🔍 Vinícius Júnior's Endless Fight

There have been plenty of feel-good stories in football this week. As there are most weeks, in actual fact: in the thick of the season, when every night seems to bring a meaningful game, it feels as though there is an almost bottomless supply of teams or players or managers doing wonderful, inspiring things. 

Mansfield, of League One, beating Burnley in the FA Cup, for example. Bodø/Glimt adding Inter Milan to the list of giants to have stumbled in Norway’s distant north in a Champions League knockout game. Arsenal dropping points at Wolves. Vítor Pereira getting a second job offer from Evangelos Marinakis and thinking it sounds like just the sort of caper he’d like to get himself into. 

I would have loved to have written about any and all of them, but given what happened in Lisbon on Tuesday, doing so would have felt glib, and superficial, and almost willfully ignorant. What allegedly – a word we have to use – happened to Vinícius Júnior at the Stadium of Light is a stain on the sport. A disgrace, in Trent Alexander-Arnold’s words, and something that should not be ignored.

Was it the first time? Almost certainly not. There is something particularly depressing about that, something that seems to illuminate at least part of the problem. The timeline of what Vinícius Júnior has had to face, what he has had to endure, does not start with his suffering. It starts at the point that we took notice. 

On Oct. 24, 2021, Vinícius had been playing in Spain for a little more than three years. With just a few minutes left of a clásico against Barcelona, he was substituted. As he strolled back to the Real Madrid bench, a fan shouted mono at him. It was the first incident of racist abuse directed at the Brazilian that attracted widespread attention. That is not the same as it being the first time it had happened.

Six months later, it happened again, in a game at Mallorca. Six months after that, a pundit on El Chiringuito – the bizarre tabloid television show that has an inexplicable prominence in the Spanish football landscape – suggested that his dancing goal celebrations were inappropriate. Vinícius, he said, should “stop acting the monkey.” 

There have been more, many more: every couple of months, at times every few weeks. It has happened at Atlético Madrid and at Real Valladolid, in Pamplona and in Seville and at Barcelona again. Atlético fans traveled outside of the Spanish capital to hang an effigy of him from a highway overpass. 

All of them – or at least most of them – followed essentially the same pattern. A report of a hate crime that went nowhere. The occasional evasive apology, including one from the pundit on El Chiringuito. At best, in one or two cases, one or two perpetrators made an appearance in court. Would it have been difficult for the police to identify the culprits in some of these cases? Possibly. Is it any surprise Vinícius started to feel they might not be trying that hard? No.

By 2023, he had evidently decided a slightly more dynamic approach was required. He confronted a fan who racially abused him during a game at Valencia. Afterwards, he posted to his Instagram that “racism is normal in La Liga.” When it happened in Seville – again – he openly challenged Spain’s authorities to do more. It was, he said, “episode number 19, and counting.” 

In one sense, that brought about a change: three fans were eventually jailed for their part in the abuse in Valencia; Sevilla proactively sought out and ejected a fan abusing Vinícius during the game. There was, at last, some sort of action. But in another sense, it absolutely did not. Atlético fans at one point racially abused Vinícius at a game in which neither he, nor Real Madrid, were playing. There have been further issues at Osasuna and, last year, Real Sociedad. 

And then, this week, there was Lisbon. Technically, what Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni said to Vinícius is contested. Vinícius clearly felt the Argentine had used the word mono; it did not take an especially gifted lipreader to realize that is what he was telling the referee, Francois Letexier. Kylian Mbappé, speaking with quite remarkable calm in the immediate aftermath, gave the same account. Prestianni, he said, had used the word repeatedly.

Prestianni has denied it; he did not, he posted on his social media, use any “racist insults” to Vinícius. Those images of him covering his mouth with his jersey – not once, but at least twice, as though he was desperately trying to get a rise out of Vinícius – are just how footballers speak, apparently. He might, according to Aurélien Tchouaméni, have admitted to using a homophobic slur, but whether that is what his official version of events will be when he speaks – presuming he does speak – to UEFA’s investigators remains to be seen. It would be quite a defense, certainly.

The chances are, of course, that Vinícius will not be holding out much hope for a satisfactory conclusion to that process. He has been through this so many times that everything that has followed, from the moment that he informed Letexier of the accusation, must have filled him with a sense not just of righteous anger but familiar despair, too.

Immediately, Benfica’s crowd jeered him. By the end of the game, Benfica’s coach, José Mourinho – who seemed to have taken the time to talk to Vinícius as he came off the field – was declaring that Benfica could not be racist because the club’s greatest ever player, Eusébio, was Black, and suggesting that it was all sort of Vinícius’ fault anyway. All of it could have been avoided if only Vinícius had chosen to celebrate in a less provocative manner.

None of this is really worth engaging with, to be honest, but for the record: if a celebration can provoke someone into racism, then the issue is not with the person doing the dancing; booing someone who thinks they have been racially abused is a deeply weird response at best; and nobody had said anything about Benfica being institutionally racist.

Not until the club decided on how it was going to handle this incident, anyway. As Vinícius surely knew it would, Benfica doubled down, posting its support for Prestianni, alleging that he was the victim of a “defamation” campaign, even casting doubt on whether Mbappé was close enough to hear what Prestianni had said. At no point did the club say it would wait to find out what happened.

But then: they never do, do they? The instinct is always to close ranks, to support your own, to place the tribal bond over morality. This is the playbook that almost every incident Vinícius has experienced in Spain has followed; it is exactly what happened when Liverpool and Chelsea found themselves in similar positions more than a decade ago.

It is why, in many ways, it keeps happening: because there are never really any consequences; because the immediate instinct is to deny and deflect; because you can rely on the unthinking and unquestioning support of your team, your club, to muddy the waters and turn everything into claim and counter-claim; because, for the most part, racially abusing a player appears to be a culprit-less crime.

Perhaps, then, there is something inspiring here, if you can wipe away the sorrow and the shame. Vinícius has been fighting this battle for five years since we started counting; in reality, he has been fighting it for far, far longer. He has devoted considerable resources to it; he runs a charity, back in Brazil, that works on education for young people.

He has seen several hard-won successes, including legislative changes in his homeland, but he has seen many more failures: cases where it is his word against someone else’s, and his is always deemed to weigh less. And yet he has not given up. He keeps going. He keeps fighting. He has said, previously, that the abuse he has suffered has diminished his desire to play. That is understandable, and devastating. It is extraordinary that it has had the opposite effect on his desire to fight.

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That sound you can hear is the clock emphatically striking midnight on Qarabağ. The perennial champion of Azerbaijan has, unquestionably, been one of the stories of the Champions League season: beating Benfica and FC Copenhagen, back to back, in their first two games; holding Chelsea to a draw in Baku in November; overcoming Eintracht Frankfurt, thanks to a 94th-minute winner, a few weeks ago.

Those results were worth celebrating. No fairytale, in modern European football, is entirely uncomplicated: Qarabağ now holds its national championship in a vice-like grip; the club is able to pay salaries that many more famous names across the continent would envy. But still, it is a good thing to see a team from a largely unheralded league qualify for the Champions League’s elimination round.

It is a shame, then, that Gurban Gurbanov’s side should quite so quickly and quite so spectacularly have hit the wall. Qarabağ’s capitulation at Anfield last month was uncharacteristic – the team had been competitive even in its defeats until that point – but ultimately meaningless, given that it did not affect qualification. Collapsing against Newcastle will sting rather more.

But it should not be used as proof that the presence of Qarabağ, and its peers, diminishes the tournament. Gurbanov and his players provided several of the most thrilling moments of a group stage in desperate need of them; they qualified for the knockouts on merit, ahead of teams with far greater resources. It is a shame they fell, hard, at the last. It is to their immense credit they got too far in the first place.

Rog and Rory break down Mourinho’s lasting legacy in Spain and the psychology of “The Special One.” (Please note, this was recorded before Tuesday’s controversial game.) Plus, the astonishing Cinderella story of Qarabağ FK — and why it might actually be better to be a Champions League underdog than a mid-table club in Europe’s top five leagues. And of course… Rory’s European food takes return.

Watch on YouTube or listen here.

The North London Derby is a bit of an outlier. Most of England’s marquee local rivalries have been diluted, just a little, in recent years. The causes of that are many and varied: the globalization of playing squads and fanbases, television times, the league’s entrenched economic stratification, and probably quite a few more.

The rivalry between Arsenal and Tottenham, in contrast, seems to me to be growing more heated, more petty, more spiteful with every passing year. I’m not entirely sure why that might be: two particularly online fanbases, maybe? Two clubs which have, for the most part, failed to deliver on their ambitions for some time? Either way, Sunday’s installment (11:30 a.m. ET, USA) would have been psychologically tortuous enough even if it had not been Igor Tudor’s debut as Spurs’ interim manager. 

Strangely, though, that might not even be the most heated derby English football can offer on Sunday. A few hours before eyes turn to London, the Steel City Derby – Sheffield United against Sheffield Wednesday – will likely end with the latter being relegated: what may well be the earliest relegation English football has ever seen. Do not expect their opponents to show any sympathy at all (7 a.m. ET, Paramount+).

Refereeing controversies always strike me as football’s emptiest calories: we gorge on them, late at night, even as they fill us with self-loathing, but they do not provide any lasting nourishment. The whole Rayan Cherki/Dominik Szoboszlai/Erling Haaland incident at Anfield is not even two weeks old but already feels forgotten.

In its stead, we have memories of Villa Park in the FA Cup, and a refereeing display that a conspiracy theorist might suggest served as a very convenient advert for the benefits of VAR. That might be enough to dull any momentum that might otherwise have gathered behind James Lockard’s suggestions.

“What would you think about replacing the current system with an NFL-style challenge system” he wrote, although he typed “NFL” when he meant to write “cricket.” “Each team could request one video review per half, if they thought an obviously incorrect on-field refereeing decision would significantly improve their chance of winning the match.” 

This would, I think, very obviously be preferable to the micro-refereeing of incidents that VAR in its current incarnation has generated; the interminable scouring of passages of play to find some trivial transgression; the repetition of a colossal mistake in pursuit of eliminating some minuscule ones. It would place the onus on the teams themselves; crucially, it would encourage them to think very carefully about how high they might want to set their bar.

“I know you’re no fan of Everton,” Phil Friedman wrote, changing the subject. “But what would you think of Thomas Frank as their manager next season (kicking David Moyes upstairs to Technical Director or some such; he seems ready to go). I think it would be a nice fit. He wasn’t ready for Spurs’ fans’ feelings of self-importance, but perhaps Everton fans would be more patient.” 

Two emails that make perfect sense in one section. Frank will not find Premier League jobs hard to come by, whenever he is ready to return: Crystal Palace will be available this summer, Fulham might well be and, yes, Everton would make plenty of sense, too.

I’ll admit that my preference would be for him to test his strength elsewhere, though: I wonder if he might thrive at Borussia Dortmund or Eintracht Frankfurt, a place that might also offer him the chance to compete in the Champions League. Either way, Frank definitely has a third act in his career. I’m fairly confident it will be an uplifting one.

That’s all for this week! Thanks so much for all of your emails, ideas, questions, and inchoate thoughts. Please do keep getting in touch: it’s so great hearing from so many of you. You can, as always, reach me here.

Have a great weekend,
Rory

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