To stay or go? To walk off and suffer the public consequences? Or to play on and suffer the private consequences?

When it comes to racist abuse in football, and the question of how those on the receiving end are supposed to respond to an act that would stop any other pastime in its tracks, one thing seems clear. A point of crisis is arriving.

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Quite soon someone out there in the professional game is going to walk off a pitch in protest. We have heard enough from current players at various levels to know it could be coming. When it does, exactly how the sport and those around it react will be a defining test of fine talk, T-shirt slogans and all the rest.

It isn’t clear whether the recent rise in reports of racism at football is just a refocusing of attention on this issue. Certainly, plenty of those affected feel not much has altered, that this stain on football, society and humanity generally never really went away.

One thing has changed, though. There are footballers in the current generation who feel differently to those who went before, and who take a decidedly more militant view than the sympathetic liberal majority. It is still a commonplace belief that the best response in the face of abuse is to play brilliantly and show no fear, a variation on the George Herbert line that living well is the best revenge. You hear it still. Cyrille Regis was magnificent: he showed them all in the best possible way.

This is the problem with more passive forms of resistance: the real power doesn’t seem to be listening

But why should anyone have to be magnificent these days, or be strong, or show character in the face of criminal abuse? Those early black British players had little choice. Grace under pressure and extreme mental strength were the only real options. In the meantime racism hasn’t gone away or been vanquished, for all the sloganeering, the public support, the statements expressing how bad assorted men in blazers feel whenever incidents are publicly highlighted.

This is the problem with more passive forms of resistance: the real power doesn’t seem to be listening. Kick It Out, with its 17 employees, its wretchedly thin sliver of resources from the big cake, should not be the only agent for change. Hearing Uefa, Fifa and the English FA condemn racism in all its forms is not the same as seeing any of those bodies taking actual, swingeing, strict liability preventative steps.

So we get closer to the point where someone, perhaps a team, perhaps one or two players, are going to walk off. It will be a kind of tipping point. This week the story of Padiham FC has made waves, a non-league team fined by an FA-convened panel for doing exactly this when their goalkeeper was racially abused.

The idea that the guardians of the national game should punish members of the public for refusing to endure intolerable working conditions is, of course, laughable. In practical terms a change to FA rules is required, an exception put in place to cover such provocation. Nobody should ever again be fined for leaving a pitch where they have been racially abused.

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The FA may fear a spate of walk-offs, copycats, games abandoned in confusing circumstances. It should be far more worried by the fact racists feel they can express themselves with impunity within its premises.

Football at the level of the Lancashire and Cheshire FAs should set an example to the rest of society on these issues. The professional game, meanwhile, has shown itself to be an entirely commercial concern, to be uninterested in anything beyond the bottom line. Faced with this it hardly surprising some players may feel direct action is the only real solution to this problem, that something will only be done when the product is disrupted. If and when that time comes anyone with a genuine interest in football’s welfare will support them.

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