With hindsight, Bernardo Silva would have been well advised to refrain from posting in public an image which compared his friend and team-mate Benjamin Mendy to a character called a “Conguito”, which we all know by now features in advertisements and on wrappers of a Spanish chocolate treat.
Whether Mendy found the image offensive or not – and for the record he didn’t – is irrelevant.
Had someone who knew Mendy less well, or even thought badly of him, posted that image on Twitter then it would have quite rightly been condemned as racist.
Just because Bernardo and Mendy know and like each other doesn’t alter the offence of the image. Whatever is shared in private is nobody else’s business but once it goes public that’s a different story.
And in a sense Bernardo has opened a Pandora’s Box with his tweet. How long will it be until the troll accounts are using the Conguito alongside other black athletes? He could well have inadvertently emboldened others to co-opt the image; he has emboldened its usage.
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Matters were not helped initially by Bernardo’s “joke between friends” defence. They were made altogether worse by Pep Guardiola.
In two separate press conferences he not only defended Bernardo’s right to compare Mendy and the Conguito character but even went so far as to say the depictions were similar.
That, no matter what way you slice it, is utter bone-headedness. Here was an opportunity for Guardiola to say that yes, Bernardo and Mendy were friends but no, he should not have put that image forward for public consumption.
Instead he allowed the affair to fester and grow worse.
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Anyone, Guardiola included, who grew up in Spain during the 1960s, 70s and 80s would have been well aware of Conguitos and how they were advertised. Maybe it was a case that back then no one took offence or thought to question whether these depictions of Congolese children were racist.
The Conguitos character could be said to draw certain parallels with an ice cream we had available to us in Ireland called a Golly Bar, first sold in 1957.
On the wrapper was an image of the 'Golliwog', that 19th century racist caricature, now widely and rightly condemned.
The Golly Bar was available with the Golliwog on its wrapper until 1992, by which time the character was removed. The name of the bar was eventually changed to the Giant Bar.
The company, HB, phased out the use of the minstrel. Maybe it caused little concern back in 1957 but by 1992 times had changed sufficiently for the powers that be to make a decision to cull it.
Attitudes and characterisations that were commonplace decades ago are no longer acceptable.
The explanation that Spain is somehow unaware as a society that these images are a no-go is counteracted by the Irish example.
If Ireland, in 1992, could figure out that a blackface minstrel was not the most appropriate symbol to use to sell ice creams then surely Spain could by now deduce similar about Conguitos?
The day that the controversy blew up, Google searches in the UK for Conguitos were running more than twice as high than they were for Bernardo Silva’s own name. And that weekend he scored a hat-trick.
He singlehandedly took brand recognition from zero to 100 in a matter of one tweet. Had the company behind Conguitos paid for publicity they could not have done a better job.
A line should have been drawn under it, with pledges made for education and awareness, but to act like there was nothing wrong in the first place was sheer stupidity.
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It’s not the first time City have been in the firing line of late. Story follows story, inquiry follows inquiry and it can feel sometimes that there is a bunker mentality threaded through the club from the management down to the fans.
There are legitimate questions regarding City and their financing by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. That link has brought with it scrutiny on the gulf state’s human rights situation and City’s responsibility to talk about it.
Reporting around various probes by UEFA, FIFA, the FA and the Premier League into City are genuine but nonetheless have left fans of the club distrustful and downright suspicious of the motives of the media at large.
Their pre-season trip to China, meanwhile, was a disaster from a PR perspective.
The Conguitos affair, like the others, will leave some City fans with a sense of grievance; that they are being picked on yet again.
It could not have happened at a worse time for the club. But any person who feels this is part of a grand witch-hunt would do well to step back and consider the case on its merits.
It doesn’t matter that Sergio Aguero was nicknamed ‘Kun’ in honour of a Japanese cartoon character, it doesn’t matter that Kevin De Bruyne has been compared to the Milky Bar Kid. Those cases aren’t racist, the Conguitos one is.
Bernardo, justifiably, is facing an FA charge. One would hope that he can finally see the error of his ways and that City fans can too, without tying it all in with some grand conspiracy that the world at large hates them.
And most pertinently one would hope also that Guardiola will finally quit doubling down on his player’s right to feed into racist tropes.