Rodrigo De Paul has criticised Chelsea’s players for unfollowing Enzo Fernandez in response to his video of Argentina’s players singing a racist song after their Copa America win.
Both Chelsea and FIFA have opened investigations after Fernandez filmed his Argentina teammates in a live video on Instagram singing a racist song about France’s players on the team bus following their victory over Colombia in the Copa America final on Sunday evening.
During Fernandez’s broadcast, Argentina’s players could be heard singing the first two lines of the song, ‘on passport, French nationality, listen, spread the word, they play in France, but they are all…’, before someone is heard saying, ‘cut the video’.
The racist and transphobic chant, which was first sung by Argentina supporters during the 2022 World Cup, claims that France’s players are ‘all from Angola’ and makes a vile reference to a reported relationship between Kylian Mbappe and transgender model Ines Rau.
The full lyrics to the song are: ‘Listen, spread the word, they play in France, but they are all from Angola, they are going to run well, they like to sleep with trans people, their mum is Nigerian, their dad is Cameroonian, but on the passport it says: French.’
Fernandez plays alongside several black French teammates at Chelsea including Benoit Badiashile, Axel Disasi, Wesley Fofana, Malo Gusto, Christopher Nkunku and Lesley Ugochukwu.
On Tuesday evening, Fofana shared the video on X with the caption: ‘Football in 2024: uninhibited racism.’
Fofana, Gusto and Disasi have also unfollowed Fernandez on Instagram.
But Atletico Madrid midfielder De Paul, who plays alongside Fernandez for Argentina’s national side, has defended the 23-year-old and has described the reaction from Chelsea’s players as ‘strange’.
‘What happens with this song thing is that one doesn’t analyse the song from the pitch, one sees it more in relation as a joke,’ De Paul said in an interview with Migue Granados on OLGA.
‘Then I can understand people who have suffered racism and don’t like it.
‘I think there are places… I think that if a person, or some of Enzo’s teammates as it happened, feels offended, the way to do it is to call him, not expose him on social media.
‘There is a bit of malice there or wanting to put Enzo in a place that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
‘It’s very strange, it’s like kicking a fallen tree. You call him and say, ‘dude, what happened?’.
‘If you have a relationship… these are people you’re with in the dressing room all the time, unfollowing him seems pointless to me.
‘You call him and say, ‘listen, I think we might feel affected by this, why don’t you post a message apologising to the people’, and the subject ends there. Don’t make such a show of it.
‘What I can say in defence of Enzo is that, obviously, the song is there because it was there, because people sing it.’
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