Hey guys,
Talking with many people and doing my own research I have come to this conclusion. For instance, I’ve read about player who went to the Premier League and were not called by any “Racially charged” nickname by their fellow players. Something had to go through on other leagues especially La Liga.
To me this is “Common Sense” and I don’t believe the “term of endearment” argument that some people put forth, usually closet racists. Since ethnic identification should be more of “private matter” and has nothing to do with football or work collegues or friends on the pitch. For instance,if I had a friend from a different ethnic group I don’t think it should be up to me to start giving him nicknames based on his ethnicity; To me that’s crossing the line.
I’ve also heard the Premier League fans at the stadium behave better than the La Liga. I seen videos of how Spaniards behave towards players from minority groups. They’ll shout all kinds of racial slurs. It seems to be a extremely hostile environment.
The three main objections that Spaniards and the Directors of Spanish Football put forth are:
1-Fatalism: Nothing can be done. Spanish Society is Racist, Football its Racist, The World is Racist. I’m not buying it if this was the case, then how are Brits able to do something about it?
2-Empathy towards the evil doer and not the victims: I’ve seen this with Spaniards but also with Argentinians. Like,‘Oh those poor working class people, they don’t know any better." If you start giving them fines you’ll be doing them a great harm since they don’t have much money’ I heard some Spaniards say, “Vinicius and other minority players are rich they need to get over it.”
3-It would be too expensive: Some people say that if they start implementing these reforms it would be too expensive and they would lose fans.
What do you guys think? How was the Premier League able to overcome these objections?
The FA and Premiership pumped loads of money into “Kicking racism out of football” and British society became a lot more racially tolerant in general from the 90’s onwards, at least as far as overt racism based on skin colour goes. Peer pressure by other fans, a change in the demographics of supporters and penalties by clubs like lifetime bans on racist fans have made it pretty effective. Not to mention having a few decades of normalisation of black players becoming club icons alongside a huge influx of foreign players since the 90’s.
The reason the FA put so much effort and resources into it was just to make the game more saleable in an age of Sky TV and mass media. It needed to be family friendly, easy to market around the world and get rid of the whole working class “hooligan” image of the old 1st division. In short, they wanted to sell the game to the middle classes, corporations and generally make it more glamorous, rather than limiting it to just the traditional working class supporters. It needed sanitising to do that.
British football fans definitely weren’t previously really any better than the Spanish, with maybe a few exceptions, it’s taken a concerted effort over a few decades to change things. It’s probably one of the biggest social positives to come out of the massive commercialisation of the English top flight.
Good answer. Why do you think Spaniards are not able to do what British people did? Is it a lack of effort, lack of money or something else?