Soccer Scores One For Racial Tolerance

In a lifetime of rooting for KSK Beveren, Eddy De Saeghen has never seen anything like this year's team. "Just watch," he says, wrapping his yellow-and-blue supporter's scarf around his neck to keep out the wind on a cold, wet winter's night at Beveren's Freethiel Stadium. When Mohammed Diallo scores the game's only goal, a lightning strike on a pinpoint cross from Gnegneri Yaya Touré, and celebrates with six back flips, De Saeghen leaps up and joins the chants of di-al-lo, di-al-lo. "That's why we love our Africans," he exclaims. "They do things nobody else can."

Soccer fans in Europe have never won any awards for tolerance; hooligans are known to make monkey noises at black players and throw bananas onto the pitch. But from Glasgow to Moscow, supporters are learning to love their "Africans": over a thousand players have migrated to Europe in the past decade, and it's a rare top-flight club that doesn't have at least one black African player in its ranks. But no club has gone as far as Beveren, where 14 of the squad's 22 players — and sometimes the entire starting lineup — are from the Ivory Coast. It's all the more remarkable for the fact that this Antwerp suburb of 35,000 is a bastion of anti-immigration sentiment.

A cozy refuge for dock workers and port merchants escaping Antwerp's rich mix of ethnicities, Beveren boasts sprawling neighborhoods of two-story red-brick houses, public parks and a bustling shopping district. It's also very homogeneous. "Not many colored faces here," says Martin De Cleen, a retired telephone engineer who has lived here for over 50 years. "And people like it that way." In the 2003 national elections, the Vlaams Blok, which campaigns for immigrants to be stripped of their full civil rights, became the town's No. 1 party. But Beveren's xenophobes go all multicultural when they enter Freethiel Stadium. "People still don't like the Moroccans in Antwerp," De Cleen says, "but everybody loves our new football team."

	I'd like to think our play is changing attitudes — GILLES YAPI YAPO, Beveren captain

The Ivorians first arrived in 2001, after French soccer entrepreneur Jean-Marc Guillou and English giants Arsenal put up j1.5 million to save Beveren, then a last-place team, from bankruptcy. The deal allowed Guillou to import players from his highly regarded academy in Abidjan. Since then, the number of Ivorians has risen from five to 14. Like many supporters, De Saeghen, a construction worker, wasn't happy at first. "You always prefer good Belgian [i.e. white] players," he says. "We thought, 'Why should we pay to watch these Africans play?'" But now, De Saeghen, 51, prefers "the Africans" and their spectacular passes and tricky offensive play to the sturdy defensive football practiced by most Belgians.

The fancy footwork is delivering results on the field. The youngest team in the league, Beveren has in the past 10 months beaten big guns like Anderlecht, Genk and Cercle Bruges. The club is unlikely to challenge for the championship this year, but Guillou has grand ambitions. "We're grooming guys for the major European leagues," he says.

Off the field, the Ivorians don't always feel welcome. When team captain Gilles Yapi Yapo, 21, shops in Beveren, he says, store security guards trail him. "That's not pleasant," says the graceful midfielder. In the clubhouse before practice, six Ivorians watch Ja Rule on MTV at one end of the room while at the other, five white Bel-gians play cards. Despite the ethnic divide, team morale is good. During practice, black and white players mix and joke with each other.

Danny Aerts, the Beveren youth coach, says the Ivorians are a "temporary solution to stabilize the club's finances. In a few years, we hope to have only four or five black players." That suits the Ivorians just fine: most of them want to play for bigger clubs. "We're all in a shopping window," says Yapi Yapo. "If we get a good offer, we're gone." Meanwhile, he says, "I'd like to think our play is changing attitudes." Maybe it is. The new insult Beveren fans have for referees who whistle fouls against the home team: "Racist!"