Acerbi Exhales and Fights Back After Favorable Ruling

Francesco Acerbi has broken his silence about the ongoing controversy a couple of days after being acquitted. He spoke to Corriere della Sera.

“I’m sad and disappointed. Everybody lost in this matter. I’ve seen people react like I was released after ten years in prison. Those days were very heavy. I believed in the sports justice and didn’t want to fuel the brouhaha, which was already huge. I have nothing against Juan Jesus, on the contrary. However, you can’t call somebody racist for a misunderstanding in the heat of the competition. And you can’t continue to do that after I was cleared.”

Acerbi had a weight taken off his shoulder thanks to the sentence.

“It was a liberation, but I’m still down in the dumps for the whole situation, which had been sorted on the pitch, and for how many rambled about it without knowing anything. They persecuted me as if I had killed somebody.”

Acerbi further defended himself.

“This does not concern the fight against racism, which didn’t happen. I’m not racist: George Weah was my idol. He called me out of the blue when I was diagnosed with cancer, which makes me emotional to this day. They are just humiliating and piling on a person and threatening his family for what?”

“Racism is a serious thing, not an alleged insult. The pitch shouldn’t be a free port, but you hear all sorts of things. Everything always ends there, or there’d be sanctions for the insults against the Serbian, the Italian, and mothers all the time.”