The seven-match suspension handed out to Tottenham’s Rodrigo Bentancur for a racist slur against teammate Son Heung-min has reignited the conversation about racism against players and fans of East and South Asian descent -East.
Anti-racism charity Kick It Out (KIO) says there has been an increase in incidents of racism towards East and South East Asian players – and reports of these incidents, put highlighted in these statistics:
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There was 395 reports of racist abuse “targeted by players” in stadiums and online on KIO during the 2023-24 season – compared to 277 in 2022-23.
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Last season, 55% of reports of racism targeting specific players involved players from East Asian backgrounds.
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Of the 937 reports of player-specific abuse made to KIO over the past five full seasons, 327 of them (35%) targeted just seven players from East and Southeast Asia.
Samuel Okafor, chief executive of Kick It Out, said: “We receive many reports of this type of racism.
“It is the fans who are sending us a clear message: they are not prepared to tolerate discrimination and that is a message that football must listen to.”
Players who have been regularly targeted over the past five seasons have not been named by Kick It Out.
The Premier League’s most high-profile East or Southeast Asian players are Son and Hwang Hee-Chan of South Korea’s Spurs, as well as the Japanese quartet of Brighton winger Kauro Mitoma , Takehiro Tomiyasu of Arsenal, Daichi Kamada of Crystal Palace and Yukinari Sugawara of Southampton.
In October, Marco Curto from Como received a Ban of 10 matches by Fifa, five suspended for insulting Wolves striker Hwang during a pre-season friendly in July.
No comment from Spurs on Bentancur ban
Son has been the victim of racist abuse on several occasions since arriving in the Premier League in 2015, with the most recent case being that of a Nottingham Forest supporter banned from all corners of the country.
Similar incidents have taken place involving Son among fans of Manchester United, Chelsea, Crystal Palace and West Ham between 2019 and 2023.
Show Racism the Red Card also called out viral social media posts linking Asian players to the 2020 coronavirus outbreak.
Tottenham declined to comment further on the ban after Bentancur was punished on Monday afternoon.
Spurs defender Ben Davies, speaking while on international duty with Wales, said: “I think as a group, as a team at Tottenham, we all put a period and moved on.
“But, ultimately, it’s important that we realize that these kinds of things need to be looked at with the seriousness that they have been.”
Manager Ange Postecoglou will address the media on Friday and previously said his midfielder had made a “big mistake” and “he has to take the punishment”.
“We have this every week” – the fan experience
“To be completely honest, we face this sort of thing every week,” says Kevin Yuan, a London-based Premier League video content creator.
Top players aren’t the only ones to face racist abuse: fans have told BBC Sport of their experiences after football.
Yuan was racially abused alongside a female colleague outside Wembley Stadium by Real Madrid fans after the Champions League final in June.
Yuan creates soccer content for the Chinese media market and was filming with celebrating Madrid fans who – unbeknownst to him – were singing a racist chant in Spanish about Chinese women, aimed at his colleague.
“I asked a fan what this chant meant? And he replied, it’s a Real Madrid chant, that we are champions,” he said.
“The next day our friends in Spain told us that it was actually a very racist song. We found it incredibly offensive.”
Yuan revealed that he had faced similar incidents while filming in English clubs.
“It’s part of our job (to accept abuse),” he said. “We film in different stadiums before and after the game and it seems to happen literally every week.
“I don’t know if it’s because of the way I look or the way I talk.
“I’m in a chat group with Chinese Manchester United fans and we have a saying that you’ll be extremely lucky to avoid a racist incident at least once in a season.
“It happens no matter what team you support. I came to the UK in 2008 and I’ve been going to matches ever since – but I feel like an outsider, like I don’t belong. I hope people understand how disturbing this is and put themselves in my shoes.
Some fans are “characterized as tourists”
A Tottenham fan holds up a banner supporting Son Heung-min (Getty Images)
Maxwell Min, project coordinator for the Frank Soo Foundation, who celebrates the life of the first non-white player to play for England in 1945, explains why he thinks there is tension.
“It’s easy to conclude that East and South East Asians don’t play football, but there’s a missing link: they often play at levels not affiliated with the county FA system, so it’s easy to ignore them,” he said.
“It is perhaps a simple fact that only in recent years have East and South East Asians started playing in our stadiums at the highest level, thanks to Japanese and Korean players .
“There are also new fans in the stadium and it is assumed that these fans have a less deep interest in the sport; that it is not as deep as the so-called local or usual ethnic groups that we see , often characterized as “tourists”.
Min added: “I have had some negative incidents myself, but the love of football has put me in the position where I work in the game in this role.
“When I was a kid, I thought Manchester United’s Ji Sung Park was the best Asian player possible. But seeing Son win the Golden Boot and be on his way to becoming a legend for Tottenham increased my dreams and my positive expectations for the future.
