Players play in front of 20,000 to 70,000 strangers. A significant number of them with hostile sentiment toward them, a lot of them drunk, a lot of them fellows with no good manners or much regard for the feelings of strangers whatsoever as you'd find out if you ever came across them on a dark street at 11 pm.
This has been understood by footballers for 60-70 years. A player who's been in the papers for cheating on his wife, for being a drunkard, for balding early or what else will hear about it in a stadium in the rudest possible fashion. What do they do? They don't pay attention. They blur it out. It'd be a fool's errand to do anything else. Of course, you can pull a Cantona. That'd be fair enough, but you're not gonna be able to do that *every time* it happens.
A football crowd is a free for all, it's the anonymity of a crowd allowing the barbaric essential nature of man to come out. Something that isn't as well-concealed with those rough guys as it is with introvert college kids who do their boasting and trash talking only on the internet. That's the football we grew up with, that's the football crowd that is a fascinating, electrifying monster. Everything comes with light and shadow, and you can't have one without the other.
I'd take a crowd with a few idiots yelling racist abuse that still maintains the essential freedom to be an anti-authoritarian community outside of a PR-friendly framework set by advertisers and officials over a 'clean' crowd of people hoping they get to be on the kiss cam and who clap when the big scoreboard tells them to clap.