In the Euro 2020 final played on 11th June Italy won the match against England on 3-2 penalties since the game ended with a 1-1 tie. Following the European Football Championship, three England players – Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho became subject to racial abuse online. This trio missed the penalty against the winning team of the tournament. Bukayo Saka took to social media to write a powerful message against racial abuse.
On social media, people posted monkey emojis and racist ridicule to insult Saka, Rashford, and Sancho, all black players who missed penalty kicks in attack shots against rival Italy. Since the final on Sunday, 19-year-old Saka spoke for the first on Thursday. In a statement on Twitter, he wrote: “There are no words to tell you how disappointed I was with the result and my penalty. I really believed we would win this for you. I’m sorry that we couldn’t bring it home for you this year.”
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— Bukayo Saka (@BukayoSaka87) July 15, 2021
He also urged social media companies to do more to deal with the abuse. His letter read: “To the social media platforms Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, I don’t want any child or adult to have to receive the hateful and hurtful messages that me, Marcus, and Jadon have received this week. I knew instantly the kind of hate that I was about to receive, and that is a sad reality that your powerful platforms are not doing enough to stop these messages”
“There is no place for racism or hate of any kind in football or in any area of society and to the majority of people coming together to call out the people sending these messages, by taking action and reporting these comments to the police and by driving out the hate by being kind to one another, we will win. Love always wins,” Saka ended the message on a positive note.
Immediately after the racism broke out, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Kevin Pietersen, and other sports personalities supported the trio and quickly condemned the ugly outburst of racist remarks, particularly against a team that epitomized England’s racial diversity.