Colonialism and Sports – Racist stereotypes continue to abound in football

It is a matter of time before the next outrage. Racial hostilities occur again and again in football: hate chants from fan groups, the throwing of bananas, monkey noises. The media often reports on “scandals” in such cases. Sports officials complain about “social problems” that football has to “pay for.” As if we were dealing with a loose series of individual cases.

“We should look more closely at structures,” says sports sociologist Tina Nobis, who researches at the University of Wuppertal. “We sometimes no longer even notice that stereotypes have become deeply embedded in our thinking.”

At her previous place of work, at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research (BIM), Tina Nobis and her colleagues looked at the consequences for German football. In 2022 they published research results about “stacking”. This approach looks for evidence of biased team composition. Some of the results for the first and second Bundesliga: White players were disproportionately represented in the playing positions in central and defensive midfield, i.e. in positions that are associated with leadership qualities, game intelligence and foresight. Black players were disproportionately represented in the attack and on the intensive wing lanes. They are positions that are more associated with strength, endurance and temperament.

Black body, white mind? Football seems to reinforce prejudices that have persisted since colonial times. “We would never claim that coach X or manager Y are racist,” says Nobis. “But racist attributions and unconscious stereotypes apparently play a role in determining which players are trained for certain positions at the youth level.”

At best, the media should educate people about stereotypes, but they have long contributed to their spread. “In sports journalism, we are dealing with a homogeneous male-white culture that is perhaps even more one-sided than in other journalistic genres,” says sports journalist Philipp Awounou, who produced a much-discussed documentary for ARD before the European Championships in the summer. “This culture encourages the reproduction of hidden racist images.”

A study from the 2019/20 football season confirms this assumption. Researchers from Denmark and Great Britain analyzed the TV comments from 80 games in England, Spain, Italy and France. Some findings: When commentators talked about intelligence and work ethic, more than 60 percent of their praise was directed at “players with lighter skin.” When it came to strength, they were 6.59 times more likely to talk about a “player with darker skin,” and when it came to speed, they were 3.38 times more likely. With this bias, commentators promote the prejudice that black footballers are “naturally athletic or endowed with God-given athleticism,” the study says.

Further studies that deal with media, sponsorship and merchandising will be necessary to shed light on structural racism in football. The British scientists Paul Ian Campbell and Marcus Maloney have studied Electronic Arts’ Fifa video game series. Since the game’s first edition in 1993, programmers have tried to bring the appearance and abilities of real players to their digital versions.

Paul Campbell from the University of Leicester and Marcus Maloney from Coventry University analyzed the data collection for the 2020 game. Each footballer was graded in 29 competency areas, for example throw-ins, jumping ability and strength. These grades were added together to produce a score from one to 99. Campbell and Maloney looked at the top 100 players. It turned out that black players usually achieved a higher average score in “physical skills” than white players. This applied, among other things, to sprint speed (79.15 to 71.63 points), jumping power (78.19 to 71.24) and “aggressiveness” (74.04 to 71.5).

In contrast, white digital gamers achieved higher average scores for technical and cognitive skills. For example, when it came to “crossing a ball” (72.29 to 71.35 points) or playing a pass precisely (74.53 to 71.04). “Our results reveal subtle ways in which stereotypes are reinforced,” write Paul Campbell and Marcus Maloney about their study on the website The Conversation. “There is a danger that children will actually be taught that black and white athletes are meaningfully different – through the seemingly innocent and banal act of playing.”

Stereotypes like these are less obvious than monkey noises in the stadium and are harder to scandalize. Associations and clubs also like to claim that they are taking offensive action against racism, for example with campaigns for “respect”, “diversity” and “diversity”. They also point to the national teams from Germany, France and England, in which players with an immigration background are increasingly among the leaders. But: “I have the feeling that the discussion is only scratching the surface,” says long-time professional player Pablo Thiam. “If professional football were serious, it would bring more non-white people into leadership positions.”

The football industry distributes its power across several hundred board members, managing directors or supervisory boards. The number of black people in this county can be counted on two hands. In England, only nine non-white referees made it into the top flight in almost 150 years. And in the rest of Europe there are fewer than ten black coaches active in the top leagues. Vincent Kompany at FC Bayern is the first black head coach at a top German club.

Pablo Thiam, born in Guinea, headed youth development at VfL Wolfsburg and Hertha BSC in Berlin after his playing career. He does not want to assume that the decision-makers in football are deliberately excluding people with a migrant background. But: »At coaching seminars or training courses, I was almost always the only black representative in the room. For me it was normal, I could deal with it. But others might feel watched and controlled.”

Even if one or two black people were promoted to a board or an arbitration tribunal with the help of a quota, that does not mean that they would be able to develop there and contribute their talents. This increases the likelihood that they will quickly leave their post in disillusionment. Thiam believes that a culture of participation should be created in popular sports as early as possible.

Maybe German sport could also learn from American football in the USA. National Football League (NFL) clubs must also invite non-white candidates in the selection process for new coaches. We are talking about “affirmative action,” about preferential treatment for marginalized minorities. Since the rule was implemented, the number of black coaches in the NFL has increased.

But in German sport, people rely on voluntariness and hope for a “natural development” towards more diversity; after all, football is a “reflection of society”. The so-called Mitte study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on misanthropic attitudes from 2023 suggests a different impression: “Black people are particularly talented in sports” – 39.2 percent of those surveyed without a connection to sports agreed with this statement. Among respondents who belong to a football club, agreement was ten percent higher.

Ronny Blaschke recently published his sixth book: “The Playing Field of the Master Men – Colonialism and Racism in Football” (Die Workshop publishing house). The German Academy for Football Culture in Nuremberg honored the work as “Football Book of the Year”.