PARIS - Ghanaian soccer player Solomon Opoku heard the Serbian fans screaming racist insults and turned around as they set upon him, hurling punches and abuse.
The attackers were supporters of Opoku’s team, determined that a black player shouldn’t take the field for their club.
Two days later, Olympique Marseille president Pape Diouf got a firsthand look at what his black players endure when he traveled to the team’s UEFA Cup match at Zenit St. Petersburg in northern Russia.
“What we went through was hideous,” Diouf, who is black, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It was the classic stuff, the bananas thrown at black players warming up, the monkey chants, obscene gestures. Not only does Zenit not hide the fact that no black player could play for this club, the fans say so themselves.”
Racism has become the scourge of European soccer stadiums. Whether the supporters are watching a minor league in Serbia or a major European competition such as the Champions League, matches are stubbornly plagued by prejudice from the Mediterranean Sea to the Ural Mountains.
Anti-racism campaigns aimed at fans have met with limited success at best, leaving the problem to FIFA, the sport’s governing body, and the Union of European Football Associations to clean up.
Soccer officials have condemned fan racism and issued fines. But penalizing clubs or nations in ways that would hurt both them and their fans — such as disqualification from tournaments, forfeiting points or stopping a match — is something they have been reluctant to do.
“You have countries, (like) Russia today, where racism is a quasi-official doctrine,” said Pascal Mignon, a French sociology researcher at the INSEP sporting institute. “In Russia, xenophobia is quite strong. So you will see it in a more powerful way, like you will in southern European countries like Spain or Italy.”
Americans aren’t exempt from the abuse.
Midfielder DaMarcus Beasley, a black player from Indiana, was taunted by fans who made monkey chants after he scored his first goal for Glasgow Rangers in a 2007 Champions League qualifier at FK Zeta in Bijelo Polje, Montenegro.
“It’s something that shouldn’t be in football,” Beasley said. “You get it everywhere. You get still get it in Spain. I got it in Belgrade. I got it Montenegro and the Netherlands as well.”
During his successful bid to oust Lennart Johansson as UEFA president two years ago, Michel Platini earmarked anti-racism as a key priority in his election campaign.
“We’re at a turning point in our sport,” Platini said at the time. “My idea would be to stop the match completely. There should be no half measures when dealing with racism.”
However, Platini has turned down multiple requests for an interview on the subject since last November, pledging to address racism in a speech next month at Warsaw, Poland.
The location is notable. The 2012 European Championship will be co-hosted by Poland and Ukraine, two nations with visible racist groups.
In Poland, sociologist Rafal Pankowski fights racism as a member of Nigdy Wieciej — or Never Again.
“To a greater or lesser degree, this problem has come up at almost every club,” Pankowski said, explaining that there have been anti-Semitic banners and chants at games, as well as monkey chants.
The BBC reported last year that Leszek Miklas, the president of Polish team Legia Warsaw, acknowledged up to 20 percent of the club’s fans were neo-Nazis. Speaking to the AP, Miklas accepted that individuals at his club have extreme fascist views, but wouldn’t estimate how many.
“Polish society is fairly homogeneous, we don’t have a lot of foreigners,” Miklas said in an interview. “So Poles are less accustomed to other races and people who look different than in countries like Britain or the United States.”
London-based Amnesty International, meanwhile, warned in a November report of an “alarming rise” of hate crimes in Ukraine. Much of the violence has been blamed on ultra-rightist groups such as the Ukrainian National Labor Party.
The party leader, Evhen Herasymenko, once said attacking dark-skinned foreigners is like “the immune system — the reaction of a healthy body to the infection that got into it.”
Some players and team officials say they’re fed up. But even they don’t know what to do.
At England’s 2010 World Cup qualifying match last September in Croatia, English forward Emile Heskey was abused throughout the match with monkey chants.
FIFA fined the Croatian FA 30,000 Swiss francs (about $32,700), a relatively small amount. England vice-captain Rio Ferdinand angrily told the BBC that “football authorities need to take a look at themselves.”
