On Monday, the 9th of April, football players and spectators once again witnessed an alarming demonstration of anti-Hungarian sentiment on a football match between ASC Juventus Bucuresti and Sepsi OSK. During the warm-up, a parody of the song “Lord, protect the Romanians” resounded from the loudspeakers on the Anghel Iordanescu Stadium in Bucharest. Several words from the original song’s lyrics were replaced by vulgar and xenophobic expressions, moreover, the lyrics clearly incited to violence against the Hungarian community.
The Romanian Football Federation subsequently fined Juventus Bucuresti, the organising team, with an amount of approximately 2000 euros. However, such an amount is symbolic at best, given that we are talking about a sport that deals with the most amount of money, not to mention that the First League (Liga I) involves teams with multi-million euro budgets. Furthermore, such amount are no enough to deter similar incidents in the future. As Árpád ANTAL, the Mayor of Sfântu Gheorghe/Sepsiszentgyörgy noted, „in cases such as this, more drastic measures are needed, the sanction of point deduction would also have been justified”.
Similarly aggressive anti-Hungarian discourse during football matches last year had led to talks and promises to the effect that the pertinent regulations will be amended to allow for harsher sanctions, with the hope that these may discourage xenophobia in sports. We believe that only by taking firm action and modifying the existing framework dealing with hate-speech in sports can such events be prevented in the long-term.