Riccardo Calafiori was one of the breakout stars of Euro 2024 despite Italy’s underwhelming outing as defending champions. The Bologna defender produced a number of impressive performances, being compared to Paolo Maldini thanks to his defensive qualities.
Calafiori’s heroics in Euro 2024 gained the attention of Arsenal. But it appears that some really investigative fans have been able to uncover a shade of racism in the Italian defender’s past. Normally, the Bologna has strayed clear of controversies in the past and only impressed scouts with his performances for the Serie A side.
Amid the controversy involving Enzo Fernandez and the Argentina squad singing racist chants at the France national team, footballers are on edge about being accused of racism. Well it seems that something that Calafiori did on Instagram in 2019 has now been brought back into attention.
On January 11, 2019, the Bologna defender had made a sweet post on his little sister’s birthday and about how big she’s getting.
Someone might have commented something inappropriate in his post and that prompted Calafiori to reply ‘shut up you n****’ in response.
It’s not clear whether he said this as a joke to some friend or whether it was really meant in an offensive way. But irrespective, this open way of slurring the N-word has not gone down well with some fans.
This five-year-old post has somehow been unearthed to try and prove shades of a racist in Calafiori.
Many fans immediately started losing their minds in calling Calafiori a racist and how he fits in with the apparent stereotype of Italian people being comfortable partaking in racial abuse.
But the fact is that there is no existing proof that this comment was ever made besides the screenshots doing the rounds lately.
Of course, it’s strongly possible that Calafiori or someone close to him saw this comment going viral on social media and quickly deleted it.
But considering that multiple people managed to grab screenshots indicates that it probably was made by Calafiori many years ago.
This is not the only issue that the 22-year-old is facing after the impressive Euro 2024 campaign. That is because his impending move to Arsenal is showing no signs of resolving due to certain complications faced by Bologna.
The Gunners have reportedly offered a package close to £42 million for the Italy international and he has already accepted their personal terms too.
But Bologna are unwilling to greenlight the deal as they’d have to pay a big amount of that fee to FC Basel, from whom they signed him from.
Calafiori can only wait and hope that this transfer situation is resolved soon so that he can complete a high profile move to North London. But before that, he might be in need of launching an apology for his past actions.
Such racism on social media is not only frowned upon by fans, but the Football Association too. The FA have infamously handed bans to Bernardo Silva (for depicting Benjamin Mendy as an ape) and Edinson Cavani (for calling a friend on Instagram as ‘negrito) for supposed racist actions.
They might do the same to Calafiori if his antics on the social media platform are found to be true. For that, of course, Calafiori needs to complete a move to Arsenal first. Once that is done, he can probably write up an apology for some stupid actions he did when he was not even an adult.