Have you honestly got a “BALOTELLI RACE STORM” left in you? If you have, you must be a stronger man than me. Some of you might even be actual men, come to that – but let’s not get distracted. First, a recap. On Monday evening Mario Balotelli reposted on Instagram a picture of Super Mario, the video game character. “Don’t be racist,” this exhorted cheerily. “Be like Mario. He’s an Italian plumber, created by Japanese people, who speaks English and looks like a Mexican, jumps like a black man and grabs coins like a Jew.”
Oh dear. And yuck. Following a few customarily gentle prods of Twitter’s pitchfork Balotelli declared “my mom’s Jewish”, and quickly removed the image. Within hours he was offering a fuller apology. “The post was meant to be anti-racist with humour,” this ran. “I now understand that out of context it may have the opposite effect … I used a cartoon done by somebody else because it has Super Mario and I thought it was funny and not offensive. Again, I’m sorry.”
Inevitably none of this has been enough to head off the opening of one of those always promising Football Association investigations. Quite when that state-of-the-art probe will report back is unclear. The form book suggests not to wait in for it. For an organisation whose business is football the FA seems to kick an extraordinary amount of things into the long grass. It’s becoming almost a physics conundrum: is the FA’s long grass so crowded that it is almost full or is it a place of infinite space that defies earthly laws?
Either way Balotelli is under fire from various quarters – a situation which, among other things, serves as a reminder of how much better we are at censuring young black men for racism than we are at getting around to doing anything about the institutional racism of the systems within which they live their lives.
Still, the limits of free speech are becoming quite a revenue-gathering scheme for the FA which two months ago was reported to have collected £350,000 in Twitter fines since 2011. Yet even the charge of “bringing the game into disrepute” feels ludicrously over-emotional. Surely bigoted statements bring those individuals who make them into disrepute? Football is probably going to survive.
And one has to ask: how long, realistically, do they think they can keep a lid on this stuff? Call me the sort of crazy person who thinks the war on drugs isn’t working but instinct suggests that at some point in their reign of absolute power over the interweb the FA is going to have to admit the game is up.
It has never exactly seemed the most with-it organisation – I imagine, for instance, that there are a good proportion of bigwigs whose secretaries print out their emails for them. Whenever one of these things blows up you can’t really escape the sense that many of them would actually like the internet turned off.
Keeping order among the underlings would be so much easier, after all, without this wretched way for supporters to find out what players are really thinking, warts and all. Fans are simply too delicate or volatile to be exposed to the unfiltered thoughts of the athletes they watch and need to be protected from candour by those who know best.
Or rather, they don’t. Football needs a new internet policy. And while I wouldn’t wish to pre-empt any five-year FA Commission into what that policy should be, I would err on the side of letting players say what they like and leaving it to other, existing authorities to decide whether or not it requires formal censure or intervention.
Fining players for speaking their own minds – however unpleasant or stupid those minds may on occasion be – feels, at best, like a 1.0 solution to a 2.0 issue.
At worst it feels like the shut-up-and-play ethos that attempts to deny athletes a voice, perhaps rooted in fear of what that voice can (and has) achieved in terms of social change.
It is hard not to bear the latter in mind in the week when some of the St Louis Rams are being attacked for coming on to the field for Sunday’s NFL game making the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture that became a symbol of protests in Ferguson.
If you missed the St Louis Police Officers’ Association’s response to this, it really is something to behold. Its lowlights are too numerous to reproduce in full here but include the claim that “the nation” found the gesture “tasteless, offensive and inflammatory”.
It sneered at the idea the players were “simply exercising their First Amendments rights”, demanded the NFL come down like a ton of bricks on them and pointed out that “it’s not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertisers’ products – it’s cops and the good people of St Louis”. (Come come, officer, just say it! Just say “black people don’t pay your wages”).
Like I say, a tricky week for discussions about race in sport. Who knows, maybe society will benefit if some blazered old white guys tell Balotelli he’s racist and antisemitic. But I increasingly lack the remotest confidence that this sort of thing is a matter for the so-called football authorities, what with it being nothing to do with football and their having so very little authority.
