FIFA president Gianni Infantino has spoken forcefully against racism in football, adding the naked injustice being meted to players across some football grounds ‘is no longer acceptable’.
Racism has dogged association football for many years as players, officials, and fans suffer abuse because of their skin colour, nationality, or ethnicity.
But speaking Thursday, February 8, at the ongoing UEFA Congress in Paris, France, the Swiss was unequivocal that racism remains a danger to the beautiful game of football even as he advocated for criminal charges against perpetrators.
He said: ‘’I don’t want to make a long speech today, on the contrary, I want to be very short, I want to mention just one topic and that one topic is racism,” the 53-year-old told the UEFA gathering in Paris. “We live in a divided world. We say that Football unites the world but our world is divided, our world is aggressive, and in the last few weeks and months as we have witnessed unfortunately a lot of racist incidents.
“This is not acceptable anymore. We have to stop this, we have to do whatever it takes to stop this. Racism is a crime, racism is something terrible and I can be standing here and say to you all this and you can be sitting there nodding at me and saying yes, that’s right and we will continue and still racism moves on.
“We have to eradicate that and we have some tools in place, the problem is that we have different competition organisers, different competitions, different rules, and what we all do is not enough. So we have to take responsibility for this. The tools that we have are of course a three-step process of the referee who can stop the game, interrupt the game, and ultimately even abandon the game, the disciplinary consequences will have to be a forfeit against the team who has been responsible for the abandonment of the game if a game has been abandoned.”
Apart from the three-way process mentioned to curb racism on the pitch, Infantino has equally advocated that criminal charges should be brought against perpetrators of the dastardly act.
He continued: “We have to start criminal charges against those people who have acted in a racist way, we have to ban them from stadiums worldwide, we have to invest in education because, obviously racism is a problem of society but that’s not enough, that’s not the answer.
“So what I suggest to you in addition to all these is that we work all together in the next three months before the FIFA congress in May, in Bangkok and at the congress in May in Bangkok, we come all together with a strong resolution united all together, all 211 countries of FIFA for the fight against racism. Let’s stop racism, let’s stop it now, let’s do it all together in a united way.”