Yaya Toure has called for tougher sanctions to punish countries with racist fans saying abuse can "break" players - but refused to discuss his future at Manchester City.

City midfielder Toure, who suffered racist abuse while playing against CSKA Moscow in the Champions League, was speaking at the launch of FIFA's new system of match observers to monitor incidents of racism and discrimination at World Cup qualifiers in the build-up to the 2018 tournament in Russia.

Toure said: "I have been in the situation where there have been monkey chants and it's difficult to deal with that. As sportsmen you want to continue to the end but when you hear something like that it hurts you and breaks you.

"You need to give them a radical sanction - paying a 20,000 [pound] fine is not enough, you need to do more."

The Ivory Coast international's agent has claimed the midfielder is "90 per cent likely" to be leaving Manchester City this summer but Toure would not clarify his position.

He added at the launch at Wembley Stadium: "I think today my coming here shows there are more important things to talk about and the discrimination case is more important than myself and my future."

The new system will see that high-risk matches will be identified for all the 900-plus qualifiers for 2018 and observers sent to their games. All 64 games at the finals in Russia will also be monitored. The observers will be trained to spot incidents of discrimination and report them to FIFA, which can then impose disciplinary sanctions on the countries involved.

Host country Russia has said it will tackle racism in its football - some 200 racist incidents were committed by Russian fans between 2012 and 2014 according to a recent report by the Sova Center, a Moscow-based racism-monitoring group.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter has said "a lot of work needs to be done" to combat the incidents.

The system is being overseen by European anti-discrimination body FARE whose executive director Piara Powar said Russia needed urgently to improve its record with even the country's sports minister Vitaly Mutko having had "an ambiguous position" on racism in football.

Powar said: "If there is evidence of discrimination this will be passed to FIFA and there will be associations who will be banned or play behind closed doors.

"There will be some pain as a result of this process but without that pain people will not really understand how they should be tackling these issues."

Howard Webb, the former World Cup final referee who is now in charge of Premier League officials, also sits on the task force and said referees would benefit from having the observers - and that in the future there could be direct contact between observers and match officials.

Under current rules, referees can ask for an announcement to be made asking for racist abuse to be stopped, then take players off the pitch and even abandon the match.

Webb said: "The introduction of the observers should help - if you are a match official on the field it may be difficult to appreciate what's happening in the stands and the bigger picture, you are concentrating on your role. Having observers takes some of the burden away.

"In the future that may evolve so that you have contact between the person in the stands and the officials."