To put another spin on this,would we even be having this conversation had the player been white and 3 black/Asian men were hurling abuse at him,wouldn't even make the news.
Quite a bizarre scenario you paint. A white footballer being abused by 3 non-white fans. I’m curious as to why you even think it’s necessary to construct this fictional account of player abuse unless it is to dilute the accusations of racism from these white fans towards Sterling.
Demographically I suspect the sheer weight of numbers in football grounds suggests that it’s very unlikely to happen that a group on BME supporters could cluster and behave in the way you sugges but if it did, I suspect it would be on the news agenda just like this incident.
There is a wider point leaving aside the racism (I’ve seen plenty of apologists claiming that this bloke is actually called sterling a “manc c*nt” not a “black” one).
Like Otis I just don’t get the desire to abuse humans who happen to move close to us. I’ve said before on here abt an incident during the final game of our Prem relegation season (home vs Bradford) Altho I didn’t know it I was sat next to Lee Carsley’s family. At the end of the game the players went for the least well thought out lap of honour in the history of bad ideas. Carsley stopped by to see his wife and collect his baby child. The abuse he got was frankly unbelievable. I know tempers were raging, the manager had lost the plot, the players had let us down etc etc but i had never seen anything like it.
Unbelievably, as Carsley stood with his wife to collect his son, one of the lads who had been booing (in fairness I didn’t hear him scream that he wished Carsley would die in a fire or of cancer as others had) asked him for his match shirt. Carsley looked astounded but after a quick roll of his eyeballs, he stripped off his shirt and gave to the bloke before making his way back down onto the pitch with his child. The bloke immediately put on the shirt and looked really pleased with himself only to resume the booing of the players on the pitch.
It was the first time in my life that I thought that being a professional football player might not always be the best job in the world.