Football-at-its-best - Football-at-Its-best

Isco with his son Isco JR after the Espanyol match in El Bernabeu.

Real Madrid’s bench vs Málaga | May 21, 2017

so i know this isn’t going to get talked about at all because the rest of europe generally doesn’t give two shits about the balkans, but during the austria vs north macedonia match earlier today, when marko arnautović scored the third goal, instead of celebrating with his teammates he decided to turn to ezgjan alioski (and egzon bejtulai, from what i could tell) and curse at them for no bloody reason except the fact that both alioski and bejtulai are muslim from albanian decent. (as you can see in the above clip, arnautić said something along the lines of “jebem ti albansku majku”, which translates to “fuck your albanian mother”.) for context the player in question, arnautović, is from serbian decent.

anti-albanian propaganda is something that has been so instilled into (some) people’s mindsets, it rarely, if ever, gets talked about. it stems from a politically infused ethnic conflict which, like most things, should have been left behind in the past but it wasn’t; and the result of this is subtle prejudice. mockery. sneering. name calling. cursing. slurs.

but what was the ref’s response to this? what was uefa’s response to this? what’s the public response to this? silence. absolute deafening silence. one of the only non-macedonian players on the pitch to react immediately to this was david alaba. otherwise there were no yellow cards, or red cards, not even the shitty two sentence apologies via instagram. arnautović faced no consequences except his team captain (alaba) trying to physically stop him from speaking, and that’s it.

but that sucks! that sucks because i know what the uproar would have been like if this wasn’t about two semi-known players from a developing country. a country which has been through so, so much going back years and years and years, at the hands of all the ploys and schemes of our own corrupt politicians. but the thing a lot of people miss about macedonia is that we are not ethnically homogeneous. i’m not sure we’ve ever been. our history and our culture is an amalgamation of macedonian and early slav and albanian and turkish and romani. we’re part of each other so we (we, the people, not the government, not those same politicians in their big leather chairs) have always stuck together.

which is why i had to say something. call me dramatic, or a snowflake, or petty because we lost, i genuinely do not care at all. i had to say something because not doing so goes against the concept of equality i stand for.

Isco Alarcon during the match vs. Italy | September 2, 2017

Málaga vs Real Madrid - 21 May 2017

Isco celebrates winning the supercopa in the locker room | January 12, 2020

Nacho celebrates with Isco after scoring vs Alavés | April 2, 2017

Isco warm up vs. Espanyol | 28.06.2020