The Midlands club’s reaction to the quenelle gesture betrays their past as equality pioneers and it underlines that football still signs up for all the initiatives but just does not always mean it

The statue will go up in the centre of West Bromwich on 15 July, the 25th anniversary of Laurie Cunningham’s death. It the work of the Barnsley sculptor Graham Ibbeson, called The Celebration, and will also show Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson back in the days when they were known as the Three Degrees and had to base their professional lives around a soundtrack of racial abuse.

“The grounds that really stuck out were Leeds, West Ham, Birmingham, Everton, Tottenham and Chelsea,” Regis writes in his 2010 autobiography. “At Spurs they used to sing: ‘Who’s that up a tree – big Cyrille, big Cyrille.’ Three black players in one team was just too much for some supporters.” Back at the Hawthorns, the office staff used to dread opening the post. “Laurie copped it worse because he went out with a white lady,” Regis remembers. One of the letters had a bullet inside and a warning about what would happen if Cunningham became the first black footballer to play for England.

West Brom’s supporters hardly need the history lesson. Their club has been a bastion for equality in sport and life. Or, at least, it has until that moment, 40 minutes into their game at West Ham United last month, when Nicolas Anelka prodded the ball into the net and celebrated with la quenelle – in a game shown live on French television.

The disciplinary charge from the Football Association is both necessary and overdue and it can only be hoped Anelka receives a fittingly long ban for his “special dedication” in support of his friend, the so-called humorist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. If they are friends, Anelka cannot be unaware of Dieudonné’s history, his convictions for antisemitism, his reference to the Holocaust as “memorial pornography”, the reasons why he is banned from public appearances in France and the background to a salute that gives his followers just about enough greyness and deniability to squirm their way out of normal legal responses.

Anelka’s argument is that it was an innocent gesture but he insults our intelligence by making out he is good enough friends with Dieudonné to dedicate a goal to him, but not good enough to know about the man. Perhaps the FA could bring along some of those charming photos that can be found on the internet of Dieudonné’s acolytes performing outside Auschwitz and other places of great sensitivity. Then, perhaps, they could use their powers so we do not have to see Anelka on a football pitch for a long time indeed.

Alan Cleverley, secretary of the West Bromwich Albion Official Supporters Club, summed it up pretty accurately. “It sounds as if he did it on purpose because he knew the match was being shown live in France. If the book gets thrown at him, I’ve got no sympathy whatsoever.”

It is an important moment for West Brom and it is knowing their background and everything they have stood for, and against, that makes it feel slightly perplexing, troubling even, that they have not been more proactive. They have been put in a horrible, invidious position but so far they have handled this issue with little clarity and eloquence. They could also have made a stand and they chose not to.

The problem in football is there is a culture among the professional clubs of self-preservation, of condemning these kind of incidents unless it actually involves one of their own. If someone of another profession had, say, put an antisemitic message on Twitter, he or she would have been suspended immediately. Yet football operates by its own rules, often in denial, signing up for all the initiatives, just not always meaning it.

A time will surely come when a Premier League club breaks free and acknowledges there is a bigger picture – and more to play for than just league points. But Liverpool did not manage it when Luis Suárez racially abused Patrice Evra and the decision-makers at Anfield tried every last desperate measure to portray him as the victim. Chelsea’s admission that John Terry had acted abominably towards Anton Ferdinand came far too late and now we have these bland statements from West Brom and the impression, certainly to begin with, that they did not understand the seriousness of the matter, and their first concern was whether Anelka could still be selected.

Keith Downing, their caretaker manager at the time, should probably be given the benefit of the doubt for his poor response on the day, reacting with indignation to the suggestion that Anelka had done anything wrong and describing it as “absolute rubbish”. it is true, after all, that outside of a few fanatics the British audience would not have understood the significance of the quenelle at that point. Downing, nonetheless, would have been much better off saying the club was aware of the allegation, would look into it properly and then comment further.

It is what has happened since then that makes you wonder whether West Brom have blurred their priorities and put more in the fact that Anelka might be able to pinch them a goal or two rather than point 7.1 of their own club charter, which stipulates: “Everyone will be regarded equally irrespective of their race, colour, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability, marital or family status, age or ethnic origin.” How does the quenelle, for everyone to see, fit into that?

West Brom’s first statement on the subject almost mentioned in passing that Anelka’s salute had “caused offence in some quarters”, which was a strange way of putting it. There has not been a hint of an apology and there is no legitimate reason, whatever the relevant people say, about why they have to wait until after the FA inquiry before holding their own investigation and taking action themselves.

Anelka did what is alleged. Everyone saw it and he will have to live with the consequences, not that he has particularly done a great deal to argue his innocence anyway. After that, it is over to West Brom and the question is: do they really want this person representing their club?

• Nicolas Anelka
• West Bromwich Albion
• Race issues

Daniel Taylor

theguardian.com