Sat, Nov 10, 2018 page16

• PSG open racial profiling probe

  FOOTBALL LEAKS: The issue reportedly ‘blew up internally’ in 2014, when a club scout told a meeting that there are ‘too many West Indians and Africans in Paris’

  • AFP, PARIS
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  Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) on Thursday confirmed that a probe was under way into claims that young players were subject to racial profiling by talent scouts, but said they were unaware of such practices taking place.

  The probe was launched in response to revelations by French investigative Web site Mediapart, which cited documents from the latest series of “Football Leaks” allegations.

  Mediapart said that between 2013 and this year, PSG’s scouting department filled in evaluation forms on potential youth signings that included stating their ethnicity. They were categorized as French, North African, West Indian or African.

  Such profiling is illegal in France.

  “Paris Saint-Germain confirm that forms with illegal content were used between 2013 and 2018 by the scouting department at the youth academy,” they said in a statement. “These forms were used solely at the initiative of the staff in charge of that department.”

  An internal investigation was launched last month “to understand how such practices could exist and decide what measures to take,” PSG said.

  “The club’s general management were never aware of a racial profiling system in the scouting department and never had such a form in their possession,” said PSG, who also came under scrutiny last week following Football Leaks revelations about their breaches of Financial Fair Play regulations.

  Mediapart, part of the European Investigative Collaborations consortium that has studied the Football Leaks documents, said the controversy “blew up internally” in March 2014 in relation to the case of 13-year-old player Yann Gboho, who caught the eye of scouts while playing for FC Rouen.

  A PSG scout who evaluated the teenager in November 2013 stated his origin as “West Indian.”

  Mediapart quoted Serge Fournier, the PSG scout who evaluated Gboho, as saying: “Instead of French, it should have said white, especially as all the players we recommended were French.”

  “PSG didn’t want us to recruit players born in Africa, because you are never sure of their date of birth,” he was quoted as saying.

  Gboho — a French youth international born in the Ivory Coast — eventually signed for Rennes.

  The matter “caused a swirl within PSG,” Mediapart said, citing the minutes from a meeting on March 14, 2014.

  At the meeting, Marc Westerloppe, then in charge of PSG scouting in France outside the Paris region, is alleged to have spoken of “a problem with the direction the club is going in. We need more diversity. There are too many West Indians and Africans in Paris.”

  The alleged comments caused upset, with Pierre Reynaud — in charge of youth recruitment in the Paris region — saying “it must not be a question of ethnicity, but of talent,” the site reported.

  Complaints were then made to the club’s human resources department, and Westerloppe was summoned to a meeting in which he rejected the accusations against him as “false, malicious and stupid,” it said.

  PSG said no disciplinary action was taken because claims against him could not be backed up.

  The allegations trigger memories of a scandal that erupted earlier this decade, after Mediapart exposed a discussion in 2010 on race quotas in France’s age-group teams.

  According to Mediapart, those at the top of French soccer believed there were “too many blacks and too many Arabs and not enough whites” in the game.
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