Roma has been forced to close the Curva Sud section of the Stadio Olympico because Roma fans displayed banners insulting the mother of a Napoli supporter who died from a gunshot wound during a fight between Napoli and Roma supporters after the Coppa Italia Final last year.
In this article from The Guardian, Serie A officials determined that the banners were, “by their content provocatively insulting to the mother of a supporter of the opposing team, who died in dramatic circumstances” and chanting “against people from a particular territorial origin.” Officials ruled that Roma must close the Curva Sud section for the next game against Atalanta.
This comes at the same time that players on AC Milan’s U-10 team were subject to racial abuse by parents during a youth tournament game against PSG.
If those two things don’t make you question humanity, I don’t know what will. It’s bad enough that in 2015, human beings (who should know better) still feel as if they need to racially abuse adults but this takes it even further. You have to be an even lower piece of crap to racially abuse kids or attack and insult someone’s dead mother.
Sadly, we have seen this happen every so often and it’s discouraging because you know that it’s going to happen again. As far as what to do to stop this, that is a complicated answer. If it was me and I ran the soccer world, in an ideal situation, I would start taking points away from teams who have these fans. It isn’t that simple because there are consequences with any decision, both good or bad, but it’s what I would ideally want to do. Either way, anything is a better idea than FIFA’s current “Say no to Racism” campaign, which seems to just be all about photo ops and handshakes instead of actually getting racism and homophobia out of soccer. If the “Say no to Racism” campaign actually did what it was meant to be, the World Cup wouldn’t be in Russia and Qatar.
