From the dugout of Bulgaria’s national stadium on Monday night, England soccer manager Gareth Southgate twice asked his players a question that most coaches never face.
With hostile fans making Nazi salutes and hurling racist abuse at the black members of his team, did the players simply want to walk off the field? If they did, Southgate told them, he would support them.
Twice, the England players said no, instead going on to complete a 6-0 rout of Bulgaria in a qualifying match for Euro 2020.
“Not an easy situation to play in and not one which should be happening in 2019,” tweeted England forward Marcus Rashford, who was targeted by home fans making monkey noises. “Proud we rose above it to take three points but this needs stamping out.”
That the England players had to consider leaving the field at all spoke volumes about the efforts of soccer’s governing bodies to curb racist behavior. New regulations introduced over the past year, which empower referees to stop and even abandon games, have so far failed to change the habits of fans intent on polluting European soccer matches with racist chanting.
“Believe me, UEFA is committed to doing everything it can to eliminate this disease from football,” UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said on Tuesday, pointing out that it had devised the current protocol in cooperation with Football Against Racism Europe, an organization that monitors soccer crowds in its work against discrimination.
Applying those rules, Monday night’s referee Ivan Bebek, of Croatia, halted the game twice after he heard the monkey chants—which several England players also pointed out to him—and saw a few Bulgarian fans make stiff-armed Nazi salutes.
On the first occasion, an announcement about the behavior was read out over the public address system and warned that the game could be stopped again. On the second, Bebek would have been allowed to order the teams back into the locker rooms, but instead warned the Bulgarians again. A third stoppage would have meant abandoning the game.
“I know that whatever we do might be perceived as not being enough, but I think we’ve made a major statement,” Southgate said. “I think we’ve made a major statement with the way with played, through such difficult circumstances. I don’t think a game of this magnitude has ever been stopped twice.”
Though Bulgaria manager Krasimir Balakov later said he hadn’t heard the chants, his captain Ivelin Popov was upset enough about them at half time to approach the loudest sections of supporters and asked them to stop.
The fallout on Tuesday saw the Bulgarian soccer federation chief Borislav Mihaylov step down, after Prime Minister Boyko Borissov called for his resignation. Mihaylov had complained before the game that he found England’s fears of racist abuse in the Bulgarian capital “offensive” and “unjust.”
UEFA also opened an investigation and will likely force Bulgaria to play one or several home games behind closed doors on top of paying a fine. (The organization, in the past, has stopped short of banning national teams from competition altogether for similar offenses.)
But for many fans, that has hardly been a deterrent. The list of clubs and national teams punished at least once by UEFA in 2019 includes, but is not limited to: Lazio (Italy), Olympiacos (Greece), Levski Sofia (Bulgaria), Shakhtar Donetsk (Ukraine), Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Latvia and Montenegro. Nearly all are repeat offenders. And that’s without counting the collection of incidents already witnessed this season in Italian soccer, where some monkey chants directed at black players have gone unpunished.
That the map of incidents lines up with the parts of Europe where far-right movements are gaining popularity is no coincidence.
“The rise of nationalism across the continent has fueled some unacceptable behavior and some have taken it upon themselves to think that a football crowd is the right place to give voice to their appalling views,” Ceferin said. “Football associations themselves cannot solve this problem. Governments too need to do more in this area.”
As for Bulgaria, the team was already scheduled to play a November home game with a partial stadium closure due to racist behavior by its supporters during a June match against Kosovo.
“Bulgaria’s full of decent people and decent football fans and a few people have embarrassed their country,” English Football Association chairman Greg Clarke told reporters in Sofia. “And I would not try to take the moral high ground because we are still fighting racism in our country.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
