Last week, Argentinian soccer fans caused an uproar by chanting anti-Semitic slogans during a match against a rival team. The rival team, Atlanta, is associated with the Argentinian Jewish community, as it stems from a historically Jewish neighborhood in Buenos Aires and currently has several Jewish players on the team. The anti-Semitic chants included “[kill] the Jews to make soap.”  According to the Times of Israel, the All Boys fans chanted this as they waved Palestinian flags and T-shirts bearing Iranian symbols.

The All Boys team lost the match 3-2, leading some of their fans to become violent. Members of the Atlanta team and their fans took shelter in the Atlanta locker room in order to avoid the ensuing violence until local police could escort them to safety.

Anti-Semitism of this nature is no stranger in the world of soccer. In October of last year for example, separate incidents in both Italy and Germany saw stickers posted which featured photoshopped images of Anne Frank wearing rival team’s soccer jerseys. Historically Jewish football clubs and teams, such as Atlanta in Argentina or AFC Ajax in the Netherlands, frequently deal with anti-Semitic slurs, along with chants such as “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” These fans and chants have been denounced by all the rules organizations and official sports bodies in the various countries in which they appear, yet they persist in their bigotry.

Outside of official bodies, it falls onto the players and their fans to combat the surge of bigotry in the soccer fandom. Luckily, some teams have taken the high road: for example, the Italian football club S. S. Lazio, the target of the first Anne Frank related campaign in 2017, chose to don shirts with images of Anne Frank and the message “NO [to] all anti-Semitism,” in order to combat the anti-Semitism of fans.