The last politically correct form of prejudice is against football’s working-class supporters
There is a brilliant irony to the campaign to ‘kick racism out of football’: its backers — the commentators and FA suits driving this petit-bourgeois push to clean up footie — think in a similar way and use very similar lingo to the football-terrace racists they claim to hate.
Indeed, they have fully appropriated the racial thinking of those dumb blokes who used to hurl bananas at black football players. But they have turned it against white working-class football fans, whom they look upon as childish, inferior, tribal and monkey-like.
Much has been made of recent, allegedly racial clashes on the pitch involving John Terry of Chelsea and Luis Suárez of Liverpool. These incidents are evidence, observers and activists tell us, that the mass sport of football is still riddled with oafish racist attitudes. In truth, as befits a sport in which 30 per cent of professional players are black (putting to shame the diversity targets of every other profession), racism is massively on the wane in Britain’s football stadiums. It is incredibly rare today to see a fan making monkey gestures or noises at black players, not least because he’d probably get a slap from one of his fellow fans.
Yet the more racism disappears from British football, the more the PC lobby becomes obsessed with it. That’s because it is through accusations of racism against football fans that these people can express, in seemingly nice, liberal terminology, their own loathing of the white mob.
Ian Buruma, echoing those bygone fans who viewed black football players as a different breed to ‘us’, says that football fans are ‘primitive and tribal’. Violence is always bubbling under the surface in this popular sport, he says, because it consists largely of ‘collective aggression… evoking the days when warriors donned facial paint and jumped up and down in war dances, hollering like apes’.
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