Despite the release of recorded comments in which he said he preferred to avoid Jews and homosexuals, the president of the Italian Soccer Federation, Carlo Tavecchio, insisted on Monday that he was neither anti-Semitic nor homophobic.
In the recording, made last year by a sports journalist and published on Sunday by Corriere della Sera, the Milan daily, Mr. Tavecchio can be heard discussing the sale of a building to a “lousy Jew.” Although he quickly added, “I have nothing against the Jews,” Mr. Tavecchio, a former economist and politician who now oversees Italy’s most popular sport, went on to say that “it is best to keep them at bay.