It’s no secret that sports fans can sometimes be awful people. Whether it be Chelsea fans pushing a black commuter of a subway train in Paris, or anything in Bill Buford’s excellent book “Among the Thugs.” The most recent example comes from Madrid, as a group of traveling PSV Eindhoven supporters threw coins at beggars in a plaza in Madrid.
The supporters were getting the beggars to run and fight each other for coins that were thrown from the crowd. All the while, the PSV fans were sitting back, laughing and even taking photos and video. It was a shameful display from the supporters who turned other human being’s real life struggles into a game for their own amusement.
These fans are most certainly not representative of all of those that traveled from Eindhoven to Madrid, but nonetheless, it definitely tarnishes the reputation of those fans, which is unfair that to those that just came to watch their team in the Champions League. It’s most unfair, however, to the women who were treated as cheap entertainment when they’re simply trying to survive on a daily basis.