Modern Football (1960 Onwards)
It was not until Viv Anderson that black footballers started to become accepted into the England national football team. Since then, many black players have played for England, and several have served as captain, notably Paul Ince, John Barnes and Sol Campbell.
Nowadays in the bigger leagues minority players have become part of football, and are supported. This was seen in the French football team which won the 1998 World Cup. The team was composed of white and black Frenchmen including immigrants from or descendants of several countries/colonies such as Argentina (David Trezeguet), Senegal (Patrick Vieira), French Guiana (Bernard Lama), Martinique (Thierry Henry), Guadeloupe (Lilian Thuram, Bernard Diomède), Ghana (Marcel Desailly), plus a New Caledonian (Christian Karembeu); the whites also included an ethnic Armenian and Kalmyk (Youri Djorkaeff), another player of Armenian descent (Alain Boghossian), a Basque (Bixente Lizarazu), a Breton (Stephane Guivarc'h), Robert Pires whose parents hail from Portugal and Spain, and an ethnic Berber (Zinedine Zidane). This composition was seen as an indicator of racial harmony, in a country where race and immigration has been and still remains a source of tension and conflict.
Incidents in 2004 have also shown this to be the case in some bigger leagues, where there are a visible number of players from a different ethnicity. A notable incident occurred that year when England played Spain in Madrid, and home fans were heard by the world media to be making "monkey chants" at some of the black players on the pitch, forcing the Spanish football authorities to apologise for their fans . Part of the outcry about these recent incidents was put down to cultural differences between the English-speaking (mainly British) press and Spanish culture .
On November 27, 2005 Marc Zoro, a player from Côte d'Ivoire, was playing for the Italian team Messina when he was racially abused by Inter Milan fans to the extent that he picked up the ball and threatened to leave the field . This caused the Italian football authorities to propose to start the following week's matches late after an anti-racism display . This comes at the same time that European Union legislators are threatening Europe-wide legal sanctions against national football associations and clubs whose fans are seen to take part in racist actions.
Read more about this topic: Ethnicity And Football
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or football:
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies stewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)