Newsletter

Pablo Iglesias calls for the resignation of the TVE commentator who said that “Moroccans steal and run away”

Juan Carlos Rivero was quick to justify that he had used a “soccer term” and that “whoever drives it crazy has a problem.”

Jose Dominguez

Soccer uses some terms that, out of context, can give rise to more than one misunderstanding. Many of them refer to war issues such as ‘low shot’, ‘frontal attack’, ‘he launched a howitzer’; other more colloquial expressions such as the ‘steal’ of the ball are simply colloquial metaphors. But if conditions that can point to comments that could be considered discriminatory or racist are added to this, the explosive cocktail is served. This is what happened this Saturday to TVE commentator Juan Carlos Rivero when, to comment on Morocco’s game strategy (which eliminated Portugal and is the first African team to advance to the semifinals of a World Cup), he said that his players “steal and they run away.” Almost instantly he realized that the phrase could be misinterpreted and tried to amend it by ensuring that he had used it only as a “soccer term” and even tried to get ahead of the ill-considered by warning them: “Whoever makes you mad has a problem.” Even so, he was unable to prevent criticism from raining down on him. Among these is that of the former vice president and former leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, who came to ask for his resignation.

It was of little use that the game led the audiences on Saturday with an average of almost 3.7 million viewers and a 32% share of the screen. Not even that it had peaks of 7.1 million audiences, or that the post-match was around 4 million (the most viewed on Saturday). The truth is that the comment and his attempts at explanations soon surpassed the echoes of the result of the meeting by becoming viral on social networks, where a heated debate began about whether they could be considered racist.

Although perhaps the most striking of all this controversy was the intervention of the ex-purple leader who, despite the narrator’s spontaneous apologies for a possible misunderstanding, did not hesitate to ask for his resignation. «If there were decency on RTVE, the man who said ‘Moroccans steal and run / it’s a football term / whoever gets mad has a problem’ he shouldn’t go back to work on public television. And so VOX, PP and Cs had independent for his motion », he wrote on his Twitter profile. Neither RTVE nor the journalist himself have replied to the former vice president, at least through this social network.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending