Just before kick-off at every Premier League game this past weekend, all players and officials went down on one knee to reiterate their commitment to “fight racism and all forms of discrimination”. It is a familiar sight, but no less significant for that.
While today’s football grounds are not the rancid cauldron of racist chants and deplorable behaviour they once were, neither would you confuse going to, say, a Manchester derby with afternoon tea at a private member’s club.
I go to football with my adult daughter quite a lot, and it’s rare that we see or hear something genuinely shocking. We know that, in the heat of the moment, committed fans lose their place and say things they would never dream of saying outside the confines of a football ground. Yes, I’ve even been guilty of that myself.
Once, I found myself having to apologise to a friend when one of my fellow Manchester City fans joined us for a half-time Bovril and unleashed a volley of expletives and unfiltered personal insults about the referee. I had to explain to my scandalised friend that he was the partner in one of Britain’s most prestigious law firms.
Football can make bad people out of the best of us, and, I’m afraid, the pre-match demonstration against discrimination, worthy though it may be, doesn’t really touch the sides when the action gets going.
So it was that, at Old Trafford on Sunday, enough Manchester United fans were singing “Phil Foden, your mum is a slag” for it to be clearly audible on the television, more than on one occasion. Some of the fans targeting the Manchester City player with this chant may even have been those who applauded the players for taking the knee before the game. It was distasteful, abusive and clearly discriminatory, and, sadly, followed a pattern of misogynistic abuse from the terraces.
“Jamie Vardy, your wife is a grass” is commonly heard from opposition fans when Leicester City play, a reference to Rebekah Vardy’s legal battle with Coleen Rooney. Last week, Everton defender James Tarkowski’s wife Samantha found herself the subject of online trolling after her husband made a reckless tackle (for which he was booked) in the Liverpool derby. She went public about the “vile comments about me”.
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Read MoreAnd last year, England midfielder Declan Rice’s girlfriend Lauren Fryer removed all pictures from her Instagram account after an online pile-in focused on her appearance. Female officials and even female physiotherapists are routinely abused by fans, and, according to research by the pressure group Kick It Out, 50 per cent of women football supporters had experienced or witnessed sexist abuse at grounds. The group is demanding that clubs take stronger action.
But it has to start with an honest discussion about the problem, and Pep Guardiola, the Manchester City manager deserves praise for explicitly calling out the abuse of Foden on Sunday. “Honestly, I don’t understand the mind of the people involving the mum of Phil,” said Guardiola. “It’s a lack of integrity, class, and they should be ashamed.” United fans may point to the fact that City supporters have been known to mock the Munich air disaster that claimed the lives of eight United players in 1958, but that misses the point here.
It takes, in football vernacular, some “bottle” for victims of misogynistic abuse to make public the harm being caused, and Foden’s ironic applause for the fans abusing his mother on Sunday, while ostensibly demonstrating his own insouciance, could contribute to the idea that this is just “banter”.
The main responsibility to tackle this lies with the clubs. Is it really beyond Manchester United, a club famed throughout the world, to take a stand? There are CCTV cameras throughout Old Trafford, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to single out a few fans who were singing the chant in question, make examples of them, and ban them from the ground. They would do it with racist abuse, so why not this? Only then might football fans, and those outside the game, believe that those organised expressions against discrimination “of all kinds” are not just tokenism.
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