Racism Against East and Southeast Asian Individuals in Football: The Bentancur-Son Incident and Broader Trends

The apology from Tottenham’s Rodrigo Bentancur to teammate Son Heung-min was accepted by Son during the summer. The subsequent seven-game suspension imposed on Bentancur for a racial slur directed at Son has reignited discussions concerning racism targeting players and supporters of East and South East Asian heritage. According to the anti-racism organization Kick It Out (KIO), there has been an increase in both the occurrence of racist incidents against East and South East Asian players and the reporting of such incidents. This trend is underscored by the following data: KIO received 395 reports of “player-targeted” racist abuse, occurring both in stadiums and online, during the 2023-24 season, an increase from 277 reports in the 2022-23 season. Last season, 55% of these reports of racism directed at specific players involved individuals of East Asian origin. Out of 937 player-specific abuse reports submitted to KIO over the last five complete seasons, 327 (35%) were aimed at only seven East and South East Asian players. Samuel Okafor, Kick It Out’s chief executive, stated: “We are getting a lot of reports about this type of racism.” He added, “It’s fans sending us a clear message they are not willing to tolerate discrimination and it’s a message that football needs to listen to.” Kick It Out has not disclosed the names of the players who have been consistently targeted over the past five seasons. Prominent East or South East Asian players in the Premier League include Son from Spurs and Hwang Hee-Chan, both from South Korea, alongside a Japanese group comprising Brighton winger Kauro Mitoma, Arsenal’s Takehiro Tomiyasu, Crystal Palace’s Daichi Kamada, and Southampton’s Yukinari Sugawara. In October, Fifa issued a 10-match ban, with five matches suspended, to Como’s Marco Curto for racially abusing Wolves forward Hwang during a pre-season friendly held in July. Since joining the Premier League in 2015, Son has experienced racial abuse on numerous occasions. The most recent incident resulted in a Nottingham Forest supporter being prohibited from all football grounds nationwide. Comparable publicized events involving Son have taken place among fan groups of Manchester United, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, and West Ham between 2019 and 2023. Show Racism the Red Card also drew attention to widespread social media content that connected Asian players to the coronavirus outbreak in 2020. On Wednesday, Tottenham issued a statement declaring: “The club has appealed against the length of Bentancur’s FA suspension.” The statement continued, “While we accept the guilty finding against Rodrigo by the independent regulatory commission, we believe the subsequent sanction is severe.” Speaking from international duty with Wales, Spurs defender Ben Davies commented: “I think that as a group, as a team at Tottenham, we’ve all put a line under it and moved on.” He further added, “But, ultimately, it’s important that we realise that these kind of things need to be looked at with the seriousness that it has been.” Manager Ange Postecoglou is scheduled to address the media on Friday. He had previously stated that his midfielder committed a “big error” and that “he has got to take the punishment.” Kevin Yuan, a London-based Premier League video content creator, remarked: “To be brutally honest, we run into these kind of things every week.” He noted that it is not solely high-profile players who encounter racist abuse, as fans have also shared their experiences of racism while following football with BBC Sport. In June, Yuan and a female colleague experienced racial abuse outside Wembley Stadium from Real Madrid supporters following the Champions League final. Yuan, who produces football content for the Chinese media market, was filming with jubilant Madrid fans who, unbeknownst to him at the time, were singing a racially offensive chant in Spanish about Chinese women, directed at his colleague. Yuan recounted: “I asked one fan what did that chant mean? And he said, that’s it’s a Real Madrid chant, that we are champions.” He continued, “The next day we were told by our friends in Spain that this was actually a very racist song. We found it incredibly offensive.” Yuan disclosed that he has encountered comparable incidents while filming at English clubs. He stated: “It feels like part of our jobs [to take the abuse],” adding, “We film at different stadiums before and after the game and it seems to happen literally every week. “I don’t know if it is because of the way I look or speak.”” He further shared: “I am in a chat group with Chinese supporters of Manchester United and we have a saying that you will be extremely lucky to avoid a racist incident at least once during a season.” Yuan emphasized, “It happens no matter which team you support. I came to the UK in 2008 and have been going to games since then – but I feel like a foreigner, like I don’t fit in. I would hope people can understand how unsettling it is and put themselves in my shoes.” Maxwell Min, the projects co-ordinator for the Frank Soo Foundation, an organization that commemorates the life of the first non-white player to represent England in 1945, offered his perspective on the underlying tension. He stated: “It’s easy to conclude that East and South East Asians don’t play football – but there is a missing link that they are often playing at levels unaffiliated to the county FA system so it is easy to ignore them.” Min continued, “There may be a simple fact that it is only in recent years that East and South East Asians have begun playing in our stadiums at the highest level, through Japanese and Korean players. “There are also new fans in the stadium and there is this assumption that these fans have a more shallow interest in the sport; that it is not as deep as the so-called local or usual ethnic groups that are seen, often seeing them characterised as ‘tourists’.” Min further remarked: “I’ve had negative incidents myself but the love of football has put me in the position where I am working in the game in this role.” He concluded, “When I was a kid, I thought Manchester United’s Ji Sung Park was the best an Asian player could be. But seeing Son win the Golden Boot and be on course to become a legend for Tottenham has increased my dreams and positive expectations for the future.”