Uefa and Rangers share the blame in sectarian cop-out

Lawrence Donegan
Thursday April 20, 2006
The Guardian

In a ruling that had the chief constable of the Keystone Kops swooning at its incompetence, Uefa's disciplinary body announced last week that Rangers fans had been found not guilty of singing sectarian songs at a Champions League match this season.

It was a tough case to crack, apparently, with very little concrete evidence being presented for the prosecution - apart from video footage of Rangers fans repeatedly chanting "Fuck the Pope" and singing Billy Boys - a song which, amid much mouth-foaming rhetoric, contains the line: "We're up to our knees in Fenian blood."

Clearly Inspector Clouseau has nothing on Geneva's finest when it comes to missing the vital clues.

Football's governing bodies at every level have a long and inglorious history of not tackling the game's real problems, particularly when there are smaller fish to fry. Why do something about racist chanting that infected many grounds in Europe for years when you can spend your time fining players for having hand-written messages on their T-shirts? Even so, Uefa's ruling in the Rangers case plumbed previously unmined depths of cowardice.

In defending the indefensible, a Uefa spokesman argued that Billy Boys had been sung at Scottish football grounds for a very long time and, as such, was now tolerated in Scottish society. "Given this social and historical context . . . the control and disciplinary committee said they considered Uefa cannot demand an end to behaviour which has been tolerated . . . in view of this, the body ruled that despite the behaviour of their fans, Rangers had not infringed the disciplinary regulations."

This analysis might just about earn a pass in GCSE sociology but as a manifesto for ridding football of prejudice it defies both logic and natural justice. It is like saying the MCC should never have cancelled its 1968 cricket tour of South Africa over the racist treatment of Basil D'Oliveira because apartheid had been tolerated in that country for years.

Clearly, this is not an isolated view. Gerhard Kapl, an Austrian Uefa official who compiled the case against Rangers, may not know much about cricket but he knows a cop-out when he sees one and has launched an appeal against his own organisation's decision.

Needless to say Rangers, who might have faced a large fine and the closure of one of Ibrox's stands for their next European home game, are determined to fight Kapl's efforts to have them properly punished. "Our lawyers are standing by to scrutinise the written reasons behind this appeal," the club's chairman David Murray said yesterday.

Murray and his expensive lawyers are entitled to scrutinise as much they like, just as people like me are entitled to suggest their time and efforts may be better used trying to tackle sectarianism rather than tackling a man trying to tackle sectarianism.

As Rangers pointed out during Uefa's initial investigation, the club has made efforts over the past five years to eradicate sectarianism from its terraces with its Better Than Bigotry and Pride Over Prejudice campaigns. Progress has been made, although it is probably best to hold on to the Most Tolerant Fans In Football trophy for a while yet, as anyone who was at Ibrox last Saturday to witness another rousing rendition of Billy Boys will attest.

Anti-sectarian campaigns are one thing, successful campaigns are quite another and, if the evidence gathered by Kapl is anything to go by, Rangers' efforts to clean up their act have fallen some way short of success. The club must bear some responsibility for this failure, not least because it was years behind behind its neighbours and rivals Celtic when it came to addressing sectarianism.

More than that, Rangers failed because they were allowed to fail and for this the blame lies elsewhere - with the Scottish Football Association, which stood idly by for decades while Rangers refused to employ Catholics at any level of the club; with Uefa, for the reasons explained above; and last but by no means least, with the media.

Every few years a documentary film-maker/journalist from some corner of the globe will land in Glasgow with a mission to "lift the lid" on the sectarianism that divides this poor benighted city. Invariably, these people will find what they were looking for thanks to some idiots who will spout any old rubbish for the price of a pint. When they finally appear, these stories always resort to the hoariest of clichés - a plague on both their houses; one side is as bad as the other; Rangers fans are are no more or no less sectarian than Celtic fans.

To the casual observer, the sectarianism found at Ibrox is worse than anything you will find at Parkhead, or indeed at most football grounds in Europe. To suggest otherwise is bad enough, but the consequences of doing so are even worse: by perpetuating the myth that one side is as bad as the other, it gives licence to those who spew their sectarian poison at Ibrox to keep on doing it, on the grounds that the other mob are just as bad.

Taken from the Guardian/Observer