Chelsea star Callum Hudson-Odoi has hit out at social media companies following their bizarre stance after a number of Premier League clubs reported incidents of racism.
Callum Hudson-Odoi said: “How can that make sense? If somebody puts for example, a monkey emoji towards a player – why is that? How is a player a monkey? What does that mean to a player? So for us seeing stuff like that it always makes us angry. Are you saying that because of our skin colour? Because of the colour that we are? Or are you just saying that because you just want to be, you think that you’re funny or you want to get a laugh out of people? No one laughs at that sort of situation. All of us take that personally as a team and as players. We have to do something about it. Because obviously, as I said, racism won’t stop. When you talk about it people start to realise that it’s not right at the same time, but there are times where people feel like it’s an advantage for them to carry on trying to make you feel more down about yourself, or make you feel a type of way about your skin colour or something like that. It’s totally unacceptable and totally – don’t like to use the word – but ‘stupid’ from their side, and idiotic; because I’m like – ‘Why would you want to do that to a player of the team that you support?’ Especially when you want them to do well for your team as well? It’s embarrassing to us that we’re playing our hearts out and trying to play the game as much as possible to try and win games. And if we don’t win or do something wrong, we’re receiving bad things from other people. We are trying our best in every game that we play in and our daily lives to talk about it because it’s just the thing where it gets me angry to hear stuff like that. As I said, it’s unacceptable and hopefully things get resolved soon.”
Top-flight clubs flagged several tweets with monkey emojis on them to Twitter but were stunned to hear that the action does not violate any rules. Recently, Chelsea’s Reece James was the subject of racist abuse which sparked a response from owner Roman Abramovich, while Tammy Abraham was targeted last season. At the weekend, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City issued a joint statement against racism – with United trio Axel Tuanzebe, Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford all suffering abuse in recent weeks. That has reignited the debate around social media companies failing to hold users responsible for the abuse they send on their platforms and Hudson-Odoi has hit out in his response.
