“Night of shame stuns England,” read the headline in London’s Daily Telegraph. It was November 18, 2004. The previous evening, at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium, England’s national soccer team had lost a friendly to Spain, 1-0. But the “shame” had precious little to do with what transpired on the pitch. It stemmed chiefly from Spanish fans’ showering of racial abuse on several of England’s black players.

Ashley Cole felt “a blast of bigotry from one corner of the Bernabeu” when he received a yellow card for a dicey tackle, reported Telegraph correspondent Henry Winter. “The racism intensified from then on, disgracefully so, deafeningly so.” Specifically, Spanish fans serenaded the black Englishmen with monkey chants. Nor was it simply a tiny rabble of Spanish hooligans doing the grunting. As the BBC’s Katya Adler noted, citing a center-left Spanish press account, “the racist chanting came as much from groups of well-heeled young Spanish men in the crowd as from the well-known football thugs labeled the ‘Ultras.'”