“Why can’t football get rid of this burden that shames it? », asks Mohamed Bouhafsi. In question, the multiplicity of racist events heard in the stands in recent decades.
READ ALSO. Racism, this scourge that has plagued football for far too long
In his 1h30 documentary entitled Screams in the stadiumbroadcast this evening on France 5the journalist and columnist of C to you documents with those concerned some of the most significant events in the history of racism in football. Basile Boli thus relives with emotion the cries of monkeys heard in Auxerre in 1990, Joseph-Antoine Bell the throwing of bananas in Marseille the same year, while Demba Ba explains that in 2013 he refused a contract with the Italian club AS Rome so as not to suffer racism.
Pascal Praud’s already problematic lexical fields
Confronted with the images, the interlocutors intensely relive these events, sometimes buried deep within them. “It was part of the show”, they can only react, as if resigned. Certain sequences appear unbearable, such as a report by Pascal Praud for TV football, presenting in turn six FC Nantes players appearing as if they had fallen from a tree. With this comment: “FC Nantes has changed color for two years. The yellow flag flew over the championship and then the future became bleak. Six of its starters are black, to erase the too sleepless nights of last year. »
READ ALSO: INTERVIEW. “Boli told me that I had freed him”: Mohamed Bouhafsi talks about racism in football
Time takes its toll and some players in the industry return to their positions at the time. Former president of PSG, Michel Denisot thus asserts that his team should not have played when George Weah was welcomed for his last match with banners where the O’s were replaced by Celtic crosses and the S’s by SS-style lightning bolts.
Lilian Thuram, Samuel Umtiti and Robin Leproux among the speakers
The high-level speakers (Lilian Thuram, Samuel Umtiti, Robin Leproux, Philippe Diallo, etc.) carry the documentary and allow us to measure the progress made to date, where France seems more spared than Spain or Italy.
But football remains the reflection of an era and cannot be a haven of peace uncorrelated with society. Far-right racism still exists in a few stands, by isolated individuals like supremacists in Lille or Nice, or the Mezza Lyon group in the aisles of Parc OL. Behaviors that continue on the internet and social networks, when anonymity makes speaking out less complex.
READ ALSO. Racism, death threats… The Vierzon club suspends its activities and files a complaint
Although not addressed in the documentary, the other fight in French stadiums is also that against homophobia and transphobia. Probably a production on the theme in two decades would provoke reactions similar to those faced with Screams in the stadium…
France 5 Tuesday June 11 (9:05 p.m.)
