Juventus are in hot waters for accidentally posting a racially degrading tweet on their official women team’s account.
The Serie A giants made headlines for all the wrong reasons as the contents of the tweet could be perceived to be mocking people of Asian descent.
The official Twitter account of the Bianconeri Women’s football team faced the brunt of the online football community as they posted a picture of footballer Cecilia Salvai wearing a cone as a hat and slanting her eyes with her fingers.
The only caption that accompanied the picture was equally abhorrent as it depicted Cecilia’s pose in emoji format.
I'd like to say that the maddest things in football in the past hour was Messi leaving Barcelona or Jack Grealish going for £100m.
— Elliot Hackney (@ElliotHackney) August 5, 2021
But then there's this… pic.twitter.com/4sPLfqtfpv
Issue half-assed response
The tweet was quite rightly perceived to have racist undertones and was eventually deleted, followed by an official apology from the account.
The apology read: “We sincerely apologise that our tweet, which was not meant to cause controversy or have any racial undertones, may have offended anyone. Juventus has always been against racism and discrimination.”
The apology was not enough as a lot of fans were not satisfied with the club’s insistence that the tweet was not meant to have racial undertones.
While plenty of people called out the club for encouraging racism in this day and age, fans also took to Salvai’s social media accounts, calling her out for the widely criticized gesture.