Kiev stadium director would consider racial segregation

The stadium manager at Dynamo Kiev’s NSC Olimpiyskiy Stadium has backtracked over suggestions that black fans be segregated in their own part of the ground.

After several black fans were assualted racist during the recent Champions League tie with Chelsea, Uefa opened disciplinary proceedings against Dynamo Kyiv, who are facing charges including one of racist behaviour by supporters.

The club is under investigation from Uefa over the shocking incident that ended with at least two fans hospitalised and claims that one of them had been stabbed.

A journalist initially put forward the idea, to which Spilchenko replied: “We’ll probably listen to your offer”.

Footage of the incident from the Group G game appeared to show a group spotting black fans in a neighbouring home section of the stadium before chasing them down in a targeted attack.

Now correct us if we’re wrong, but that sounds an very bad lot like racial segregation, and not at all like an acceptable response to the goings-on at the Valery Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium.

In a statement to Omnisport, executive director Piara Powar said: “We deplore all acts of exclusion inside football stadiums and outside”.

Soccer club Dynamo Kiev’s stadium director, Volodimir Spilchenko, has now called for drastic, and controversial, measures to prevent future discrimination. It said Western media had reported “only the first sentence of the possibility of creating a separate sector and completely ignored the next sentence, in which the executive director expressed his position”.

“[Volodimir] categorically condemned the idea of creating a separate sector or any other segmentation separate groups of supporters”.