Following the racist chants from their fans in a friendly against AC Milan, Pro Patria have been forced to play one game behind closed doors. The Lega Pro who are in charge of the lower league football have issued this punishment...well punishment at its minimum, following they claim incidents that have taken place before. Their verdict was the following
"(The Lega Pro) will impose on the club Aurora Pro Patria the sanction of the obligation to play a league match behind closed doors, with immediate effect, with the caveat that further breach will be evaluated as an
occurrence of multiple violations, for the purposes of the subsequent sanction."
Many of you would think this is a weak idea of punishment and you would be right. They have already received fines of 4,000 and 5,000 euros respectively for previous incidents. They stated that the previous punishment was ineffective....well if a fine of 4 or 5,000 euros will not make a difference to the problems, then a match behind closed doors is not going to make one bit of difference. They need to clamp down seriously on these issues. It needs the Italian football association to actually make a stand, but sadly we know it wont happen.
Things need to change and maybe it's time that UEFA actually had the bottle to stand up and be counted. They were quite happy to ban English clubs from European competition after the Heysel tragedy, so why cant they ban Italian clubs from European competition. The problem is rife up and down the Italian league and until UEFA take a strong stance to make the Italian football association wake up and take action themselves, we will no doubt see more of the same walk offs by players.
Handing out pitiful fines and games behind closed doors is not saying we take it seriously, it says the Italians are making the point of you've been naughty so dont do it again.
Whilst I am not saying English football is racism free, the English FA and Football League are more positive in dealing with this problem.
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