You’re a footballer who has been racially abused by an opponent in the course of doing your job. So let’s talk tactics, scenarios, next steps. Yes, I know it happened only a few seconds ago. You’re angry, upset, confused. Above all there’s a football match still to be won, and you don’t want to lose your focus. But really, you need to get your head in the game. Because even in these raw early moments, one false move, one wrong choice, and your prospects of justice are sunk.
Obviously you’ll want to lodge a formal complaint as soon as possible. But of course the referee didn’t hear anything, and the opponent has an angelic “Who, me?” expression on his face. Here’s your first task: you need to remember the exact words that were used. Was it “fucking monkey”, “black monkey” or just “monkey”? Yes, it’s gruesome, but it’s important. Get it wrong, admit the merest uncertainty, alter your story one iota, and in a few months’ time a smooth-talking lawyer will be flaying you to ribbons in front of an FA disciplinary panel.
Next: make sure you flag the incident up at the time and gather witnesses, or you’ll be accused of making it up afterwards. And remember, you need to look just the right amount of angry: too angry and people will assume you’re motivated by rage, not angry enough and people will assume you’re a scheming, mendacious troublemaker.
Once this gets out, you’ll need as thick a skin as you can muster. You’ll be forced to relive those few traumatic seconds again and again, through ever more jaundiced filters. Your reputation and your motives will be dragged through the mud. You will be abused again, this time in great anonymous torrents. And for all the support and encouragement you will also receive, the whole affair will leave an unpleasant aftertaste: a problem everyone wishes would simply go away.
By the time of the hearing, the incident will begin to feel like a surreal abstraction: you, who were there, will have your recollections challenged by others who weren’t. The player who abused you will wheel out a succession of character witnesses to defend their honour. If he had said the thing, they will insist, that would make him a racist. But he isn’t a racist, and so he can’t have said it. Ultimately, you will be told, it’s your word against his, and so nothing more can be done.
The reason for sketching this process out in such gristly, unpleasant detail is that there remains a significant body of opinion that is convinced people put themselves through all this for a laugh.
This cropped up again recently, after the Rangers midfielder Glen Kamara accused Slavia Prague’s Ondrej Kudela of racially abusing him during their Europa League game on Thursday. Kudela has denied the accusation and Uefa will hear the case in due course. And yet already Kamara’s treatment is a reminder of the obstacle course that awaits all victims of racist abuse: gaslighting, obfuscation, counter-narrative, a system that seems to be rigged from top to bottom against the accuser in favour of the accused.
I discovered this on a much smaller scale only a few years ago. Towards the end of the last Ashes tour, an English journalist racially abused me in the press box of the Sydney Cricket Ground. Or, more specifically, in a corridor near the press box: a detail I now realise was hardly accidental. As the older journalist flatly denied making the remark he had made about eight seconds earlier, there was a devilish glint in his eye: the stomach-turning realisation that I would never be able to prove otherwise.
And in the end, he got away with it. Complaints were lodged. Grave, stony-faced summits were held. My version of events was scrutinised with a forensic laser focus. Did I have a grudge? Did I provoke him? Could I have heard something else? All he had to do, meanwhile, was deny everything. And – legally speaking – that was that. Game over.
Multiply this by hundreds, thousands, and you realise why so many acts of personal violation – racism, harassment, sexual abuse – go unpunished. Kamara has received plenty of support, but also a good deal of scepticism and outright hostility from rival fans. Like many before him, he has been accused of simply inventing the whole episode. And remember, this was an on-field incident captured live on television. Imagine the overwhelming burden of proof required to substantiate a similar accusation in amateur football. In a dressing room. In a boardroom.
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We know racist abuse is a common, widespread problem. Conversely, there is no body of evidence to suggest that false or malicious accusations of racism exist on remotely the same scale. And yet time and again we are nonsensically asked to give these two scenarios equal weight: often under the cloak of well-meaning phrases like “due process” and “innocent until proven guilty”. Yet the presumption of innocence is not a neutral stance in these cases. It presumes, by extension, that the accuser must be lying or mistaken unless proved otherwise. And in so doing, it provides generous cover to any abuser shrewd enough to cover their tracks.
This is the landscape that virtually all victims of racism must navigate: suspicion, bad faith, institutional hostility. Meanwhile, football’s authorities wonder aloud why hatred festers in the game and what can be done about it. They can begin, above all, by assuming that those who stick out their neck to denounce racism are telling the truth. And not only that, but by believing them: not blindly or dogmatically, but instinctively, and with empathy.
Jonathan Liew was last week awarded the John Bromley trophy for sports writer of the year at the Sports Journalism Awards
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