Getting out of Hand

NICK UNITED

Commentary for Futbol, Soccer, or whatever you call it!

Every professional sports league has its issues. Maybe its drug abuse, labour disputes, a biased distribution of wealth among players, coaches, and owners. The Barclays Premier League has a social issue that most leagues have been through with for decades, and it's getting out of hand.

 
The Premier League has been plagued with racial tension, and I really don't know why. So many of the American sports leagues maintain the "he's Black, and as long as he keeps scoring points I don't really care what his skin colour is," mentality. The English Premier League has failed to do that. There is know an epidemic across the FA of players, fans, and even referees, racially abusing one another. What makes the problem even more perplexing is that there is so much discrepancy whether certain claims of racial abuse are even valid. 

The primary example to help better define and identify this issue would be the John Terry Scandal. Of course, anyone who follows soccer/association football knows what happened. Basically, Anton Ferdinand of Queens Park Rangers claimed the John Terry of Chelsea 'racially abused' him. [Ferdinand] Terry and his club [Chelsea] launched efforts to try and prove Terry innocent. This included that team mate Ashley Cole, who is black, testifying on Terry's behalf. (Of course, the FA's verdict made Cole a little bit mad and caused him to go twitter-crazy, but we'll visit that in a minute.) Anyways, John Terry was eventually acquitted by the Magistrates Court, but the FA fined him and banned Terry for four games. This caused Ashley Cole to through a twitter fit and call the FA names when they declared Cole's evidence (which primarily included pointing out that Terry wasn't racist) invalid. The precise details, I'm not going to disclose, I don't really need Google kicking me out.

The solution to this issue is hard to come by. Of course the FA should expand punishments on those who racially violate others, but that doesn't totally fix the problem. The players have to not want to be racist, because its what they want, not because they'll get punished. The cliché for this situation could be, 'if white was a minority, would we [white people] appreciate being called derogatory names?' It's simple respect. A problem getting out of hand, needs to be fixed...soon.