Swansea City have taken a stand against the continued abuse of their players by accounts on social media. Jan Dhanda, Ben Cabango and Jamal Lowe have all received hate messages via social media based on their ethnicity and race. Swansea and all of its staff and players will not utilise any social media platform for seven days.
On Thursday afternoon the swans announced that they have taken a club-wide stance against racism. "From 5pm today (April 8) all first-team players, those in the academy professional phase (under-23s and under-18s), Swansea City Ladies, our Community Trust, senior club staff and official club channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat) will not post any content for a period of seven days," the club shared on their website.
The club cited that they have seen several of their players receive abhorrent abuse in recent weeks and believe they need to take a stand against such behaviour.
In March 2020, Android Townsend was on the receiving end of abuse, as an Everton fan hurled racial insults at the winger taking a corner at Selhurst Park. According to the Evening Standard, the fan was arrested and later given a three-year ban from attending games. He has publicly supported the swans today.
Swansea’s move has been backed by Sam Allardyce, Graeme Potter, Scott Parker, amid numerous other high profile Premier managers this afternoon. This site, having some knowledge of the forthcoming boycot last week contacted Paul Abbandanato at Wales on Line to ask him for support for Ben Cabango but received no response. His account is generally Cardiff based and converses with convicted football hooligans who also support Cardiff City amongst others. Wales on Line preferred to run with numerous Cardiff based stories including smoke seen coming from a roof in the city’s centre. In fact the amount of headline news in place of this move by Swansea went from the best fish and chip shop in Wales to a woman who took her son to hospital having swallowed air pods. We know this newspaper will come back with a response, covering their tracks but the very fact their headlines four hours after the swans announcement is still dominated with their perception of news is not only disgusting it echoes and supports the abuse Swansea players have had to put up with this season.
We stand by that and our statement that this is another example of the media not assisting anti racism stances and is further proof the Cardiff based media prefer to ignore positive news stories in lieu of their own specific local interests. It isn’t good enough the story may well be read by excessive searching and looking for it in local news stories and - any response like that is totally pathetic. It should be noted that the FAW have also not reported this story, seems like a few noses are out of joint this evening.
Screenshots from the newspapers online news feeds are below as at 6pm this evening.
Wales on Line fighting racism ? Proof they don’t because of their own personal interests conflict with a positive Swansea news story. Pathetic. If you don’t support anti hate and anti racist campaigns and give it your total commitment, you may as well be supporting hate and racism. Simple.