The Kick It Out course is run by Alan Bush, the charity’s fan education and engagement manager, who has delivered more than 400 sessions in the past five years. In that time, 40 fans were referred to him by either police or clubs for using the Chelsea slur.
“We can’t ban our way out of discrimination and we can’t just ban football fans from football. All we do is we push it back into society,” Bush said.
“Football has a responsibility to educate its fans… then fans say to other fans ‘you can’t say that, mate, you’ll end up in court’ or ‘you can’t say that because that’s wrong’. There’s a chance they report, there’s a chance that they challenge. And I just think that has to be a far better than just banning people.”
He added that “the vast majority have not understood the gravity of how offensive that [chant] can be, how that can cause harassment, alarm and distress to an individual”.
To illustrate his point, Bush tells the offenders the story of Lee Johnson, a passionate Tottenham fan who was forced out of football for nearly a decade after hearing the Chelsea chant inside White Hart Lane as a teenager.
“It completely shook me to my core,” Johnson – who is now co-chair of the Proud Lilywhites, the LGBTQ+ supporters’ association of Tottenham Hotspur – told BBC Sport.
“It felt like all of the lights had gone out and I was just isolated by myself. It just took me straight back to when I was younger at school. ‘Rent boy’ was one of the things I used to get [called].”
Johnson had often been a target for abuse in his home town. Football used to be an escape, somewhere he could “get lost in the magic of the game” but hearing homophobic chanting made him question everything.
“I was thinking ‘Am I safe here?’ If people around me knew that I was gay, would they be attacking me or be verbally abusive? Would they stop singing it about Chelsea and would they start singing it about me?” he said.
“People were using a term that has caused a lot of harm to me over the years. It’s very traumatic. I think it was still the first half and I just said to my friend, ‘I can’t be here’. It was a fight or flight response. I left and I didn’t come back for nearly 10 years.”
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