CHELSEA ARE PLANNING to deal with cases of anti-Semitism among the club’s fans by sending them on educational courses, chairman Bruce Buck has said.
Blues owner Roman Abramovich, who is Jewish, is at the forefront of an initiative that aims to eradicate instances of anti-Semitism among supporters.
And Buck explained that the process will produce better long-term results than merely imposing banning orders on guilty parties.
“If you just ban people, you will never change their behaviour,” Buck told The Sun .
“This policy gives them the chance to realise what they have done, to make them want to behave better.
“In the past, we would take them from the crowd and ban them, for up to three years.
“Now we say, ‘you did something wrong. You have the option. We can ban you or you can spend some time with our diversity officers, understanding what you did wrong’.
“It is hard to act when a group of 50 or 100 people are chanting. That’s virtually impossible to deal with or try to drag them out of the stadium.
“But, if we have individuals that we can identify, we can act.”
Buck had been speaking at the British Houses of Parliament, where Chelsea had been previewing a video aimed at tackling the ongoing problem.
He added: “Chelsea and the Chelsea Foundation do a lot of good work in the community but a little while ago Mr. Abramovich came to us and asked us to do something a little more aggressive and intensive to tackle antisemitism.
“Since then and over the last year we have hosted a lot of events and worked tirelessly to do this.
“This event at Parliament is another of those events and it is an exciting one as we have the Speaker of the House and Sports Minister in attendance and we showed a video we have prepared to assist us in the campaign moving forward.
“There was then a panel session to discuss the next steps so it has been an interesting evening for all in attendance. We are just trying to make a dent in the antisemitism in this world.
“We won’t be able to move the needle entirely but hopefully this will allow us to engage with other football clubs, other sports clubs and more people and over time we hope to make a real contribution for good to society.”
In September 2017, Chelsea condemned an anti-Semitic chant from their own fans about Alvaro Morata that abused rivals Tottenham , who have a large Jewish fanbase.
