Chelsea FC to send racist fans on Auschwitz trips

Chelsea FC has said that it wants to send racist supporters on trips to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland instead of imposing ban orders, a media report said on Thursday.

The club's owner, Roman Abramovich, who is Jewish, is at the forefront of the initiative, designed to tackle anti-semitism among fans, the Guardian reported.

It wants to offer supporters caught being racist the chance to attend education courses at the second world war concentration camp in Poland instead of being banned from attending matches at the Premier League club.

"If you just ban people, you will never change their behaviour," Chelsea Chairman Bruce Buck told the Sun tabloid.

"This policy gives them the chance to realise what they have done, to make them want to behave better.

"In the past we would take them from the crowd and ban them, for up to three years. Now we say: 'You did something wrong. You have the option. We can ban you or you can spend some time with our diversity officers, understanding what you did wrong'."

Chelsea publicly criticised a number of their own fans for anti-semitic chanting against rivals Tottenham in September 2017.

On Wednesday, the football club previewed a new film at Britain's Houses of Parliament aimed at raising awareness of the consequences of anti-semitism, interspersing images of offensive chants and social media posts alongside images from the Holocaust.

--IANS

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