Sporting heroes - the best campaigners for equality
Last week my son came home from school and said that some FAI footballers had visited the school. He didn’t seem as excited about the event as I thought he would have been and he went on to say that they hadn’t come to talk about football, but simply about racism. My son couldn’t understand why footballers needed to talk about this as an issue. Earlier that day I had opened up the notebook that I use for jotting down ideas for essays and found a few pages of my son’s handwriting. He has a typically boyish habit of creating imaginary fantasy football line-ups. His teams included names such as Robinho, Fabregas, Torres, Cole, Boateng and Podolski amongst countless others. All spelt correctly and including accents and umlauts as appropriate. It was a reminder of how much football has done for multi-culturalism.
My son has grown up in a world where sporting heroes come from all over the world, and are idolised and respected without prejudice; hence his failure to comprehend why footballers today still need to campaign on issues of racism. My son innocently assumes that racism does not really exist any more.
I explained how football was back in the 1970s when I used to go to football matches on a regular basis. Black players were only just starting to appear in the teams, and they were not universally welcomed, even by the supporters of the teams they played for. The seventies weren’t really that long ago, but it felt like we were discussing the dark ages, and I guess we were. My husband played semi-professional football during this time, and he added his own memories of horror stories of fans throwing bananas onto the pitch and chanting like apes whenever a black player got near a ball.
We are still a long way from total equality, but I think it is a measure of how successful the campaign to kick racism out of football has been that some of today’s children question why it is needed.
Really love this post Frankie. There has been marked progress and it needs to be recognised. It's horrific thinking about just how bad things used to be. We've a ways to go of course. Some of the antics of the Spanish supporters are unbelievable and it has always bothered me that Beckham never once said anything in support of efforts to rid the game of racism during his time in Spain.
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