Italian Soccer’s Anti-Racism Campaign Features Paintings of Monkeys

Four months into the Italian soccer season, the country’s top league is wrestling with a persistent problem: A series of players have again been victims of racist abuse in the country’s stadiums, groups of hard-core fans have defended their right to abuse anyone any way they choose, and certain clubs have denied that racism is even a problem.

Last month, one of the country’s highest-ranking soccer officials was accused of trying to conceal racist chanting rather than address it, and a powerful newspaper was criticized for its tone-deaf coverage of the issue.

So on Monday, Lega Serie A, the organization that oversees the country’s highest division, responded by launching a series of anti-racism initiatives. Almost immediately, even one of those — a series of images of monkeys in club colors — was criticized as racist.

“In a country in which the authorities fail to deal with racism week after week #SerieA have launched a campaign that looks like a sick joke,” the anti-discrimination network Football Against Racism in Europe said in comments posted on the organization’s Twitter account. “These creations are an outrage, they will be counterproductive and continue the dehumanization of people of African heritage.”

Lega Serie A had scheduled Monday’s news conference in Milan to reveal its plan to tackle Italian soccer’s endemic racism problem in three ways: by introducing facial recognition technology to enable clubs to identify and bar offenders; by appointing a so-called anti-racism team, consisting of 20 players from Serie A’s 20 clubs; and by creating a cultural program centered on bespoke works created by the artist Simone Fugazzotto.

The three Fugazzotto images, which will hang in the entrance to Serie A’s headquarters in Milan, depict three monkeys, each one decorated in different colors. Fugazzotto — who regularly uses monkeys and apes in his work — wrote on Instagram earlier this year that he had the idea for the imagery after a game at Milan’s famed San Siro stadium between Inter Milan and Napoli. During that game, fans had directed monkey chants at Napoli’s Senegalese defender Kalidou Koulibaly.

“I had such anger that I had an idea,” Fugazzotto wrote. “Why not stop censoring the word monkey in football, but turn the concept, and say instead that in the end we are all monkeys?”

The work — which he said represented “a Western monkey, an Asian monkey and a black monkey” — was originally commissioned for the final of the Coppa Italia last summer, but now will form part of Serie A’s broader initiative.

Given the context, though, using such imagery appeared to be a stunningly ham-handed lapse in judgment. Several players in Italy’s top league have been victims of monkey chants in Italian stadiums already this season: Romelu Lukaku was abused while playing for Inter at Cagliari, Fiorentina’s Brazilian left back Dalbert endured similar chants at Atalanta and Sampdoria’s Ronaldo Vieira was targeted by Roma fans while playing in his team’s home stadium. Mario Balotelli, a black striker now at Brescia, was so incensed at the abuse he received during a game in Verona in November that he picked up the ball and kicked it into the crowd.

The response from the game’s authorities to the issue has been far from ideal. Cagliari was not penalized for the Lukaku incident, and officials at Verona initially refused to acknowledge that anything had happened to anger Balotelli. In each case, the players were told — by fans of their own clubs — that the abuse had not been racist in nature.

Luigi De Siervo, Lega Serie A’s chief executive, meanwhile, was captured on a leaked audio recording apparently confirming that the league had ordered television broadcasters to mute crowd-facing microphones so racist chants would not be heard on television.

The series of incidents persuaded Serie A’s clubs to take action themselves, with all 20 signing and releasing an open letter in November calling on the league to do more to address the issue, as well as admitting that they had “not done enough” themselves in the past.

A week later, though, the newspaper Corriere dello Sport chose to preview a game between Inter and Roma by using pictures of Lukaku and Chris Smalling, the England defender, and the headline “Black Friday.” When both players, among others, criticized the decision, the newspaper said it was the victim of a “lynching.”

De Siervo, though, was unmoved by the criticism of the league’s latest attempt to fight racism. He dismissed the idea that using pictures of monkeys to try to stop people directing monkey chants at black players could contribute to the problem, rather than solve it.

“Simone’s paintings fully reflect the values of fair play and tolerance, so will remain in our headquarters,” he said.