Unión Balompédica Conquense player, Nacho Ruiz, does not rule out taking legal action for the series of homophobic and sexist insults he received last Sunday on the CD Quintanar del Rey pitch in one of the second RFEF provincial derbies. “Shitting faggot”, “faggot”, “daughter of a whore” or “poor mother of yours who has a girl and not a man” were some of the expressions which, according to what was reported on her Instagram account, “a large part of the stands” of the municipality of San Marcos dedicated to her and which this Tuesday she publicly denounced again in a press conference expressly at the Conquense factories. The barrage of insults, which according to Ruiz occurred practically from the beginning, was interrupted when the referee, after the communication from the player himself, ordered the match to be interrupted for two minutes and the broadcast of a message over the public address system warning of the end of the match if the insults did not stop.
“As far as football is concerned, it doesn’t concern me, but I believe that these are acts that should not occur in the 21st century,” explained the Conquense full-back, who asked that those who utter these types of insults be banned from entering the pitch, he clarified, “homophobic and sexist” and not, as was said in the public discourse, “xenophobic and racist”. The player has, for the moment, obtained an apology from the president of CD Quintanar, Pedro Navarro, who via WhatsApp communicated to him “his dissatisfaction with the stands” and his commitment to identifying the authors of an episode, according to the player, “rather unpleasant”. “We have to give visibility, this cannot continue to happen,” said Ruiz, who is playing his first season with Conquense and who combines his work as a footballer with his role as a model and content creator. “This is the first time this has happened to me and I hope it’s the last, and not just for me,” he noted.
The player, as other footballers have done in recent years, has asked for this type of attitude to be banned from the pitches. “It’s something that is too normalized and that we shouldn’t normalize. It doesn’t matter what the insults are, we have to stop them and make football what it is, something beautiful and with many excellent values,” defended Ruiz, accustomed to receiving similar insults on social networks for his way of dressing. “I hope it helps so that the players who are on the pitch don’t allow this kind of thing and that more people speak out when they receive insults,” he insisted. The footballer is grateful for the “incredible” support he is receiving inside and outside his team and also from the Spanish Footballers’ Association (AFE), with which he is considering the possibility of taking legal action for what happened in his match against the Quintana Roo club.
“Zero tolerance”
CD Quintanar released a statement last Thursday to express its “zero tolerance against racism and homophobia” and announce “immediate action” to identify and punish the perpetrators of the insults. The green and white team condemns “without palliatives” last Sunday’s behavior, “totally incompatible”, they express, with their own identity. And they announce an internal investigation to identify those responsible, to whom it will apply, it says, the “most severe” disciplinary measures allowed by its statute and current legislation. The team, as its president has already told EL PAÍS, will prohibit violators from accessing its facilities and all matches it plays “both home and away”. The body guarantees “anonymity” to those who report “behavior contrary to the values of the club” and asks its fans to “maintain a climate of respect”.
The president of Quintanar, Pedro Navarro, defended, in statements to CMMedia, “to stop this type of comments” but asked, obviously, “not to criminalize” the club and its fans for the behavior of “one or maybe two or three people”. The Minister of Equality of Castilla-La Mancha, Sara Simón, urged on Tuesday to corner those who “are determined to walk on the other side” and linked these incidents “to the hate speeches that are promoted through some political parties, in interviews and even on the benches of Parliament”. “I ask society to isolate people who think this way, to isolate them, to understand that it is not acceptable and, therefore, that there are more of us who ask for a fully egalitarian society and a society in which we can be proud of our diversity,” Simón shouted to questions from the media.
