The FIFA president Gianni Infantino has urged governing bodies to take more stringent measures to eradicate racism in football.
The 53-year-old FIFA boss was addressing the annual UEFA congress in Paris on Thursday, February 8.
He referenced recent racist incidents while emphasising that the act was “unacceptable” and must be eliminated from the game.
His words:
‘’I don’t want to make a long speech today, on the contrary, I want to be very short, I want to mention just one topic and that one topic is racism.
“We live in a divided world. We say that Football unites the world but our world is divided, our world is aggressive, and in the last few weeks and months as we have witnessed unfortunately a lot of racist incidents.
“This is not acceptable. We have to stop this and we have to do whatever we can to stop this. Racism is a crime, it’s terrible.
“We have to eradicate that. And we have some tools in place to do so. The problem is we have different competition organisers, rules, competitions and what we’re doing is not enough so we have to take responsibility for this.”
Infantino reiterated his desire to strengthen sanctions for racist abuse, as an effective approach to tackling the menace.