ROME — The front-page headline was designed to attract attention. For a match on Friday between Inter Milan and Roma, two of the biggest soccer clubs in Italy, it was only two words, one in yellow and one in white, and in all-capital letters.
“BLACK FRIDAY.”
The headline, on Thursday’s edition of Corriere dello Sport, one of Italy’s main sports newspapers, immediately drew condemnation from anti-racism groups, the two black players pictured and even various clubs in a country that has struggled to deal with racism in general and racism in soccer in particular.
It referred to two players — Chris Smalling, a defender for Roma, and Romelu Lukaku, a forward for Inter Milan. If it was intended to be a clever play on a phrase normally associated with holiday season bargains, it did not work.
Lukaku said on his social media accounts that it was “one of the dumbest headlines” he had ever seen, and scolded the paper for fueling negativity and racism.
Smalling described it as “wrong and insensitive,” and he encouraged the editors to “understand the power they possess.”
In the face of widespread condemnation over the headline, the newspaper insisted that it had done nothing wrong. It said, in a new headline in Friday’s editions, that the criticism had been no less than a “lynching.”
“Who Are You Calling Racist?” was the headline in the Friday paper, surrounded by images of past front pages, as well as editorials, denouncing racism in soccer.
“‘Black Friday,’ was the innocent title of a daily, ours, that for almost a century has defended, obstinately and passionately, the values of sport,” the paper’s editor, Ivan Zazzaroni, wrote. “But it was transformed into poison by those who have poison in them.”
Italy has long struggled to deal with racism in the game, a persistent strain that has tainted the country’s most popular sport but is frequently played down when it is acknowledged at all.
Lukaku, though he has only been in Italy for a few months, was already familiar with racial abuse. When he was greeted by monkey chants during a game in Cagliari in September, the Sardinian club dismissed as “outrageous” any suggestion that its fans might be racist.
Last month, Brescia defended controversial comments by a top club official about one of its own players, Mario Balotelli, who was born to Ghanaian parents, and whose adoptive mother is Jewish, as a “misunderstood joke.”
Black players in Italy, including the Juventus midfielder Blaise Matuidi, a former teammate, Moise Kean, who now plays in England, and A.C. Milan’s Ivory Coast midfielder Franck Kessie have continually been subject to racist incident. Last month, a Roma-Napoli game was temporarily suspended after Roma fans targeted the Senegalese player Kalidou Koulibaly, who plays for Napoli. Anti-Semitic insults are also not uncommon at stadiums.
There are signs that many prominent figures in the sport have had enough. The headline appeared two days after Luigi De Siervo, the chief executive of Serie A, Italy’s top league, vowed that the league would root out racism “stadium by stadium,” ensuring that those responsible would be banned from games, although he was referring to racism from fans, not the media.
“We must punish them in the most severe form — that is, expulsion from the stadiums,” Mr. De Siervo told reporters at a news conference hastily convened after an Italian newspaper leaked audio from a meeting in September at which he said he had asked for microphones pointed at booing fans in stadiums to be turned off so that they wouldn’t be heard on television.
Last week, Italy’s 20 Serie A clubs wrote an open letter recognizing that there was a “serious problem with racism” and that the clubs had not done enough to fight it. Racist incidents “are a reason of frustration and shame for us all,” the clubs wrote, which prompted them to work alongside Italian soccer officials to draft “new laws, and more severe regulations as well as an awareness raising campaign,” according to the letter, which added: “We don’t have time to lose.”
In response to the headline, Roma and A.C. Milan, Inter’s crosstown rival, banned Corriere dello Sport from their training facilities and from talking to their players for the rest of the year.
“Players, clubs, supporters and the media must be united in the fight against racism in football,” the clubs said in a statement. “We remain totally committed to tackling racism.”
Adam Smulevich, the co-author of a book about racism in Italian soccer, said that until now, reactions to racism had been superficial, “at every level,” even if the Serie A letter was “a step in the right direction.”
But Mr. Smulevich added that racism could only be eradicated by an across-the-board reaction, from the admonishments of fellow players, to the clubs, to journalists, who are expected to know better. Even if the content of the Corriere dello Sport article was not racist, he said, “Many just read the headlines.”
“There is an urgency to call things by their names,” Mr. Smulevich said. “The world of soccer has until now been very vague,” he added. But the fact that there had been so much controversy around the headline was a sign that awareness was growing, he said.
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