Patrice Evra said Vinícius Júnior has to keep insisting on racism allegations and called the Real Madrid forward the target after a reported insult by Gianluca Prestianni in a Champions League match against Benfica.
“It’s sad. Vinícius has to keep insisting on the issue. He is the target, that is what he will feel,” Evra said, arguing that the Brazilian will keep facing the same pattern unless he keeps pressing the point.
Evra drew a direct line between the pressure around Vinícius and the treatment he said he endured in his own career, as well as the case involving Luis Suárez. He said that when these episodes happen, the sense of injustice is sharp because the accused people turn themselves into victims. In his view, the reaction often shifts away from the abuse and toward the victim’s behavior.
He said people complain more about Vinícius’s attitude, asking why he is dancing or provoking after goals, and that this gives others an excuse to insult him simply because he celebrates that way. Mourinho also pointed to the provocative way Vinícius celebrated the goal, adding another layer to the debate around the winger’s on-field behavior.
The former Manchester United and Juventus defender spoke from personal experience. In 2011, Evra said Suárez used racist words against him at Anfield, and he said he felt proud that he did not react, even though the urge to strike back was there. “It was hard,” he said, describing the internal battle between doing nothing and lashing out. He said he later won his case against Suárez.
Evra also said he shook Suárez’s hand when they met again in the 2021 Champions League final between Juventus and Barcelona, a moment that closed one of football’s most watched discrimination cases. He said he never tried to turn the dispute into a spectacle and that, when he defended his case, he made clear that he did not know Suárez well enough to call him racist. Suárez, he said, had used racist words in that moment.
The former France international’s authority in the argument comes from a career that brought him 5 Premier League titles and 1 Champions League with Manchester United, plus 2 Italian championships with Juventus, for a total of 12 trophies across England, Italy and France. Born in Dakar to a Senegalese father and a Cape Verdean mother, Evra moved to Brussels as a baby before later settling in the suburbs of Paris and growing up in Les Ulis, the same neighborhood as Thierry Henry. He was one of 24 siblings.
Evra is now working in sports commentary and entrepreneurship, and his latest remarks show how the Vinícius Júnior debate has become bigger than one incident. For him, the key is not whether the criticism gets louder, but whether the player keeps forcing the conversation back to the abuse itself.
