick Racism out of Football” campaign and the like have been going on for as long as I remember, and while they are great programs with the right intentions — only one group of people will ever really be able to do anything about racism in soccer: The fans.

Soon these people will die out, because they have nowhere to hide. Two of the three incidents that have been probed this past week have been caught on video and uploaded to social media. We are living in an age where technology is is ubiquitous and news/knowledge are instantaneous. The “old fashioned banter” of these vile-minded people will soon fade away.

We are united against racism, we are united against hatred, and we are united in our love for the game.

Let’s keep soccer beautiful. But avoid BTSport. They’ve firmly nailed their colours to the other mast.