A black football player is once again the target of racist howls from a faceless mass of hostile supporters. Stuffed official reactions followed, then symbolic sanctions, and a debate on racism in football reopened and closed in the space of a few days. The sequence which followed the racist attacks of the supporters of the Roman team of Lazio against Samuel Umtiti, the French defender of Lecce, world champion in 2018, during the match between the two teams, Wednesday January 4, opened an episode additional and sadly banal in a never-ending story. Thus continues the litany of racist acts – unparalleled in Western Europe – suffered by Afro-descendant players in the Italian football championship and, more generally, by black sportsmen, whether foreign or Italian, playing in the Peninsula.
On loan from FC Barcelona to Lecce since 2022, Samuel Umtiti had finished his match victorious but in tears. He had refused an interruption of the meeting proposed by the referee, his Zambian teammate Lameck Banda having also been targeted in the first part of the match by racist cries from Lazio supporters. The Roman club is known to have among its supporters a strong minority of ultras adhering to a fascist-inspired subculture. However, it is only the advanced and visible part of an Italian phenomenon that nothing seems to have pushed back for several decades.
Disciplines other than football are concerned. The ordeal of Paola Egonu, Italian professional volleyball player, targeted by permanent racist, sexist and homophobic harassment leading her to consider leaving the national team, had marked the public debate for a few weeks, in October, before being forgotten. More recently, Italian rugby player Cherif Traorè, of Benetton Rugby Treviso, decided to speak out on social media following the latest racist bullying he suffered. As Christmas approached, one of his teammates anonymously offered him a rotten banana.
But it is in the world of football, national sport and mass cultural phenomenon in Italy, that the vast majority of discriminatory acts are concentrated. In its report on the 2021-2022 sports season, the National Office against Racial Discrimination of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers revealed that 78.7% of documented cases concerned football.
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