I'm Not Being Funny, But...

Anyone who starts a sentence with "I'm not  being funny," or "No offence," is likely to aggravate that by adding, "but" and then say something completely offensive. Same goes for "I'm not being racist, but," which more often than not is followed with an inflammatorily  racist remark which the speaker may think they are tempering by adding that they have many friends of whichever group of people they have just defamed. Not so the group of Chelsea supporters who, while travelling on the Paris Metro, were heard chanting  "We're racist, we're racist and that's the way we like it" and were caught on video refusing to let a black passenger on a train.

Now obviously this incident has caused much controversy, received much news coverage and the behaviour of these men has been roundly condemned by Chelsea Football Club  who  have threatened life bans and wasted no time in identifying and suspending the suspected culprits. Rio Ferdinand, a member of FA chairman Greg Dyke's commission looking at how to improve English football, has called for the game to do more to tackle the problem of racism and while it is true that work remains to be done, I am sure that clubs like Chelsea would argue that whatever work they do within stadiums, either when they are playing at home or away, what they can do while fans are outside the ground is limited.

One of the men involved in the incident has been reported to be a human rights official who is a director of World Human Rights Forum and, while acknowledging that he played a part in the incident says that he did not participate in the chanting and denies being a racist. Now I am unclear on exactly what level of participation this man was involved in, but the incident was undeniably one that was racially motivated and whether or not he chanted anything or not it is difficult to reconcile participation with not being racist. Indeed if he is not a racist and is a member of the World Human Rights Forum, should he have not been intervening on behalf of the man who was not allowed on the train? Interestingly, while Chelsea may well ban him from Stamford Bridge, his employers are supporting him.

This man is reported to have been travelling to Chelsea matches for over 20 years and travelled to Paris alone. He did not travel with an official club party and because the incident occurred away from the ground, and given his position with a human rights organisation you would not expect him to fit the profile of someone who would demonstrate racist behaviour. And there is the problem that Chelsea, and indeed any other football club, have. They can ban people from their ground and perhaps stop them getting tickets to away games once those people have behaved in a racist manner, but how can they prevent them from behaving that way in the first place? I have grave doubts that people behave in a racist fashion in football grounds but nowhere else, yet when they exhibit this sort of behaviour n any way that associates them with football, the media, politicians and the man on the Clapham omnibus demands that football does something about it. I reiterate that racist behaviour in the grounds is the responsibility of the clubs to deal with, but how far do we take the behaviour of fans away from the grounds and say the clubs must act?

If a man is racist and a supporter of a football team, where do we draw the line? Is the man who racially abuses someone while on holiday, during the close season but while wearing a replica shirt a racist football fan or just a common or garden racist? Is the man who racially abuses a shopkeeper or a bus driver on a Saturday morning a racist football fan or a common or garden racist if five hours later he watches a football match? If Chelsea are made to feel responsible for the behaviour of the men on the Paris Metro, why should clubs not be responsible in the circumstances I have just described?  Why are football clubs, with whom these people have only a tenuous connection, deemed responsible for their behaviour away from grounds to a greater extent than organisations with whom these persons are more closely associated, like their employers? Are we not, to some extent saying that football clubs are not doing enough by simply banning people because this does not stop them being racist in the first place, it just stops them being racist in football grounds.  Quite what football clubs can do that the government, local authorities, schools, parents and society at large cannot (apart from banning people from football grounds) to stop racism escapes me.

I don't believe that people suddenly become racist when they walk through the turnstile and onto the terraces, although I accept that there are some people who may be egged on by others to do something they would not otherwise have done, but because a person is just as likely to be racist outside the grounds it seems unreasonable for football to shoulder the responsibility for their behaviour. Just look at the recent behaviour of some West Ham fans in light of the incident in Paris. One group made a light hearted (if to my mind slightly patronising) video which was published on social media, showing a black man being helped onto a train by Hammers fans, while another have been threatened with bans from Upton Park after singing anti-Semitic songs on the Underground.

Gustav von Hertzen, the Finnish writer and philosopher, said that fundamentally we are all racist, that xenophobia is a survival factor, and to some extent he has a point. After all even Rio Ferdinand, the FA commissioner who has called for football to tackle racism, was himself fined £45,000 in 2012 for racist remarks when he referred to Ashley Cole as a "choc ice" after he had appeared as a witness for John Terry following the charge that Terry made racist comments to Ferdinand's younger brother Anton.

Like all right thinking people, I find racism abhorrent and I agree that football can play its part in dealing with it, but please don't let anyone think that eradicating racism among people who, among other things, are football supporters is the game's responsibility alone. The man who is racist on the terraces is just as likely to be racist in the pub or the supermarket and no one has yet asked Wetherspoons or Tescos to deal with it.