Racism in football

Eighteen months, an interrupted season, social media, politics and in the middle of it all, a love of football and a demon that plagues it

By Kieren Williams

A million acts of spite

At ten minutes to 11 GMT, on 11th July 2021, Italian giant Gianluigi Donnarumma saved Bukayo’s Saka penalty and won Italy the delayed Euro 2020 championship. 

What followed was three of the world’s most talented young footballers, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Saka, being inundated with racist abuse online.

Ian Wright, on his own football podcast, discusses the issue of racism with The Athletic's Carl Anka and Ringer FC's Ryan Hunn. Listen from 12:00.

Seth Ejukwu, works in the campaign teams at Show Racism the Red Card, one of the leading organisations tackling racism in football.

He said: “The first thing I said when I saw Rashford walking forward was ‘my god he can’t miss’. 

“And it wasn’t about England not losing. We’ve seen situations where players have a bad game, have a bad day, and the team lost and people go online to racially abuse them. 

“And now we’re talking about the Euro finals, and a black man holding the ball. I have texts messages from friends who were like Seth, Show Racism the Red Card will have work to do now.”

He added: “It’s like it’s constantly reminding us of our place. Like people are saying you should know your place. 

“So if they score the goal and we win they’re English, but now they miss they’re all black boys. It constantly reminds you that whatever you do, this is your place.”

Peter Pieh, one of a number of football fans SWLondoner spoke to, has been a fan of the game for almost 20 years.

Alongside watching football both in the UK and US where he lives, he runs an American football podcast, Across the Pond. He echoed Seth’s sentiment almost word for word.

He said: “Once I saw Sancho, Bukayo and Rashford miss those penalties, immediately I knew what was going to happen. Stuff like that makes it really unnerving, it’s always intertwined. You’re English if you’re score and black if you miss.” 

Football and racism has conditioned black people to the point that there is an automatic survival response.

Footballers getting racially abused has become an increasingly common occurrence over the last few seasons, but especially online, and it culminated in one summer, in one tournament, until it felt like the country finally sat up and took notice.

An interrupted season

On March 23rd, 2020, Boris Johnson announced the nation would lockdown. Football, along with everything else, came grinding to a halt.

“A perfect storm,” is how Professor Daniel Kilvington, a senior lecturer and course director specialising in race, sport and new media at Leeds Beckett University, described the last season and a half of football, or 18 months for people not avidly following the Premier League.

It wasn’t just the increased pressures of the pandemic, and being stuck at home and with less human contact, peoples' phones were a portal to the world they’d lost.

He said: “When we're watching primary events, television is our main screen, but we will be WhatsApp-ing friends or we will be scrolling on Twitter, we will be reacting to get involved in that broader conversation with our phone in our hands when we're watching the action unfold. It’s a second screen.”

It’s during these moments people would lash out online, sending racist hatred in the moments, minutes, hours and sometimes days, after.

Racist abuse online, as opposed to the stadium, isn't something that just appeared in the last 18 months.

Over the last few decades, racist incidents in stadiums have generally decreased, but not disappeared, while online abuse has risen.

This can be explained through a model Professor Kilvington described as “front stage” and “back stage”.

On the front stage we are visible, we cannot hide and our actions are observable by all.

On the back stage we are hidden, anonymous and invisible and can act without being seen.

The former is in football stadiums, where people can be identified, banned, fined and even arrested if caught being racist.

The latter is online, where people can hide behind fake names and monkey emojis, and people felt freer to send abuse in the heat of the moment.

Over recent years and seasons, this was happening more and more.

Then, on the 25th May, as Dominic Cummings told the world he drove to Barnard Castle to test his eyes, George Floyd was murdered.

Almost every fan who spoke to SWLondoner brought up the Black Lives Matter movement unprompted, some more positively than others.

The same pandemic-related-factors which created ripe conditions for racial abuse online, also create fertile soil for such a social movement. 

It was difficult to escape the video which showed part of the nine minutes and 29 seconds in which Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck. The protests that followed spanned the globe.

Seth said: “The reason why last year racism was more in the limelight was the death of George Floyd. 

“I can’t speak of the pandemic in a positive light, but during it people were home, they had more time on their hands.”

George Floyd’s death had a huge impact. Previously white, suburban towns which had often very little to say about racism found themselves holding protests. And, of course, football was affected too, because, as sometimes people forget and Professor Kilvington pointed out: “society comes to football.”

The first match back after the season was postponed due to Covid-19 was a 0-0 draw between Aston Villa and Sheffield United. Before the game began, the players and officials, for the first time in the Premier League, took a knee.

The action has roots in NFL player Colin Kapernick, an American footballer who effectively lost his career after refusing to stop protests against police brutality.

Sky Sports commentator Rob Hawthorne said: "Look at this.

"A powerful image to show football's social conscience as all of the players take the knee. The referee did as well."

Labour leader Keir Starmer took the knee, Prime Minister Boris Johnson didn’t. Foreign secretary Dominic Raab said he only took a knee for "the Queen and the missus when I asked her to marry me" and seemed to think it came from the popular TV show Game of Thrones.

While politicians debated around the topic, some fans opposed the stance entirely.

YouGov said: “Research suggests that this opposition mostly comes as a result of a vocal minority.” A minority who flew a “White Lives Matter” banner over Burnley, and, when asked, more than one of this minority told SWLondoner that taking the knee was comparable to the Nazi salute.

The opposition to it, didn’t remain online, and when fans were let back in, it came too.

Professor Kilvington said: “Then you get people back in the stadium and then they're doing it [opposing taking the knee] so it seems kind of hand in hand with what we're seeing online. 

“Maybe because people are seeing it and consuming this so much online, then what they're thinking is that it's acceptable to then do that in person, in a stadium.”

This uneasy balance, of opposition from a vocal minority, politicians who too opposed it all the way up to saying so, came to a head 304 days after George Floyd’s death, in England’s first game before the rearranged Euro 2020 championship - held in 2021.

Across the debates and arguments around racism, an increasingly unavoidable issue is the role social media plays, for good or bad in tackling racism.

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Today, it is difficult to get away from social media, but racism doesn't happen because people are on social media.

It’s difficult to overstate the reach and power of social media. Sophie Zang, a Facebook whistleblower said she “had blood on her hands” as she dealt, and didn’t deal, with global political manipulation on the site. 

Facebook has almost 2.9 billion users and Statista said that in 2019, about 51.4% of the globe had access to the internet.

This means there are less people with internet access who are not on Facebook, than are on Facebook.

These are sites publishing an unparalleled amount of content every moment of every day, but are still not treated as publishers or largely held responsible for the con.

Seth summed up what many see as the main issue with racism on social media: “People can hide behind anonymous accounts and say whatever they want to say. They know they can get away with it.”

The argument against anonymity online is simple. People shouldn’t say anything they aren’t willing to say in person, with their name attached to.

Requiring ID cards to sign up to accounts would mean anyone who was racist online could, in theory, be easily identified and punished.

However, it’s not this simple.

People are, quite simply, very willing to also be racist on the front stage, with their name attached and the lines between front stage and back stage aren’t as definite as it may feel when sat alone at home on your sofa.

Nick Scott, 50, tweeted the above. He is a youth football coach and his own family benefitted from Marcus Rashford’s anti-poverty campaign.

He first said he had been hacked, then admitted he may have tweeted it when drunk.

Whilst factors like the feeling of anonymity and invisibility do often encourage people to be racist online. People are often willingly racist without them. 

Twitter recently revealed after an investigation into the abuse the England players received that the website was able to identify 99% of the accounts permanently banned. 

Added to that, anonymity can be vital for whistleblowers, the marginalised and victims of abuse online.

A recent New York Times report highlighted the internal chaos at Facebook over a similar period.

Seth spoke about a meeting in 2019, between social media companies, the FA, football clubs and groups like Show Racism the Red Card.

He said: “There were so many things that they promised that they were going to do and change, and it’s definitely difficult now because you expect them to have implemented a lot of things and they’re not."

He added: “It’s a question of what’s more important now for social media companies, is it the people and keeping people safe on their platforms or money.”

Peter said: “There’s a lot of people who say you should just turn off social media but why should you adhere to the racists? It's a new phenomenon and I think a lot of the older generation don’t really get it, how social media is everywhere in our lives.

"If you have thousands of people sending you monkey emojis and there’s nothing you can do about it, it really takes a toll on you.”

And for Professor Kilvington a mixture of companies being more proactive, instead of reactive, and meaningful government sanctions to force them into action combined with wider education efforts to help deal with racism.

“It's not social media's fault that people are racist it's society's problem,” he said, alluding to a wider issue of people trying to cordon the issue of racism in this country, into just football.

On social media companies, he said: “They are largely unregulated, so I think that what the social media companies need, first is some kind of sanction.

“Organisations like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, they haven't been as proactive and they've been very reactive. 

“So we look at Germany as the kind of leader really in this field, if Facebook doesn't take down extremist or racist or whatever, abuse, it might be within a time period of say 24 or 48 hours, then they could face a huge fine.”

Germany, under the Network Enforcement Act which came into force in 2017, put the responsibility to deal with hate speech on social media platforms and gave them set deadlines as fast as 24 hours for easy cases and fines of up to €50million should they fail to comply.

On top of this, more sophisticated algorithms he said would help ease the burden on moderators who were often overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work and unable to properly respond to everything coming their way.

In response, a spokesperson from Facebook said: "No one should have to experience racist abuse anywhere, and sending it on Instagram or Facebook is against our rules. 

“We share the goal of holding people who racially abuse others accountable and we do that by taking action on content and accounts that break our rules and cooperating with law enforcement when we receive a valid legal request. 

“In addition to our work to remove this content, we encourage all players to turn on Hidden Words, a tool which means no one has to see abuse in their comments or DMs. 

“No one thing will fix this challenge overnight, but we’re committed to keeping our community safe from abuse.”

“There’s been massive denial of racism in the UK, until now. The reason why last year it was more in the limelight was because we had the Black Lives Matter movement." - Seth Ejukwu, Show Racism the Red Card

"It's not social media's fault that people are racist it's society's problem." - Professor Daniel Kilvington

Politics as usual

More than one interviewee, unprompted, brought up the role of the current government in exacerbating the issue of racism.

Seth said: “We have a government that has said some things and empowered some people to do whatever they like and feel like they have no consequences for it. 

“People have become bold enough to say what they want to say and defend their racist acts, this is because we have a government that always backed them.”

The actions of the government in question were so numerous that the Independent even made a timeline on them all. But they included some of the following:

Tory MP Lee Anderson refused to watch England games as long as they took the knee (and ignored repeated emails from this reporter on the issue). 

PM Boris Johnson said: “I do not believe in gestures, I believe in substance.” on taking the knee and refused to criticise those who were booing the players.

Home Secretary Priti Patel said fans had a right to boo the England team. She dodged the question of whether she’d boo herself, saying: “I just don't support people participating in that type of gesture politics.”

In less than a month, two of the most prominent politicians in a country would u-turn on their comments. It must have been a coincidence that it came at the same time the country came out whole-heartedly behind the team.

So when Priti Patel tweeted this:

Tyrone Mings tweeted this:

Racism, to the current government, is not an overwhelming priority. That’s not a criticism as much as an analysis of their policy. However, when the issue threatened to jeopardise the one thing the government does take very seriously - power and popularity - they changed their tone.

 A DCMS spokesperson said:

"There is no place for abuse online.The police already have a range of powers to identify and pursue those who use anonymity to spout hatred.

"Our world-leading Online Safety Bill will force social media companies to stamp out illegal and harmful abuse and stop repeat offenders from opening new accounts. If they fail to live up to their responsibilities they will face huge fines."

The bill give social media companies a “duty of care” and give Ofcom power to block access to sites, and introduce fines of up to £18million, or 10% of annual global turnover.

Some have criticised the bill for giving too much power to social media companies, saying it could threaten free speech. 

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How to solve a problem like Maria

Professor Kilvington outlined a key tenant of any response as education. That, to quote Angela Davis, "it’s not enough to not be racist, we must be anti-racist." We must teach people to be proactive and aware in their efforts to be anti-racist. Education was something that Show Racism the Red Card work extensively on as well. 

Angela Davis, activist and scholar

Angela Davis, activist and scholar

Angela Davis, activist and scholar

Angela Davis, activist and scholar

Seth also pointed to the huge impact that the Black Lives Matter movement had had educating people.

Seth said: “If the BLM movement didn’t happen last year, and the death of George Floyd didn’t bring about the awareness we now have, I imagine that nobody would have come out to support these black players [Saka, Sancho and Rashford]. 

“People would just sweep it under the rug and act like it didn’t happen as they have over the years. There’s more anti-racism education going on now.”

Professor Kilvington said: “I'm biased because I'm a lecturer at a university. But education is so important, helping that next generation come through and not falling into the same trap of perpetuating the same old racist abuse that we've seen in decades before.” 

Professor Dniel Kilvington on the importance of education in challenging and tackling racism.

Specifically within football, the response is hindered by an opaque culture of privacy in clubs, and in the FA, most of whom seem more eager to avoid blame rather than to take on responsibility for dealing with racism.

On top of this, there isn’t a uniform system to deal with racism across clubs, for example it is the responsibility of different people (e.g. communication teams or liaison officers or social media teams) at different clubs to deal with abuse players receive online.

A Black Lives Matter protest starting in Hyde Park on 3rd June 2020 CREDIT: Katie Crampton (WMUK) Creative Commons

A Black Lives Matter protest starting in Hyde Park on 3rd June 2020 CREDIT: Katie Crampton (WMUK) Creative Commons

Furthermore, whilst Manchester United are known to have a good relationship with Facebook and Twitter, to help tackle the issue, it is indicative of how piecemeal football’s response to racism is, that they are an exception in this, not the rule.

The FA said it would always take "the strongest possible action" against those proven to be racist.

But pointed out that they only have jurisdiction over stadiums, and thus do not record, or get involved with instances of racism online, passing the responsibility on.

To deal with the issue within football, a more transparent, proactive, and joined up approach across clubs, leagues, footballing associations and groups like Show Racism the Red Card, is desperately needed.

Grapes Hill Underpass, Norwich CREDIT: Evelyn Simak, Creative Commons License

Grapes Hill Underpass, Norwich CREDIT: Evelyn Simak, Creative Commons License

But this piecemeal approach is also summed up in groups like Show Racism the Red Card. There are a number of very similar groups who, by Seth's own admission, do similar things.

The opaqueness in the fact that only two Premier League clubs, out of every single one, replied with a comment for the piece.

A million acts of kindness

The past 18 months, and perhaps a bit more before that, seemed to come to a head this summer, during the rearranged Euro 2020 tournament. 

One of the most significant changes that this England team has brought to the fold, beyond being an actual force in international football, is that the players hold more power in their hands than Paul Gasgoine, David Beckham or Sir Bobby Charlton ever did. They have platforms to directly communicate with millions. They can get their message out there unfiltered.

Tyrone Mings took on the Home Secretary who now refuses to comment on the issue. Marcus Rashford terrifies the Tory government whose MPs snipe about him in private.

 And Gareth Southgate wrote this for the Players’ Tribune.

But what wasn’t in the team’s hands was what happened after those penalties were missed. Something had changed. We’re used to the media demonising black players, to dog whistles, alongside the online abuse.

But this time, things changed.

The push back against the racist abuse was unprecedented, in public, in politics and in the press. There was near universal defence for the three players amongst the British press.

It went from treating black players like this,

It went from treating black players like this,

And this

And this

To this

To this

Arguments can be made that a newspaper like The Sun having such a Damascene conversion is an incredibly good thing, as one of the nation's biggest papers, and also a result of them seeing which way the wind was blowing and urinating with the wind, not against it.

The team themselves played a large part in leading to this moment, alongside them was years of campaigning and education and research, it was a summer of protests unlike any other, and it probably wasn’t the current government.

But it led to what could be a turning point. 

Peter said: “I am optimistic, as our generation gets older these issues will be in the forefront, but ten, 20 years ago they weren’t. The Patrice Evra thing, how tribal that was.

“You’re a Liverpool fan, he didn’t do anything wrong. You’re a United fan, oh he did. But irregardless of that, if that were to happen today, you wouldn’t see the opposing team wearing t-shirts in support of him. 

“Today, you would at least see respect, a little bit of more respect. There’s a lot of stuff that’s happening now, that ten years ago, we wouldn’t have even touched.”

Ex-Liverpool player Jamie Carrager apologised for the event last year.

What happened after The Euros was the culmination of a long series of events which suggest change might be possible. A series of events which saw those fighting against racism go up against the government, the media and some of their own fans, and win.

No one’s under the illusion of racism being eliminated permanently and totally into some sort of utopian society.

But it can be challenged and tackled head on. Dealt with so black football players no longer expect monkey emojis after missing a penalty, or expect support when it does happen.

Seth said: “Immediately, after the racism [against Saka, Sancho and Rashford], there were more people countering it, coming out in support of these players. 

“Years ago, when black players were racially abused, nobody stood for them. People swept it under the rug and acted like nothing happened. But people are calling it out now. 

“Not just in society, but when they see it in the media too. It’s giving people the awareness and boldness to say we want an inclusive society and will do everything to fight against any form of discrimination.

“The positive is that there’s this conversation going on. 

“Me and you in the future will be looking at our kids saying well done, you didn’t have to fight like we did and like our father’s. But you are now in a position where now you are no longer fighting but implementing change.

“All we’re doing now is fighting, we’re fighting to get recognition and make it a mainstream conversation. We want a future where it’s no longer about having a conversation but implementing things. 

“We want to be able to say let’s reflect on the conversations we’ve been having and do something about them.”

And that’s key, because to disagree with a certain American preacher, the arc of the moral universe is very long, but it doesn’t bend towards justice.

Recent years have proven we are not guaranteed progress and acceptance.

There are noisier, less accepting people who will make sure of that, sometimes, they are even elected President of the United States.

And the point is, racism doesn’t just exist in football, or online. It’s everywhere, and the problem of everyone. And it’s up to everyone to be noisier, more accepting, and more anti-racist than ever before.

That’s why the Black Lives Matter protests worked because for one moment, however brief, it was all-consuming. White people couldn’t escape racism like black people never can.

“No one - not our fathers, our police, our gods - is coming to save us. The worst really is possible. My aim is never to be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves - just like my ancestors did.” - Ta Nehisi Coates.

“We don’t have to engage in grand heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world.” - Howard Zinn

Picture credits: Jadon Sancho, Вячеслав Евдокимов license Creative Commons; Gunnersaurus, license Islington Council; Old Trafford, Andre Zahn license Creative Commons; Boris Johnson, Andrew Parsons/10 Downing Street; Priti Patel, Andrew Parsons/10 Downing Street; 10 Downing Street decorated for the Euros final, Tim Hammond/10 Downing Street; Priti Patel, Richard Townsend; Angela Davis, Columbia GSAPP license Creative Commons; Gareth Southgate, soccer.ru license Creative Commons; Stephen Lawrence, 4wardEver UK license Creative Commons.

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