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Jerome Boateng was 11 years old when he discovered what racism in football sounds like. Barely out of primary school, he travelled to a game in the east of his native Berlin, where a watching father decided to pick on the fact that he was black.

‘Another kid’s dad called me... you know (the word).’ What he means is the ‘N’ word and he has a natural reluctance to speak it out loud. ‘I didn’t know how to take it. The whole game he was speaking to me and I started crying because I was small, 11 or 12 years old.