Serie A fans urged to ‘publicly condemn’ racist chants | OneFootball

The Serie A sporting justice chief Gerardo Mastandrea urges more fans to take action ‘openly condemning’ racist or discriminatory chanting, which in turn could save the club from punishment.

The issue of insults coming from the stands has been a plague on Italian football and only seems to be getting worse, so clubs and the authorities are trying to find ways of clamping down on the problem.

Sporting justice Mastandrea spoke to the media at the presentation of the FIGC Code of Sporting Ethics and discussed bringing the majority of fans onside to battle those who try to spoil the game for everyone else.

“The code makes it clear that while organisation and preventative measures do not save the clubs from punishment, it will still be evaluated. We also cannot forget that the sporting justice has the option of a suspended sentence in case it happens again.”

Fans told to combat racism

While in England there is more focus on identifying and removing fans who misbehave from the stands, it is far trickier to achieve this in Italy, in part because the stadiums are generally not owned by the clubs.

This inevitably means that stewards have less scope over what action they can take.

“Technology allows for the identification of individuals responsible and is a challenge. The clubs must be given more responsibility, but so must the crowd. It would be good to see public dissociation, so when those few begin the discriminatory chants, the rest of the crowd openly condemns them.

“That is an important element that would also take us to consider removing responsibility from the club.”