Crowd Control
How Is It “Brave” for a Black Athlete to Get a Disabled White Man in a Wheelchair Arrested at a Soccer Game?

1,939 words

Antoine Semenyo

As a primarily American-facing website, many readers of Counter-Currents may not possess much interest in the subject of English Premier League soccer. In which case, I have one simple piece of advice for you: tune in to any given Premier League soccer match! Rather than boring old sportsball, the main topic covered during most broadcasts of games is now in fact racism.

The new Premier League season for 2025/26 kicked off on Friday, August 15 with a home match at Anfield Stadium between the team I half-heartedly support, Liverpool FC, and visitors Bournemouth FC. Being only mildly interested, I tuned in to my radio momentarily partway through, just to check up on the score. Annoyingly, there seemed to be a break in play, with players angrily surrounding the referee. Had someone been injured? Yes – a black player named Antoine Semenyo had just had his ego severely bruised by being called something racially abusive by a man in the crowd.

He should have heard what many of the listeners at home would have been calling him at this point.

Blowing the Whistle

During the club’s 1980s heyday, due to the presence of a single black player on the team, the Jamaica-born John Barnes, Liverpool used to be known as “Niggerpool” to rival fans, who hurled bananas onto the pitch for John to peel and eat. He didn’t complain to the referee or get proceedings stopped, though. He simply backheeled the ‘nanas off the pitch, and got on with the game.

Rather than acting in a similar adult fashion today, Semenyo preferred to childishly complain to the referee and get the entire game stopped for a good five minutes whilst the police intervened to eject the abusive fan and a special Important Announcement was made over the stadium’s loudspeaker system to the basic effect that, if any other members of the crowd fancied calling anyone a banana-licker, they would be banned from the ground and prosecuted. And then, eventually, finally, the referee’s whistle blew once more and the game continued.

Then, a few minutes later, the whistle blew again for half-time. This was the very first game of the Premier League season, and one filled with legitimate sporting talking points. Liverpool, as champions, had just spent nearly £300m on new players. Would this make them even better, or simply destabilize a winning team? Even more newsworthy, one of Liverpool’s best-loved stars, striker Diogo Jota, had died in a car crash over the summer, together with his brother André. How would this affect team morale? Fans across the country would have liked to know.

But they would get no answers from the experts to any of these questions, as the half-time analysis was about one thing and one thing only: a single man, from inside a stadium which holds 62,000 people, had reportedly just called a black man a naughty word.

I turned the radio off and went to bed.

Adam and His Ant

The next morning, I woke up and checked the score. Liverpool had won 4-2. But, unfortunately, Bournemouth’s two goals had been scored by Antoine Semenyo, leading him to be cast as a “hero”. Pathetically, Semenyo had been offered the chance to be substituted off by his coach, but, somehow, this latter-day Spartan had managed to steel himself and play on. In 1956, Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautmann had once played on with a broken neck, but Trautmann was a German PoW who had served in the Luftwaffe, so is these days unacceptable as an icon of sporting racial grit and determination.

Bournemouth captain Adam Smith (white, English) told a post-game TV interviewer the following:

It’s totally unacceptable. I’m sort of in shock, to be honest. It shouldn’t be happening in this day and age. I don’t know how Ant has played on to be honest, and come up with those goals … But this shows what type of man he is … To come up with those goals shows what type of guy he is and what character he has. Fair play to Ant.

So being called names motivated him to play well, then, Adam? Isn’t the logical conclusion of all this therefore that, if you want your team’s black players to put in a good performance, you should systematically racially abuse them all yourself prior to each and every game?

Particularly interesting was the reaction of the Liverpool FC manager Arne Slot (white, Dutch):

It is unacceptable in any stadium, especially Anfield. It shouldn’t happen but unfortunately we definitely have to talk about it. It should be about Diogo and how the tributes were. I spoke to Antoine after the game and said the club will do everything we can to find the person responsible. Big credit to him if something happens to him and he can perform like this. He is not only a great player but very strong mentally. But it is unacceptable.

He isn’t a “great player”, he’s fairly mediocre, most people have never even heard of him. And as for being “very strong mentally”, if that’s so, then why had he just gone crying to the referee about being called nasty names like a tiny mewling infant? The truest words Arne Slot spoke here were that the night should have been all about the late Diogo Jota, towards whom a special tribute was paid by crowd and club staff prior to kick-off, this being Liverpool’s first official Premier League home game following his fatal car-crash.

But instead, the post-match headlines were all about neither Jota’s memory, nor the actual soccer match, but a “brave” black man’s hurt feelings, which somehow must have been way more intense and upsetting than, say, those of the dead man’s family, who were actually in attendance as guests of honor.

Oddly, the previous weekend, Liverpool had played a Charity Shield exhibition match against Crystal Palace at the national stadium of Wembley in London, where another minute’s silence for Jota had been disrespectfully disrupted by a small minority of Crystal Palace fans chanting loudly. On this occasion, Slot’s attitude towards the abusive fans was rather more forgiving:

I don’t think this was planned. Maybe the fan was not aware of the minute’s silence and was happy and tried to cheer for his team, then the Palace fans tried to calm him down and our fans reacted. I don’t think they had a bad intention. I’m a positive person.

Why is it seemingly now worse to call someone a nigger (or whatever the triggering word actually was) in a moment of probable fleeting anger of the kind familiar to all foolish sports fans, than it is to consciously disrupt a minute’s silence towards someone who has just burned to death in a tragic car accident, thereby spoiling the moment for a large number of his teammates, family, and staff who knew him personally? Because racism is now the biggest sin of all – far worse than, for example, a black man exploiting his own new-found position of social power over a helpless disabled white man.

Wheels of Misfortune

Disabled? Yes, that’s right. The man who reputedly called Antoine Semenyo a nasty name is in a wheelchair. Not that you would have known it from any of the subsequent anguished mass media coverage, of course. The only reason I even suspected this to be the case was because, during initial radio reporting of the incident, one of the commentators happened to mention the slur came from the pitchside disabled access area. But, curiously, the (extremely copious and excessive) subsequent reports in newspapers and online did not appear to mention this detail. Could the commentators at the time have been mistaken?

No. Some fans had taken images of the incident from TV coverage, where it could not be hidden, and posted it to social media, clearly demonstrating the man was indeed chair-bound (here and here):

It is strange, is it not, that mainstream media sources the next morning did not see fit to report on this particular aspect of the incident, simply calling the accused a “47-year-old man” without the aid of any illustrative photos? I wonder why that could be? Might it, perchance, be because the racially “correct” narrative of Semenyo being oh-so-very “brave” here does not particularly fit in with the rather less sympathetic image of a thin-skinned, hair-trigger millionaire professional athlete getting a poor cripple forcibly wheeled out of a soccer stadium by at least three able-bodied police officers?

Far from making Semenyo look brave, to me such images make him look rather more self-entitled, petty, and vindictive. If you heard someone insulting you, glanced around, and observed that it was a man in a wheelchair, would your natural reaction be to just ignore the fact as not worth pursuing, or to cause a massive public fuss and get him arrested by the police?

Because this man was actually formally arrested by the police, on suspicion of “a racially aggravated public order offence”, and wheeled away into custody. According to a statement by the “Match Commander” of the local force:

Merseyside Police will not tolerate hate crime of any form. We take incidents like this very seriously, and in cases like this we will be proactively seeking football banning orders, with the club, against those responsible. There is no place for racism and it is vital that anyone who witnesses such an offense reports it to stewards, or the police immediately, so we can take the necessary [massive overre]action like we did this evening. As with all matches, we work very closely … to ensure the safety of the public, and the players.

Yes, I’m sure the 6ft 1in tall, hyper-fit, 25-year-old Mr Semenyo must have felt very “unsafe” indeed in the presence of a 47-year-old disabled guy in a wheelchair.

Wheelchair Clampdown

Will this man end up in prison? According to an official 2022 statement on such matters from Max Hill, then the Director of Public Prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), giving people a criminal record for shouting hurty words at Africans (or gays, or indeed gay Africans) during professional sporting events is one of the absolute priorities of the modern-day British justice system:

The CPS has always prosecuted so-called fans who shout racist offensive comments at games including those aimed at footballers [No it hasn’t; this is a totally modern phenomenon] … My sports lead prosecutors [how disturbing that such taxpayer-funded roles even exist!] have been responding to this growing threat by working with clubs, charities, and footballing bodies, as well as the police, to demonstrate what is needed to bring people accused of racist or homophobic abuse to justice. As a result, two people have been jailed and more people now have hate crimes on their criminal record … Because we take hate crime so seriously, we will always ask for harsher sentences in these cases … if you see or hear any of this unacceptable behavior, report it to the police, who will investigate. If the legal test is met, we will not hesitate to take people to court so that justice is served.

If justice really was being served at Anfield Stadium last Friday, Antoine Semenyo would have been sent off the field of play himself for gross unsporting behavior and disrupting the game in play.

People are sick of this. The general public reaction at home will, I guarantee you, have been nothing like as universally sycophantic towards Semenyo as the “official” reaction spewed out identically by the regime media was. And that, I suppose, is why the authorities feel the need to clamp down on all such dissent so very harshly and mercilessly.

Even if it means arresting a man in a wheelchair.