The French defender of Lecce, world champion with the Blues in 2018, was the target of racist cries of the supporters of Lazio Rome. A recurring drift in the transalpine stages.
by Allan Kaval (Rome, correspondent)
A black football player is once again the target of racist howls of a faceless mass composed of hostile supporters. Compassed official reactions ensue, then symbolic sanctions, and a debate on racism in football reopens and closes in the space of a few days. The sequence that followed the racist attacks of the supporters of the Roman team of Lazio against Samuel Umtiti, the French defender of Lecce, world champion in 2018, during the match between the two teams, Wednesday January 4, opened an episode Additional and sadly banal in an endless story. Thus continues the litany of racist acts – without equivalent in Western Europe – which the Afro -descendant players of the Italian football championship undergo and, more generally, black sportsmen, whether foreigners or Italian, evolving in the peninsula.
Listed by FC Barcelona in Lecce since 2022, Samuel Umtiti had finished his victorious match but in tears. He had refused an interruption of the meeting proposed by the referee, his Zambian teammate Lameck Banda having also been targeted in the first part of the match by racist cries on the part of Lazio supporters. The Roman club is known to count in the ranks of its supporters a strong minority of ultras adhering to a subculture of fascist inspiration. However, it is only the advanced and visible part of an Italian phenomenon that nothing seems to have been backting for several decades.
Other disciplines that football are affected. The Calvary of Paola Egonu, Italian professional volleyball player, targeted by racist, sexist and permanent homophobic harassment leading her to consider leaving the national team, had marked the public debate for a few weeks, in October, before being forgotten. More recently, the Italian rugby player Cherif Traorè, of the Benetton Rugby Treviso, decided to express himself on social networks following the last racist bully that he suffered. As Christmas approaches, one of his teammates offered him anonymously a rotten banana.
But it is in the world of football, national sport and mass cultural phenomenon in Italy, that the vast majority of discriminatory acts are concentrated. In its report on the 2021-2022 sports season, the National Office against the Racial Discrimination of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers thus revealed that 78.7 % of the documented cases concerned football.
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