In the Vancouver Whitecaps’ 3-1 victory over Minnesota United on Sunday, the nature of the Whitecaps’ impressive performance took a backseat to the allegations that emerged from an exchange late in the second half, levied at Minnesota’s Joseph Rosales for potential discriminatory language directed at Vancouver’s Emmanuel Sabbi.
This is the fourth time such an allegation has been made during an MLS match since 2021, and the second time this year in a game involving MLS teams. (The other came during Concacaf Champions Cup competition.) But what was arguably the most notable feature of Sunday’s incident was how evident it was to informed observers exactly what was going on when referee Drew Fischer paused the match for more than three minutes to address team captains and managers, as well as his own officiating crew.
“You wonder if there was something that was said,” said MLS Season Pass play-by-play commentastor Neil Sika as Fischer began talking to manager Eric Ramsay of Minnesota and Jesper Sorensen of Vancouver.
“That’s what I’m wonering now,” responded Sika’s analyst partner Lloyd Sam. “I’m sure some news will come out after.”
Sika continued: “I’m almost willing to bet that’s the case when you bring both coaches over and you’re the referee.”
In his postgame remarks afterward, Ramsay also said it became clear to him what was going on pretty quickly.
“We sat through a workshop in preseason as to how those types of instances are dealt with,” Ramsay said. “And that was pretty much to the script.”
After four years, we may have reached the point where there is enough of a track record with MLS’ policy for dealing with such incidents that they no bring immediate confusion for bystanders. And while that unfortunately speaks in part to the frequency with which such allegations occur, it also is evidence the league and its match officials have been both consistent and deliberate in their response.
Not Just An MLS Issue
And whatever the number of times the league’s protocol for discriminatory speech has been used does indicate about the prevelence of discriminatory language in soccer is very obviously not a problem for MLS alone.
The players involved in those incidents have come from a wide range of backgrounds: Argentine, Colombian, German, American, Greek, Jamaican, Spanish, Nigerian, Honduran and Italian among them.
The logical conclusion is that discriminatory speech is an issue everywhere the sport is played with people from disparate backgrounds. If there’s a reason you see the issue surface more often in MLS competition than in other matches, it’s because MLS is one of the few competitions with deliberate policies to combat it.
(Pierre-Luc Lauzierre, the referee in charge of the mentioned Concacaf Champions Cup match earlier this year, is also an MLS official.)
Whether the protocol is effective at reducing such instances is another matter, and probably nearly impossible to determine based on the data we have.
While roughly one instance a year is notable, it’s not much of a sample size in the big picture and certainly prone to fluctuations. And the existence of the league’s policies could potentially be a lurking variable, in that players simply knowing have an avenue to formally address a perceived slur could make them more observant of potential discriminatory language.
And the use of the protocol doesn’t always mean a slur was used. In many circumstances, there’s the possibility for words to be misheard during the fog-of-war conditions of high-level athletic competition in a loud stadium environment. That’s one potential explanation for the previous episode this season in Concacaf play, one that ended with Concacaf publicly clearing Sergio Palencia of using the slur that had been alleged by Chidozie Awaziem.
