Mike Maignan and the referee Fabio Maresca (photo Lapresse)
Maignan, Udinese: “Whoever insulted him is banned for life from the stadium”
“A Daspo has a limited duration but the club can decide to exclude a fan from a stadium for a longer period of time. We will work to exclude them from the stadium forever, for life”, explains Franco Collavino, general manager of Udinese. The Friulian club announces that the people who insulted Mike Maignan, the AC Milan goalkeeper who abandoned his goal in Saturday night's match, will be removed forever from the “Bluenergy Stadium”.
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“We are convinced to go in search of those responsible, there can only be two or three people. There were no chants, which were not perceived by either the referee or the prosecutor's office. There are one, two, three wretches, and this is enough for it to be a very serious thing – underlines Franco Collavino – We have already started looking at the images from the stadium cameras, we also have to listen to the audio. At the Blueenergy Stadium, between inside and outside, there are over 300 cameras, there is a lot of work to do in a very short time.”
Maignan said: “Whoever does nothing will be complicit.” The Udinese manager agrees with Magic Mike: “And he's right. But we acted long before his words, already during half-time of the match we contacted the police to start looking for those people we don't want among us. More generally, we implement ticket policies that encourage the presence of families at the stadium, of which there are many, and we send our footballers to schools to raise awareness among children on the issue of racism.”
Read also – Udinese-Milan, racist chants against Maignan. “They called me a monkey”
A message for the AC Milan goalkeeper? “I want to tell him that we are deeply sorry for what happened and we express our solidarity with him. Udinese has always been an example of a multi-ethnic and multicultural society, an example of coexistence and tolerance. We have always had a higher number of black players in our squad than the Italian average and indeed, after the Bosman ruling which opened the borders in 1995, we were also criticized for this, because we had too many players of different nationalities and few Italians. The last thirty years speak for us, they are there for all to see.”
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