I hate to be a wet blanket, but I have the tiniest sliver of sympathy for football administrators in the predicament they face following the actions of Kevin-Prince Boateng and his Milan team-mates.
The powers-that-be now have to decide how they are going to respond when a similar walk-off happens in a competitive match – as assuredly it will.
And sanctioning those evacuating the pitch for having the temerity to take the law into their own hands has just been wiped definitively from their menu of options.
Before you stop reading, or worse, consider these questions:
Would you react the same way to a player who stormed off with his team 3-0 down, as one who did so when 3-0 up?
If the abuse is obvious, then hopefully yes, you would.
But what if the evidence was not clear-cut?
One hopes it would never happen, but stakes can be unbelievably high in football and the authorities have to at least allow for the possibility that a player might depart the pitch alleging – non-existent or non-proven – racial abuse in the hope of getting a result annulled or reversed.
Partly for that reason, I think authority to exit the field has to vest with match officials – with clear instructions that if there is the slightest evidence to support a player’s complaints, off they would go with severe consequences for the abusers and their club.
And what, if sanctions are made tougher, about the potential for agents provocateurs?
By this I mean supporters of a club, or even members of an extremist political faction, who might dress up as fans of a rival and hurl racial abuse in the hope of getting the rival penalised, or simply garnering headlines for their misguided cause?
This perhaps sounds even more far-fetched, but it wouldn’t take many people to create a stir, especially
at a lower-division club.
In any case, if penalties for racism are ratcheted up, authorities would need to be confident that their investigative machinery was capable of identifying examples of such despicable behaviour, even if it judged them supremely unlikely to occur.
Notwithstanding such reservations, I think it is now inescapable for football decision-makers to act to impose stiffer penalties for racism, including footballing penalties such as points deductions, expulsion from a competition and demotion.
And if they do so, I would think it should be possible relatively quickly to banish overt racist acts and chants from our football stadia.
Would that, though, contribute significantly to expunging racism from society?
It would be a step in the right direction, yes, but it would be naïve to see it as more than that.
The truth is – and apologies if this sounds utopian or banal, but it needs saying – the fight against racism is one that we all have a responsibility to fight every day.
There was a time when I used to think that some Irish and Jewish jokes were funny.
I am ashamed of that now – but it took someone to say, “Actually, I’m Jewish”, and then insist I went ahead and told the joke anyway to snap me out of it.
I understood with a clunk how indefensibly offensive such humour is.
There is a song by the ska-influenced, mixed-race band The Specials called Racist Friend.
The lyric goes like this:
“If you have a racist friend,
Now is the time, now is the time for your friendship to end.
Be it your sister, be it your brother,
Be it your cousin or your uncle or your lover…”
That, I think, sums up our responsibilities just about perfectly.
It is not one of the group’s better-known songs, peaking at number 60 in the British chart, but I also think that if they got together with Kevin-Prince Boateng and recorded a new version, it would be a global Number One.
Much more importantly, it would open a lot of eyes and change a lot of attitudes into the bargain.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938