“Many asked me to ignore it, many others said that my fight was in vain and that I should just ‘play football,’” Vinícius Júnior recently wrote on X. “But, as I’ve always said, I’m not a victim of racism. I am a tormentor of racists.”
In the post, Real Madrid’s star footballer announced that the three Valencia football fans who had previously been detained for their racist taunting of Viní Júnior after a Spanish league match in May 2023 had now been sentenced to eight months in prison, and banned from entering football stadiums for two years.
“The first criminal conviction [of this nature] in the history of Spain is not for me,” Viní Júnior proclaimed, “It’s for all [B]lack people.”
After the 2023 incident, Vinícius Júnior had been vocal about experiencing anti-Black racism in Spain. In another X post, the Brazilian footballer revealed his many encounters with racist fans.
“It wasn’t the first, nor the second, nor the third. Racism is normal in La Liga. The competition thinks it’s normal, the Federation does too and the opponents encourage it.”
He was right.
Viní Júnior is not alone in experiencing anti-Black racism on the pitch.
I attended a landmark conference earlier this year in Nottingham aimed at addressing racism and gender inequality in European football. A joint initiative between Premier League’s Nottingham Forest F.C, the Weatherhead Center at Harvard University, and the Lilian Thuram Foundation, the conference brought together academics, industry experts, current and former players, and football fans to examine inequality within the sport and explore positive transformations in it.
There, current and former European footballers from across the continent shared their experiences with anti-Black racism. Just days after AC Milan’s goalkeeper, Mike Maignan, walked off the pitch when Udinese fans allegedly made monkey noises and other racist chants, and Coventry’s midfielder, Kasey Palmer, condemned an alleged racist gesture from a fan at Sheffield, I sat with dozens of current and former players at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground and listened as they shared personal accounts of experiences with racism from their playing days, much of it from fans.
As French football legend Thierry Henry summed it best, while football provided a means for inclusion, it was never truly designed as a space for him and his Black colleagues to belong.
On June 27th, the U.S. Soccer Federation condemned the racist social media attacks targeting Tim Weah and other U.S. national team members following their loss to Panama in Copa América.
Like Viní Júnior, many of these Black athletes have amassed the sort of influence to demand an end to racism in their sport, especially the racist behaviors from football fans.
I am, however, reluctant to applaud the criminal convictions and prison sentences for the racist fans in the way that many (including Viní) have. I do believe there must be accountability for what these fans did, but I do not believe prison offers the appropriate solution, and I worry their sentencing may do more harm than good.
Given the long history of racism and prejudice deeply embedded in nearly every European and European-descended legal system, it would be wise for these athletes to be cautious about turning to them to achieve justice.
The three Valencia fans were found guilty of a crime against moral integrity. The Magistrate’s Court of Valencia sentenced them under article 173.1 of Spain’s Criminal Code, which states, “whoever inflicts a degrading treatment on another person, seriously damaging his moral integrity, shall be punished with a sentence of imprisonment of six months to two years.”
The ruling handed down, according to the Court’s statement, “which is final, establishes as proven that the three defendants insulted Vinícius with shouts, gestures and chants referring to the colour of his skin.”
Criminal Justice in Spain?
In Spain, defendants with no prior convictions who receive prison sentences of less than two years for non-violent crimes typically don’t serve time.
This tendency originated from the Spanish General Penitentiary Law of 1979, which established a progressive system of serving prison sentences.
“Prisoners are classified into three possible grades that contemplate a life regime in accordance with the risks they may pose in their coexistence within the prison and for society,” according to Cristina Rodríguez Yagüe, a professor of criminal law at Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha.
These classifications, which vary in degree, determine the range of experience for people incarcerated in Spain. The first and second degrees are reserved for more serious offenses.
The third-degree classification, known as the “open regime,” is what Viní’s racist antagonists received, joining just under 20% of the incarcerated population in Spain classified under that category. Ultimately, the open regime seeks for convicted persons to serve their sentences outside of the penitentiary, allowing them to be close to their normal family, social, and work environments. This is believed to be crucial for reintegration.
The outward goal here of the Spanish legal system in such cases is less concerned with punishment and more with legal responsibility.
But not all people convicted of crimes in Spain access either that third-degree classification and its attending conditional release – and the people in Spain who do spend time behind bars are often of the same hues as Vinícius Júnior.
Spain is like most European countries in that its racial and post-colonial relations shape the selective enforcement of the nation’s law.
This has manifested in a high proportion of foreigners – many from former colonial holdings of European empires – being caught in this web. “Despite decline in number of incarcerated people in Spain, in 2019,” according to Cristina Güerri, a professor of criminology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, “foreign nationals still accounted for 28.1% of the Spanish prison population.” And the two groups of people affected the most are Africans, particularly from Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco, and Latin Americans, from Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Ecuador.
Such numbers suggest that the criminal legal system in Spain, like many Western countries, serves disproportionately as a means of controlling immigrant populations.
“From this perspective, it is argued that immigration law, the media and politicians present the immigrant as a ‘risk subject’ towards whom the criminal justice system acts selectively,” Guerri writes, “leading to their higher presence in prisons. That is, the actions of the criminal justice system are bordered.”
The criminal legal system in Spain also serves as a means of ethnic profiling. Though, like most European countries, it lacks national data on policing by ethnicity, various sources, including municipal police and academic studies, consistently show that police in Spain disproportionately stop and check minority groups.
Because of this past and present, Black footballers like Vinícius Júnior and others should be cautious in relying on these carceral institutions for justice.
The Black feminist poet Audre Lorde once wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The institutions now wielded against Viní’s racist detractors have more commonly served to the detriment of those who look like them, and we should be guarded in offering them legitimacy, knowing their history and how they are and have long been wielded against Black and immigrant peoples.
Like Vinícius Júnior, I certainly hope this ruling will force “other racists [to] be afraid, ashamed and [to] hide in the shadows,” even if the cynic in me feels otherwise.
