It is not hard to see why Dick Advocaat ran into a little local difficulty during his time in Scotland as manager of Rangers. Not exactly Braveheart, is he? Advocaat is now the coach of Zenit St Petersburg, who are favourites to defeat his former employers in the Uefa Cup final in Manchester this evening, but it is the transfer policy of his club, not their football, that has attracted most attention in the build-up to the game.

Advocaat said in an interview conducted with Yuri Doud, an English-speaking journalist working for Pro Sport magazine in Russia, that he could not sign black players as coach of Zenit. The fans would not allow it, he claimed. In 83 years Zenit have never found use for a black player and Advocaat’s chosen path is not to confront this standard, but to work with it. “I don’t want to sign a player who won’t be accepted by the fans,” he told Doud, who has the interview on tape.

He need only look at his opponents this evening to spy the flaw in that argument. The Rangers team with which Advocaat won the treble in 1999 and retained the title a year later would have had a remarkably different complexion had former incumbents at Ibrox been as tremulous in confronting prejudice. When Graeme Souness arrived at the club in 1986, and inherited a 116-year tradition of not signing known Roman Catholics*, he demonstrated how to tackle bigotry: head on. It took him a while to find the right man, but in 1989 Souness signed the biggest, most high-profile Scottish Catholic footballer of all. Maurice Johnston, a Celtic hero, had been sent off in the League Cup final against Rangers in 1986 and crossed himself as he left the pitch. A month before signing for Rangers, he flew in from France to attend the Scottish Cup final as a Celtic supporter.

Rangers had signed Catholics before, but nobody like Johnston. It was a deliberately challenging measure that, ten years later, Souness explained. “My children were Catholic and my wife was Catholic,” he said. “My supporters were singing songs about killing Catholics and the opposition sang about killing Protestants. They were glorifying murderers. That never sat comfortably. In my first week at Ibrox I was asked if I would sign a Catholic and I said yes. Did people expect me to come to work and be a bigot and become a normal person with my children at home? I said if a good Catholic came along, one I thought was right for this club, then I would do it.”

It went deeper than that, though. Souness knew that Rangers could not compete if they had a restrictive transfer policy and was determined to smash the sectarian influence. Terry Butcher, his first significant signing, from Ipswich Town for £750,000, said Souness was privately hoping that he had been raised a Catholic when the transfer negotiations took place. “He was desperate for me to be a Catholic,” Butcher wrote in his autobiography. “Graeme was particularly anxious to break the mould. He had played in Italy and with Liverpool and knew the only way to be successful was to encompass everyone.”

According to Advocaat, Zenit encompass no one, unless white. “The fans are the most important thing that Zenit have and that is why I have to ask them outright how they will react if we sign a dark-skinned player,” he said, in the conversation with Pro Sport. “The only players who can make Zenit stronger are dark skinned. Look at the Brazilians who play for CSKA Moscow. For us, it would be impossible. I would be happy to sign anyone, but the fans don’t like black players. I do not understand how they could pay so much attention to skin colour. For me, there is no difference; but they care.”

There are two ways of considering this. It could be argued that Advocaat, who has worked with black players throughout his career, is attempting an ill-judged kindness by not exposing an alien individual to sustained hostility. It would be hard enough for many black players to adapt to life in Russia, anyway, without giving a new arrival this extra load and it is significant that CSKA provided their black Brazilians with an in-built support system by signing them in such great numbers, and never leaving a man alone. Vágner Love and Daniel Carvalho arrived together on July 1, 2004, to be joined by Dudu (2005), Jo (2006), Ramón and Ricardo Jesus (2007).

Advocaat could break Zenit’s taboo this way, but his team are not in need of drastic surgery, as victory in the 2007 Russian championship and this season’s progress in Europe indicate. After a slow start, Zenit have demolished Bayern Munich, the German champions, and Bayer Leverkusen in the knockout stages, and eliminated Marseilles and Villarreal, second in Spain, on away goals. They are near the bottom of the Russian league but this is largely because of European fixture commitments and, by winning games in hand, Zenit could go third. So Advocaat is not a manager who is looking to Africa or South America for multiple signings, not least because the nucleus of his team is young and Russian and he will not wish to see it disrupted. Advocaat is talking of one or two players, as a finishing touch, and may fear their isolation, although he does not suggest this in the interview.

More worrying, then, is the thought that Advocaat is not bold enough to confront his problem in the way Souness did at Rangers. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” Edmund Burke wrote, and Advocaat could be accused of not only inertia, but tacit, albeit inadvertent, disregard for the racism in his midst. With the movement of labour and the rise of football on the African continent, and of black players in Europe and South America, it is not only surprising but unnatural that a club should never have had a black player on their books. Zenit display anti-racist banners at home matches, have condemned racial abuse at their ground, and claim that Advocaat’s comments in the magazine were mistranslated — an unconvincing explanation, but one swallowed whole by Uefa — yet it is as if the multiracial evolution of football in Europe in the modern era has been airbrushed from the picture at Russia’s wealthiest club.

This can happen in other fields, too. Last year, at No 4 in the British pop charts, was what is termed a mash-up track from Italy called Destination Calabria. It was a reworking of two pieces of music, the wonderful Calabria by Rune Reilly Kolsch, a Danish producer, and Destination Unknown by Alex Gaudino, an Italian DJ, with vocals by Crystal Waters, a 43-year-old singer from Washington DC, mostly popular in dance music circles. Destination Calabria took Rune’s tune — most particularly, an infectious saxophone break — and Waters’s vocal and created one of the most memorable sounds of the summer.

In this, it was helped by a male fantasy video, featuring eight strikingly pretty women underdressed as a marching band in short green tunics, the length of a crop top, and shorter black miniskirts that, at the back, exposed a green G-string and quite a lot else. The backdrop was white and so were they; the skirts aside, the only thing black about the song was the voice, but that didn’t matter because a white girl mimed the words anyway. On video at least, Waters was airbrushed from her own recording, because teenage white fluff sells more units than a well-groomed, handsome, fortysomething black woman, with a soul voice handed down from her Aunt Ethel. At one stage, using computer trickery, the eight-girl band expanded to form a legion of hundreds, all marching, all playing, all white. In the circumstances, it is appropriate. And while Destination Calabria may help to pay the rent, it will not have given the career of Crystal Waters the lift it should. Google her name and the first entry that comes up is a carp fishery in north Burgundy.

So, just as not one of the white guys involved in the production of the video appears to have fought hard enough against the market to get the black woman her due, so those in positions of power at Zenit do not feel sufficiently guilty about what they see on the pitch to stand against the right-wing boneheads in their crowd and act on it. Advocaat, for instance, may care to wonder how successful his time in Glasgow would have been without Lorenzo Amoruso, Sergio Porrini and Rino Gattuso. Indeed, he may care to wonder who tonight’s opponents would have been without a manager that stood tall against the bigots; because it would certainly not have been Rangers.

* And, yes, I know there is a short list of Catholic players that turned out for Rangers in that time, but I would counter that if, in more than a century of football, you can name the specific individuals who were Catholic and playing for the club, that is pretty damning evidence of intolerance. It is, as Chris Rock, the comedian, pointed out, like knowing the number of black people who have been guests in your house (as in “how can I be racist when I’ve had three black people over to dinner?”).