A Spanish football president has appeared to criticise his own player who came forward to speak about his experiences with racist abuse in La Liga.
Chrisantus Uche, who signed for Getafe this summer, spoke openly about the unfair treatment he received from referees after just seven games in the top-flight division.
‘First two matches or three matches, I saw it with my eyes the referees are are so bad, they are so bad,’ he told ESPN earlier this week. ‘They will kick me, the referee will just say I should stand up. No, it’s a foul, you have to blow it.
‘But if they kick another person the referee will just blow it. And it’s so painful, you cannot do anything, you don’t have any power because the referee has power to do anything he wants to do.
‘No, he has to stop it. Me I will fall down, they will kick me and I will fall down in front of the referee and the referee will not do anything. No it’s not good.’
Uche also claimed he was on the receiving end of racist abuse from fans, saying: ‘Both the fans, some of the fans, they will be hailing you “f*****g Black,’ you are a ‘Black this this, that that.” No it’s not good. It’s not good.’
However, those suggestions have been dismissed by Getafe’s president Angel Torres, who labelled Uche’s comments a ‘complete mistake’.
‘The fact that it is not the right question to ask a young man who has just arrived does not justify him speaking badly of the referees or anyone else,’ Torres told El Chiringuito TV.
Torres went on to criticise journalists for their part in the interview and even suggested that Uche didn’t understand Spanish well enough to conduct the interview or know exactly what fans yelled at him.
This comes even though the midfielder has played football in Spain for two years now and conducted the interview in English.
‘I will talk to him as I haven’t seen the full interview. I don’t want to justify it, but someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, who has a microphone placed in front of him, it seems to me that the journalist is more at fault,’ Torres said.
‘The people in charge of my press office who were not there but have listened to it, and the journalists who asked that question to a lad who just arrived a month and a half ago, are just as guilty. That doesn’t justify him having to speak badly of anyone.’
Asked about Uche’s claims of fans racially abusing him, Torres responded: ‘But if he doesn’t understand, how is he going to say that? He can’t say that. When he’s been here for one or two years and understands Spanish, he can say what he wants.’
Getafe’s assistant head coach Patri Moreno echoed his president’s sentiments and insisted that Uche’s comments were likely a mistake.
‘Uche does not master the language well. Either he has not interpreted the question correctly or it must have been a mistake in answering,’ he said.
The troubling comments come just months after three Valencia fans were handed prison sentences for racially abusing Real Madrid forward Vinicius Junior.
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