Poor old Vincenzo Nibali. He dominates the cobbles, attacks in the mountains, and becomes the first Italian to win the Tour de France in 16 years; and even then he isn’t the week’s biggest sports story in Italy. That prize, rather less gloriously, goes to a 71-year-old football executive whose unsmiling face has now replaced Nibali’s yellow jersey on the front pages.

Balding, besuited and bespectacled, Carlo Tavecchio, one of two men vying to become the president of the Italian football federation (FIGC), has not won anything, let alone performed an incredible feat of physical prowess.

He has merely managed – in the space of a few seconds; a few astonishingly ill-judged words – to ignite the latest racism scandal in Italian football, and to become, according to his critics, the walking, talking example of how great the need for change is in the sport’s governing class.

“England,” explained Tavecchio, head of Italy’s amateur leagues (LND), at their summer assembly on Friday, “identifies the players coming in and, if they are professional, they are allowed to play. Here, on the other hand, let’s say there’s [fictional player] Opti Poba, who has come here, who previously was eating bananas and now is a first-team player for Lazio … In England he has to demonstrate his CV and his pedigree.”

If Tavecchio had a point to make about foreign players in the Italian leagues, it was largely lost in the ensuing polemica. Even in a country unhappily used to hearing racist chants on its terraces, the statement – coming from him – was shocking.

Fans reacted with outrage; on Twitter, the #NoTavecchio hashtag started to fly. Several petitions were launched on Change.org. The indignation spread beyond Italy, with Fifa asking the FIGC to investigate. The European commission weighed in, too, noting football’s “particular responsibilities in the fight against racism”.

A petition started by centre-left MP Khalid Chaouki read: “After such effort to isolate these phenomena [racist words and acts], we cannot accept that Mr Carlo Tavecchio will represent Italian football and we believe that the best way to say sorry for this disgraceful phrase, which offends millions of Italians and [Italians of foreign origin], is for him to withdraw his candidacy for the presidency of the FIGC.”

A strong advocate for immigrants in Italy, Moroccan-born Chaouki told the Guardian that despite attempts to clamp down on racism in football in recent years, “unfortunately, among the football leadership, there is still a part that is conservative, closed, and obviously did not share in the action of recent years”. What Tavecchio said was not “just a joke but unfortunately reflects a widely-held feeling among this group of bosses”, said Chaouki, 31.

And what of the man himself? Has he begged for forgiveness and been forced to stand aside? Not exactly. “I made an unfortunate remark; I was wrong. I am sorry and I have apologised,” he said on Monday night. “But I can say, with arrogance, that few have done what I have done for the third world.” Tavecchio, whose candidacy received the backing of 18 of 20 Serie A clubs last week, still has the support of most of them.

“Faithful to its ethical and civic values”, Fiorentina dropped him; Sampdoria and Cesena have expressed concerns. But Adriano Galliani, CEO of Milan, made clear his club’s support was going nowhere. “What Tavecchio said was an unfortunate joke, but now he’s being portrayed as a racist. But it stops there. Milan’s position is not changing.”

Franco Carraro, a senator in Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party and a three-time former FIGC president himself, reportedly warned: “I would be careful about accusing Tavecchio of racism. There has been no act in his life that has suggested that, quite the opposite.”

With friends like those, the veteran insider has little to worry about. “I’m going ahead with my candidacy to the presidency of the FIGC,” he told Ansa on Monday.

Damiano Tommasi, president of the Italian Footballers’ Association (AIC), backs Tavecchio’s rival, 42-year-old Demetrio Albertini, for the job. “I am disconcerted by Carlo Tavecchio’s comments on Opti Poba and bananas,” remarked Tommasi. “But I don’t know if I ought to be even more dumbfounded by the silence surrounding them.”

The election of a new FIGC chief is happening because, on 24 June, in the bitter aftermath of World Cup humiliation, Giancarlo Abete, the former president, resigned alongside the manager, Cesare Prandelli. A day later came the news that Ciro Esposito, a Napoli fan shot during clashes with Roma ultras before the Coppa Italia final in May, had died. Both events contributed to a sense of disaster hanging over Italian football. The pink pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport named it the sport’s “year zero”.

Precisely because of this moment of crisis, however, there were calls for it to be seized as an opportunity; for, as the sporting daily put it, “a cleaning up of the old powers and a pursuit of deep reforms”. But, especially since Friday, Tavecchio is viewed by many as absolutely the wrong man for that job. Commentator Aldo Grasso denounced him as “the ideal candidate to change nothing”. La Gazzetta said the only surprising thing about his racist comments was “the peremptory speed with which the ancien regime has managed to sink itself”.

For Chaouki, whose parliamentary mailbag speaks volumes about Italy’s wider struggles with integration and lingering prejudice, the Tavecchio storm has exposed the “hidden racism which emerges now and again” in society as a whole. The corridors of power he walks are no protection: in fact, one of the most grievous examples of racism in recent years came courtesy of Roberto Calderoli, a Northern League politician, who suggested last summer that then-integration minister, Cécile Kyenge, had “the features of an orangutan”. Calderoli is a vice-president of the Senate. He is still in his job.

The one cheering aspect of the Tavecchio affair, said Chaouki, has been the indignation it has caused on social media and among ordinary fans. Not for the first time in Italy, many people have shown they are far more progressive than the people meant to represent them. “We have sent this petition to [Michel] Platini, to Uefa, to Fifa, because we don’t want it to seem to Europe and the rest of the world that Italy is resigned to these racist comments which come out every so often,” said Chaouki. “We are trusting in the attention given to this popular campaign which is building in Italy. We cannot give the message that racism is tolerated in this country.”