Monday, March 31, 2008

Homophobia and racism in soccer, part 65

Newspapers throughout the world have tried to adopt elements of the blogosphere, some by inviting some readers to create their own blogs on their online pages. Mexico's El Siglo de Torreón is no different.

Earlier today, one such blog post found my way and I didn't know what to make of it. It listed a litany of quotes from a Hugo Sánchez, which I gathered was either a soccer player or a coach (Sue me! I'm not much into soccer!) and included the following beauts:

* "He is a fag and he will be rewarded by his pedophile leanings" (referring to Leo Beenhakker [a renowned Dutch football coach currently leading a Polish soccer team] after winning 4-1 in the azulgrana).
* "I'll cut the negro's throat. I will [defecate] on the mother whore that gave birth to that negro" (referring to Castillo, a player of the Santos Laguna in the pre-Olympic trials).
* "The Brazilian negros's at the American Cup 2007... They looked like the Congo, speaking with all respect. You looked to one side and there were four negros warming up, you looked at the other and there were five and three more on the field."

A caveat: I'm not sure whether these quotes are accurate (after all, they were posted by an anonymous Torreón blog author who calls himself GeneralDisarray) but I now know who Hugo Sánchez is (thanks to MachoChip and the Associated Press) and how he just got fired yesterday as the official Mexican Olympic soccer team coach after the team failed to gain a spot at the upcoming Olympics.

That's right: He got fired because his team did not perform to expectations. NOT because of his past comments (if the quotes above are true).

Let's hope that somewhere in the future we will come to a time when no one involved in soccer who makes these sort of statements can even been considered for employment.

Previously:

1 comment:

John K said...

Wow. Fascinating too that the epithet "Congo" circulates not on among Spanish speakers but also in Portuguese, in Brazil. The irony--or not--is that the majority of Africans in the Americas came from the Congo, especially, I believe, after the turn of the 19th century. Talk about a concept, notion, history, narrative, discourse, what have you, that needs to be reclaimed!