A number of years ago, a Republican senator called George Allen referred to an Indian American man as "macaca" in public. Which was correctly interpreted as a rather racist remark, and Allen got into trouble for it, but most people's reaction was like "uh, what does that mean?" - and Allen claimed he hadn't known what it meant when he used it. In my country, there wouldn't have been any hesitation or claims of ignorance as to what it meant, because racists on the far right have used that word (a macaca is a kind of monkey) to refer to the Arabic and Turkish minorities here in the past (now the politicians have moderated their language, but I'm sure some of their supporters still use the word).

Just goes to show that, as Larry says, there are racial tensions of a different nature, and that a word or concept that's really offensive in one country can be much less so in another one. Since Europe's racial minorities are primarily Middle Eastern, they are the ones that most racial tensions are about. Black and Asian people are much less numerous on the whole - although individual countries like France, the UK and indeed the Netherlands have sizeable black populations - and so things are much less delicate there. Although you're right that soccer players of African origin used to encounter racist remarks a lot - there have been some ugly sides to soccer matches in the past, they're trying to put an end to the violence and the racism but they aren't entirely there yet.