Racism and English Football

For Club and Country

Daniel Burdsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000210095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Racism and English Football: For Club and Country analyses the contemporary manifestations, outcomes and implications of the fractious relationship between English professional football and race. Racism, we were told, had disappeared from English football. It was relegated to a distant past, and displaced onto other European countries. When its appearance could not be denied, it was said to have reappeared. This book reveals that this was not true. Racism did not go away and did not return. It was here all along.

The book argues that racism is firmly embedded and historically rooted in the game's structures, cultures and institutions, and operates as a form of systemic discrimination. It addresses the ways that racism has tainted English football, and the manner in which football has, in turn, influenced racial meanings and formations in wider society. Equally, it explores how football has facilitated forms of occupational multiculture, black player activism and progressive fan politics that resist divisive social phenomena and offer a degree of hope for an alternative future.

Focusing on a diverse range of topics, in men's and women's football, at club and international level, Racism and English Football extends and expands our knowledge of how racism occurs and, critically, how it can be challenged. This is an essential read for scholars and students working on race, ethnicity, sport and popular culture, together with those interested in the social and organisational dynamics of English professional football more generally.

1 Racism and English football

Introduction: racism, English professional football and the paradox of the returning constant

The story of modern, post-war multicultural Britain comprises millions of lives and experiences, innumerable stories and social settings, and multiple struggles and achievements. Throughout this time, English football has been arguably the foremost popular cultural sphere in which ideologies and discourses around race, racism and immigration have been both expressed and resisted. Indeed, football (and sport more generally) provides one of the most significant backdrops for what Stuart Hall (2000) labelled a ‘multicultural drift’ and the broader establishment of everyday multiculture (Back and Sinha 2018). At elite level, these developments have been literally ‘played out’ on the pitch through the composition of professional clubs’ squads. For the children and grandchildren of many people of colour who came to the UK at the formal end of the British Empire, their dis/connections to football as players and supporters – inclusions, joys and accomplishments, alongside discriminations, exclusions and derogatory representations – might be read as an allegory of their experiences in British society (Burdsey 2006b; Campbell 2016). The organised structures and systems at all levels of English football (from the professional game to the grassroots), such as recruitment, selection and responses to racism, are likewise reflective of wider racial and racist social arrangements and policies in this period. The social tale of modern English professional football is certainly rich and varied, and it contains a range of sub-plots that point towards potential happy endings; but it is also a narrative in which the menace of racism has always been, and continues to be, an incorrigible protagonist.

Racism and English Football: For Club and Country analyses the contemporary manifestations, outcomes and implications of the fractious relationship between English professional football and race. I address the ways that racism has tainted the game, and the manner in which football has, in turn, influenced racial meanings and formations in wider society. Equally, I explore how football has facilitated forms of occupational multiculture, black player activism and progressive fan politics that resist divisive social dynamics and offer a degree of hope for an alternative future. Sport has, after all, provided ‘a context wherein people who had no idea about the lived experience of anti-Black racism and class subjugation’ have eventually been ‘forced to confront its existence’ (Trimbur 2019: 259). These themes are unravelled in the following pages but first, in this introduction, I focus explicitly on a specific aspect of the current debate: how racism in English professional football is talked about, within the game itself, and in popular, political and media circles. Some discourses routinely rehash outdated and simplistic ‘authoritative’ modes of conceptualising and opposing racism, and rely on assumptions about the experiences of players and fans of colour. Others comprise frames of representation and modes of discussion that appear well-meaning and/or ostensibly progressive, but are still essentially ill-informed, contradictory and counterproductive.

To understand the racial present in English professional football we need, initially, to look back very briefly on what has gone before. The existence of racism in the men’s game over the past half-century is now widely acknowledged, and is spoken about in relation to certain periods and spaces. Yet what might seem to be a fairly innocuous observation in fact illuminates the fundamental misreading that has, until very recently, characterised dominant interpretations of the issue: racism’s occurrence at some time in history. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, many people with a vested interest in the game, from players and coaches to pundits and fans, together with those that had outwardly no connection to the sport, were pretty much aligned in their conviction. Collectively they believed that racism in professional football had become largely a thing of the past (Back et al. 2001). Any remnants were seen to be perpetrated by a decreasing number of residual bigots, who occupied the terraces, pubs and social media, rather than the pitches, locker rooms, management offices, boardrooms and press boxes.

Such a supposition was not reached without reason. Several high-profile achievements were extolled to dispute assertions of residual inequality and exclusion, especially those which drew attention to more intricate, concealed and structural racisms. A comparative decrease in supporter racism in stadia, increased representation of some minority ethnic groups in some roles and a decline in overt workplace discrimination were cited as ‘evidence’ of racial progress. The institutionalisation and relative successes of a disparate anti-racist football movement – at the level of public consciousness-raising, if not necessarily in implementing effective anti-discriminatory measures (Garland and Rowe 2001; Hylton 2010) – became a powerful means of repudiating and silencing allegations of racism. Racism, recognised primarily as incidents of banana-throwing, monkey gestures and insults by supporters towards black players, was consequently relegated to a discrete and increasingly distant past. Like the way that one nervously examined the racist artefacts of Empire in a museum or recoiled when viewing the discriminatory content of 1970s television sitcoms on a retrospective compendium, racism in English football was archived as an historical blight. It was, as Alana Lentin (2016: 35) neatly puts it, ‘frozen’ in time, signifying an embarrassing period from which the sport, as part of a broader putative post-racial present, had moved on and away.

This ontological (re)positioning was spatial as much as temporal. In the same manner that racism in English football was consigned to the past it was also displaced elsewhere. A conspicuous public manifestation of this frame emerged in press coverage of the men’s international match between Spain and England in Madrid in 2004. Following racist abuse of England’s black and mixed-race players by numerous home supporters, sections of the English sports media juxtaposed the two nations’ football cultures and what they perceived to be their starkly contrasting approaches to race. Articulated from a very shaky moral high ground, journalists’ condemnation of racist behaviour ‘over there’ was notable for its wilful racial amnesia and blinkered view about the extent of the residual problem ‘at home’. In subsequent years, self-assured glances were directed towards other European countries (such as Russia and the Balkan nations) which, we were told, were now the principal sites and sources of racism in football. Investigative reports on Poland, Ukraine and Russia before the men’s European Championships in 2012 and World Cup in 2018 were welcomed for identifying the extent of racism in these countries and the potential difficulties facing visiting fans of colour. These portrayals were also a means of displacing the racism that continued to occur in the UK, and in English football, onto an ‘unenlightened’ and ‘unrepentant’ Eastern European Other. In short, the figure of football’s racist and the act of racism were relocated onto someone else, somewhere else and some other time. These frames reflect what have been described as ‘the three Ds of post-racial racism management: deflection, distancing and denial’ (Lentin 2016: 34).

In some European countries, overt, public manifestations of racism in football are admittedly more pronounced than in England. As Piara Powar, executive director of anti-racist organisation Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE), has stated about Italy, its governing bodies and the systems of discipline that should bring racist behaviours to task are ‘simply not fit for purpose’ (cited in Sanghera 2018b). These failings are apparent in responses to supporters’ racist abuse of Mario Balotelli, Moise Kean and Romelu Lukaku, for instance; and, incredibly, in the decision to use paintings of monkeys’ heads in an anti-racism campaign (BBC Sport 2019m). Moreover, organised neo-fascist activity is evident among several fan groups in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe to a far greater extent than has ever been seen in the UK (Goldblatt 2019). In such a milieu we must not let location (in all senses of the word) impede cross-cultural analysis, critique and challenge of racism; nor allow it to stand in the way of global anti-racist solidarity and support. The perpetrators of racism anywhere in football should be condemned and confronted persistently in the strongest possible way, without apology or recourse to cultural relativism. The primary concerns of this book relate to the English scenario though (and encapsulate forms of institutional, structural racism outside and beyond, as well as in, its unmistakeable expression by supporters in the public sphere). Accordingly, my fundamental point is that the necessary process of identifying and confronting racism ‘elsewhere’ did not prompt a sufficiently reflexive and informed consideration of the problems ‘here’. A sense of complacency flourished regarding the extent and effects of racism in the domestic game, further expatiating and rationalising the rhetoric of denial. A range of systemic shortcomings around race were ignored or unchallenged, and appropriate and effective anti-racist measures were not put in place.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, one cannot fail to recognise that the enduring portrayal of English professional football as having eradicated racism and concomitantly become a post-race entity is wholly inaccurate. This book, and my work more generally, argues that this depiction has always been incorrect; but it has taken a sizeable number and severity of events and developments to shift the public mindset. My interests here lie in how we got to this position. Racism has again risen to the top of the social agendas of players, clubs, governing bodies, politicians, anti-discrimination groups and the media. News sources report incidences of racism on pitches, in crowds and on social media on an almost weekly basis. During the annus horribilis of 2019, the players of Haringey Borough walked off the pitch after being racially abused by opposition supporters during an FA Cup tie against Yeovil Town; and a Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea was forced to invoke the designated protocol, by way of a stadium announcement that ‘racist behaviour is interfering with the game’, after Antonio Rüdiger reported that a fan had made monkey gestures towards him.

Public comprehension of the extent of racism in contemporary English football is accompanied by considerable head-scratching: how can people explain the presence of something which they were so convinced had disappeared? A frequent response is to interpret this phenomenon as a recrudescence, manifest in the rhetoric of ‘return’. In other words, racism had gone away but now it has come back. Problematising the essence and effects of this discourse of return is central to my conceptual framing of this book. I contend that it represents a fundamental (and sometimes deliberate) mischaracterisation of the situation which requires active challenge. Racism did not return to English football. It could not return because it never went away. It has been a constant and central presence during my 40 years of following the game and 20 years of writing about it.

This discourse of ‘return’, and the expressions of ‘shock’ and ‘surprise’ that accompanied it, require further probing. I argue that this position does not represent simply (if at all) an innocent or naïve response to the situation. Rather, it is a conscious ideological standpoint, combining a dogged reticence to admit the political nature of sport (Andrews 2019; Carrington 2010) and a neoliberal, post-racial position in/on this popular cultural sphere. Any notion of ‘return’ commands ipso facto a belief that what has returned must have previously receded – or, perhaps more precisely, that it was being managed and suppressed effectively (Back et al. 2001; Burdsey 2014). Consequently it presupposes, to varying extents, a fluid ‘coming and going’ of racism: here today, gone tomorrow. Racism in football, as much as any social sphere, shifts, mutates, looks and feels different, can be (partially) hidden from sight or sound, and finds new targets. This dynamic shape-shifting should not be mistaken as indicating its ephemerality. Furthermore, a perceived return of racism does not merely indicate that it is ‘not always here’; it says something more significant about the observer’s views on the very nature and manifestations of racism. Claims to its transience necessarily deny its rootedness and traction, and, as such, dismiss its inveterate systemic and structural manifestations. By constructing an ontological break between ‘then’ and ‘now’ (as well as ‘here’ and ‘there’), people disaffirm their connections to, complicity with and continuation of, the ‘bad old days’. This is a discursive and practical regime of power that negates, more broadly, the lingering effects of historic racism, especially Empire, on contemporary racial politics (Bhambra 2014; Gilroy 2004; Sharpe 2016; Stoler 2016).

In 2019, Mims Davies MP, then Minister for Sport and Civil Society, announced that ‘the Government is concerned about the recent rise in racist abuse in football’. While clearly distinct – and statistically accurate in terms of reported figures from clubs, the Home Office and/or the police – the idea of a ‘recent rise’ sits within a similar ideological terrain to that of a ‘return’. As Jon Burnett (2017: 89) notes in a wider context, ‘the racist violence that has followed the [Brexit] referendum is not a just a “spike”, a “jump” or a “spate”, as the mainstream consensus has it. It is the literal manifestation of the political climate which sustains it.’ Citing an incident involving Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Davies went on to note how ‘late last year [in 2018] – the unthinkable occurred – a banana skin was thrown on the pitch in the direction of a player during the North London derby’ (Davies 2019, emphasis added). Throwing a banana skin at a player is obviously a despicable act. Seeing this happen at the Emirates Stadium brought back personal memories of similar symbolic violence towards John Barnes of Liverpool at Everton’s Goodison Park in the late 1980s. Unfortunately it was not ‘unthinkable’ that someone would do it in this day and age; unless, that is, you thought racism had been eliminated from football, or your racialised and classed identity, habitus and social interactions safeguarded you from enduring racism in your daily personal and professional lives.

My own football spectating activities provide a constant reminder of the racist elements routinely found in fan cultures: chants and songs; comments during matches and on digital forums; and stares and intimidation towards people of colour inside the ground and in surrounding streets, food outlets and railway stations on match days. To consider a comparative example, we live in a society – a government-invoked ‘hostile environment’ (see Chapter 3) – where a group of people decided to construct a cardboard effigy of Grenfell Tower, with black and brown faces etched on the side, and then set fire to it at a bonfire party in 2018; and we reside in a politico-judicial epoch where the protagonists subsequently evaded charge (Rawlinson 2019). In this climate of hatred and violence (actual and symbolic) towards minorities and the impoverished, which is instigated in no small part by the state itself, it was sadly far from inconceivable that racist acts like banana-throwing would find an outlet in football.

Alongside deflection, distancing and denial, I have highlighted here the three conceptual Rs of contemporary dominant perspectives on racism in football: return, rise and re-emergence. As part of my critique of this position – wherein I argue that racism is instead enduring and systemic – I conceptualise this popular viewpoint on racism’s supposed transience as the ‘paradox of the returning constant’.

The problem and the response

At the end of 2018, Manchester City and England star Raheem Sterling publicly exposed racism in the British media via a post on his Instagram account. Specifically he drew attention to the industry’s role in encouraging and validating discrimination in football stadia. This was a pivotal moment in shifting the debate on racism in English football, both in terms of who the critique came from (a current top-level player) and who it was aimed at (a major public institution). Shortly afterwards the Sky Sports News television channel commenced a series of feature-length ‘Tackling Racism’ shows. The first episode, shown in February 2019, began by announcing the findings of the broadcaster’s own online survey on racism in football (Sky Sports News 2019a). Based on a representative sample of 1,006 fans, with an additional boost of 150 minority ethnic fans who attend multiple matches per year, the survey found that:

• 86 per cent of all fans and 93 per cent of minority ethnic fans had witnessed a racist incident at a game
• 10 per cent of all fans and 28 per cent of minority ethnic fans experienced frequent racial abuse personally
• 20 per cent of all fans and 26 per cent of minority ethnic fans witnessed racist events every time at a match
• 33 per cent of all fans and 71 per cent of minority ethnic fans had suffered racist abuse directly
• 71 per cent of all fans and 59 per cent of minority ethnic fans had reported the abuse
• 26 per cent of all fans and 68 per cent of minority ethnic fans said that something had happened as a result of reporting
• 31 per cent of all fans and 46 per cent of minority ethnic fans did not report racism as they did not expect any action to be taken
• 29 per cent of all fans and 23 per cent of minority ethnic fans did not know how to report racism
• 44 per cent of all fans and 48 per cent of minority ethnic fans thought that the football authorities have not gone far enough in challenging racism
• 30 per cent of all fans and 46 per cent of minority ethnic fans thought the media were negative, fairly negative or very negative in coverage of black players

According to anti-racist organisation Kick It Out (2019), reports of discrimination in professional and grassroots football during the 2018/19 season increased by 32 per cent. The total number of known cases rose from 319 to 422, and 65 per cent of these reports referred to incidences of racism, up from 43 per cent the previous year. Discrimination based on faith, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, showed the steepest rise, increasing 75 per cent. A considerable proportion of cases occurred on social networking platforms, such as Twitter (see Chapter 2). For the same season, according to the Home Office, hate crime incidents were recorded at 193 games, increasing from 131 the year before, with 79 per cent of the incidents related to race – a 51 per cent increase on the previous season (BBC Sport 2019d). These figures illuminate the extent to which racism characterises and even dictates the match-day experience for many spectators. This is something that supporters of colour and attuned observers have long known (ITV 2020).

In February 2019, Mims Davies convened an ‘urgent’ summit on racism in football, involving campaign groups, fan group representatives, players, managers and administrators. A nu...