Let's speculate on the fines UEFA will hand out for Serbia v. England

Danny Rose: lifetime ban.
Rest of England team: banned for all group matches.
English management: coaching badges revoked.
English FA: fined 25% of the UK’s GDP.

Serbian FA: public apology from UEFA.
Serbian team: fines from English FA disbursed equally to each team member.

That’s two Serbian games on the trot we’ve now seen disgusting racist chanting and monkey noises from the Serbian fans. We mostly stamped this shit out in the 70s in the UK (John Terry not withstanding, yet to be fair both the legal system and the EFA fell on him like a tonne of bricks), yet still UEFA and national footballing associations are still turning a blind eye to the rampant racism in football in Southern Europe. The last time it happened the Serbian FA got fined £16,000! Porto, for their fan’s racist chanting, got fined half of what Manchester City got fined for appearing on the pitch less than a minute too late for the second half of a match!

Even worse, the Serbian FA are refusing to acknowledge there was anything wrong with the Serbian team’s behaviour or the behaviour of their fans, despite ESPN cameras and English FA officials secreted in the crowd with recording devices clearly picking up the racist chanting ringing out around the ground aimed at black English players.

UEFA, get a grip.

Hopefully they’ll just ban football.

But would all the rascist chav fatties start going to badminton matches instead? It’s an interesting question. Perhaps they would then spend their Saturday afternoons making Airfix models?

This is the organisation that fined two countries a total of £40,000 for racist chanting at Euro 2012. Then…apparently completely without irony, banned a player and fined him*** TWICE AS MUCH*** for an infringement of sponsor regulations.

That is UEFA in a nutshell. They will do as little as they can get away with so as not to scare the horses.

:smiley:

England team is lucky to just visit for a game and then go back home. Imagine living with this sense of justice on a daily basis.

Friend and I read about it and we laughed so hard that England team actually agreed to go to this specific city. An arseh** city of assh** country :o

/* on a 2nd thought sorry to derail your thread with my bitterness from 1990’s but these are football fans who, when Serbia plays Bosnia at a club or national level would put banner like this - it reads “Knife, barbed-wire, Srebrenica” so eff them… it would be best for that whole place to be swallowed by Earth so that normal people can go on with their life

Ehh didn’t the FA give Terry half the punishment of Suarez? I personally can’t take any English claims of racism seriously since the prediction of an apocalypse in the Ukraine last summer…

So, English predictions of racism in Ukraine proved to be exaggerated and you believe that that gives other countries the right to racially abuse black England players? Nice one.

First of all no ‘country’ has acted racist in football for a while. Some supporters might and I’m sure the officials will make note and take in any complaints opposing teams have. There are many places in the world where racist people are around, it’s not that easy to do something about it. Do you think banning Serbia from international matches will do something about what these people think? In these East-European countries most racism is ‘just’ fear of the unknown; I can probably count the total number of black people in Serbia on my two hands. This kind of ignorance filled racism seems almost impossible to do something about.

If the UEFA doesn’t want it in its tournament, that’s to be respected. They can have Serbia (and Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Slovakia, etc.) play all there matches without people in the stands or something.

All I was saying (not to eloquently - reading back, I can see it seems I made a different point - I admit) is that I don’t bother reading journalist’s reports about all these hate filled foreigners; when they seem very keen to find any evidence of racism (the Panorama program) and at the same time act lenient when one of its favorite sons seems to do the same. I don’t care for the way the media is all over this; start at home, for instance with Jason Roberts not wanting to be part of the anti racism campaign anymore.

It’s this ‘holier than though’ stance of the English (press) that irks me. You see it when they talk about diving as well. Most blatant diver I ever saw: favorite son Stevie G, and pundits claiming: well the other teams do it as well.

The press and media in general have been anything but lenient towards Terry.
He has had a true hammering. His stock is pretty low. That isn’t just due to the racism claim mind you as he seems to be a first grade dick but I promise you, he is not a “favorite son”.

Also, let’s look at the stance that the FA took over Suarez and Terry. In both cases racist words were used and in both cases there were arguably mitigating circumstances. No matter, the FA saw no reason to make allowances for that and took a hard line. 8 match ban and £40,000 for Suarez. Terry gets 4 matches and £220,000 fine.

UEFA? tell me, what action did they take against racist chanting at Euro 2012?

…after Terry had been dragged in front of a court and found not guilty. The FA still handed out a £200,000+ fine and a four match ban.

As to the European Championships, wasn’t speculation of potential racist chanting at the competition validated by Dutch players being abused at one of their training sessions, prompting UEFA to crack down on racist abuse in the stands?

UEFA’s match report made no mention of the racist abuse or disorder seen on the pitch after the game.

My take is this:

This sort of stuff is allowed to perpetuate by UEFA and FIFA doing nothing with respect to bans and the fines that are given are so small it makes no difference. Until there is direction from the top, it won’t happen.

Related to this, UEFA presidents are elected by coalitions of the FAs of the various countries and, due to the break up of the Balkans and the USSR, there are many more Eastern European nations who you can’t afford to piss off if you want to get elected and maintain power.* It’s why Platini has buttered up the smaller nations with Champions League entry and so on - it was an election promise.

This problem is both Capital P and small p political and I don’t see that changing any time soon. It will take the will of a large number of nations to elect someone standing on a platform of stamping racism out of football - and it’s not on the top of the agenda for most countries.

  • At this point I should note that not all the problems come from Eastern European nations - it’s simply pointing out that keeping the coalition of countries that put you in office together is more difficult now. Squashing Yugoslavia was a lot easier when it was only one country and could be outweighed by other nations in Europe not allied in football politics with them being relatively more numerous. Now there are more nations that ally together so squashing one country creates uproar in others and fractures your own bloc of votes.

Greetings all! New member to the forum and came across this thread and thought I would share a comment from a Serb I know.

I see the british prime minister has spoken about the ‘racism’ at the serbia - england game. in particular to a player named danny rose. lets examine how someone of african origin can have a last name of anglo-saxon origin like “rose”. england’s empire was built on the largest genocide in history when they took slaves from africa and transported them to the new world. 20 million died on their way across the atlantic. the slaves were given the last names of their owners. george bush and reggie bush aren’t actually related. this is why malcolm x replaced his last name with an x to signify the unknown. the english went carried out similar practices in india, china and australia. all places they subjugated for 100s of years with their racist practices. serbia on the other hand has no history of the slave trade and we ourselves fought for our freedom from the ottoman empire for 500 years. it’s completely ironic and absurd that the leader of a country built on the most brutal type of racism would dare have the nerve to speak out against one who fought so hard against it.

Take it with a grain of salt!

Ciao

I’d maybe take it with a grain of salt if the Serbs were chanting insults at Turks. It’s going to get a little salty for my taste if I’m going to swallow this vision of the Serbs as Europe’s most race-blind people.

I suppose the Srebrenica massacre wasn’t along strictly racial lines…

I wouldn’t own up to knowing him that well if I were you.

Typical ignorant apologetics. The behavior of long dead civilizations can’t be used to somehow deflect attention from racist behavior right here and right now.
If the UK continued to refuse to tackle racism today I would be thoroughly ashamed.
That isn’t the case though is it? Compare and contrast the reaction of the two countries to racist incidents.

Anyhow, what your friend said is unmitigated bullshit but I’d be interested to hear what you think about it.

Of course the repression of Albanians on their own land at Kosovo is something we will fail to remember, and the denials of voting rights and public sector work too.

There was something about the military support for a war somewhere local too, wasn’t there, now why did Serbia get out of it? Was it the Air power of NATO that maybe persuaded those naughty Serbs to reconsider their ethnic cleansing policies? I think perhaps it was.

So we had an evil perpetrated a couple of hundred years ago and is totally irrelevant to your story, and then we have modern day denialist attitude from a country that attempts to play the victim, when it is an ethnic murdering aggressor that hides its criminals from international justice and is rather proud of that fact.

More importantly, that denialist attitude feeds into the racist attitudes that your own nationals displayed toward a team who were there to play a football match.

Serbians were clearly racist and blatantly deny it, just as they continue to deny any responsibility for the horrors that it imposed during the war.

In short, fuck you, you knuckle dragging racist murder-supporting shitbag, go fuck off and next time your kind intend to ethnic cleanse a town by murdering its inhabitants, NATO will be there to crush you into the dust. I think we should respond by doing the only thing that your tinpot little godforsaken irrelevance you call a country seems to hold in any respect, bomb the fuck out of Belgrade, arrest more of your leaders and put them on trial in the Hague.
Fucking troll

  1. He’s citing things from hundreds of years ago. Carry a grudge much?

  2. If the Serbs’ behavior really was motivated by England’s history in the slave trade, you’d think their sympathies would be with a player of African descent and their anger would be directed at the white English players. That seems not to have been the case, however. Please ask your Serb acquaintance to explain this.

Obvious troll is obvious.

If you want to claim the moral highground for historical racism issues, it helps if you’re not the nation whose recent history led to the creation of the phrase Ethnic Cleansing.