racist insults tarnish the football match – Libération

Racism isn’t just in professional football. Exhibition meetings between streamers, with less competitive than festive issues, are not spared. Saturday October 12 in the evening at the Wanda Metropolitano, the Atlético de Madrid stadium, on the occasion of the France-Spain return match between star content creators on the internet, the Iberian streamers certainly took their revenge on their French counterparts (2 -0), but the game, closely followed behind the screens, was spoiled by monkey cries coming from the stands aimed at a black player from France, Brawks, leading his teammates to return to the locker room in protest.

At least one supporter was excluded from the stadium, where 30,000 spectators were seated (for a total capacity of 70,000). “This is the first time I have been a victim” of this kind of racist acts, “it has no place in sport”commented Brawks, a former Call of Duty pro player, on the microphone during the interruption, around the 56th minute of play. A few minutes earlier, the same Brawks had immediately gone towards the supporter in question to ask him to account , before returning to the locker room.

The two selections then discussed at length in order to decide whether or not to resume the match, knowing that unlike a classic professional football match, there is no established protocol in the event of an incident of this type. “It touches me a lot. I fight all forms of injustice, it has no place in sport. We will continue the match and we will fight against racism”wrote Brawks at the same time on his X account. “It’s crazy to call me a monkey! No to racism!”added the Frenchman on his X account, applauded at the end of his speech by the Spanish supporters.

This incident took place while Spain is more than ever confronted with racism, omnipresent in football stadiums with recent heated episodes, a subject that Real Madrid star Vinicius Junior, himself a victim of racist insults, helped to put it in the spotlight through various speeches.

This meeting between streamers, revenge of the first leg where the French won 2-0 in November 2022 in Paris, will have thus shed a little more light on the scourge of discrimination in stadiums, since the latter accumulate millions of subscribers on social networks. The French team had star streamers in its ranks like AmineMaTue, organizer of the match, Inoxtag and Michou. Called Eleven All Stars 2, the game reached a peak of some 990,000 spectators on the Twitch channel of AmineMaTue, the third streamer in France in terms of subscribers on this platform (2.8 million), behind Squeezie and Gotaga. This total of spectators remains far from the peak of 1.1 million people who followed the first leg on the AmineMaTue channel.