By NAN Sports Editor
News Americas, PARIS, France, Mon. Dec. 19, 2022: While the French soccer team failed to repeat history and claim another World Cup title Sunday, losing by penalty kicks to South American soccer giant Argentina, a Caribbean roots French player who missed a penalty kick has been forced to deal with online racism because of his miss.
Kingsley Junior Coman, a forward who was born in Paris to parents from Guadeloupe, has been targeted with horrific racist abuse since missing his penalty in France’s World Cup final shoot-out defeat against Argentina in Qatar on Sunday evening.
Coman along with Aurelien Tchouameni and Randal Kolo Muani, who all featured in the final, were subjected to vile messages on their accounts, as reported by The Athletic.
Coman and Tchouameni missed penalties in the shootout, while Kolo Muani missed a chance to win the game in extra-time.
The trio received messages that included banana and monkey emojis on their Instagram accounts just moments after the loss. Tchouameni reportedly disabled his Instagram account for a brief time following the racist comments.
Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, condemned the abusive posts and said the messages had been removed.
FC Bayern, the club Coman plays for, strongly condemned the racist comments noting on Twitter: “The FC Bayern family is behind you, King. Racism has no place in sport or our society.”
The abuse received by the French players is similar to what occurred following England’s loss to Italy on penalties in the final of Euro 2020 last year.
After that game Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho, who all missed penalties, received racist abuse online.
OTHER CARIBBEAN HERITAGE PLAYER
Meanwhile the other Caribbean heritage player on the French team, Manchester United defender Raphael Varane, who lasted 113 minutes of the 120 minutes of play and had o be helped off in extra-time, looking absolutely exhausted, and with a minor injury, says he is taking the defeat hard.
“We are very disappointed of course, we gave everything,” Varane said. “We had to face a lot of obstacles during the competition, we gave up nothing. For an hour we were not in the game. We could have won too. …. We almost turned the game around, which was not going well. … There was mental strength in this group, a lot of heart. That allowed us to come back in this game. We’re disappointed but also proud.”
France was beaten 4-2 in a penalty shootout by Argentina on Sunday as they failed to defend their world title.
