Archive for the 'Europe' Category

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Although players of color have graced Europe’s top leagues since the 1970s, and there’s hardly a championship team anywhere without some Brazilian or African imports, an astonishing level of racism persists among some fans and even coaches.

Ukraine coach Oleg Blokhin, for example, recently complained that the influx of foreign players deprived his compatriots of role models: “Let them learn from [our players] and not some Zumba-Bumba whom they took off a tree, gave two bananas and now he plays in the Ukrainian league.”

Then there was Spain’s coach, Luis Aragones, caught on TV telling striker Jose Antonio Reyes that he was better than his French Arsenal teammate Thierry Henry. Except Aragones didn’t say Henry’s name; he used a vicious racial epithet.

In Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe, black players regularly suffer racial abuse in the form of ape noises and bananas thrown from the stands.

Although the penalties aren’t always as strong as they ought to be, FIFA, the sport’s governing body, has made combating racism a priority.

The full article can be found here.

Update: An ESPN special of the whole thing here.

“Krugman’s failure to relate the European model to Europe’s Muslim problem is telling. To point to the upside of Europe’s social model without mentioning the most serious downside is to provide bad advice to our own policymakers. The assimilation of immigrants by the United States, compared to the inability of the European nations to assimilate them–with potentially catastrophic results for those nations–is not unrelated to the differences between economic regulation in the United States and Europe. Because the U.S. does not have a generous safety net–because it is still a nation in which the risk of economic failure is significant–it tends to attract immigrants who have values conducive to upward economic mobility, including a willingness to conform to the customs and attitudes of their new country. And because the U.S. does not have employment laws that discourage new hiring or restrict labor mobility (geographical or occupational), immigrants can compete for jobs on terms of substantial equality with the existing population. Given the highly competitive character of the U.S. economy, in contrast to the economies of Europe, employers cannot afford to discriminate against able workers merely because they are foreign and perhaps do not yet have a good command of English. By the second generation, most immigrant families are fully assimilated, whatever their religious beliefs or ethnic origins”. –Richard Posner, discussing the differences between the U.S. Economic model and the European economic model with regard to immigrants, specifically Muslim immigrants, over at the Becker-Posner blog

“Clearly, the European system of employment helps the “insiders” with good jobs, and works against “immigrants” and other newcomers ,or “outsiders” in labor markets. …The labor market restrictions, however, make it hard for immigrants to obtain jobs in the legal economy, so either they are unemployed, or they work in the flourishing underground economies of Europe, where they avoid paying taxes. Apparently, the French intentionally do not collect data on unemployment rates of their Muslim population, but economists there tell me they believe it is more than double the official overall French rate of over 10 per cent unemployed”.Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winning economist, discussing the difference between the US economic model and the European economic model over at the Becker-Posner blog