Racism and English Football: For Club and Country 0367423766, 9780367423766

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1. Racism and English football
2. Club
3. Country
4. Playing by different rules?
References
Index

Citation preview

ROUTLEDGE

FOCUS

RACISM AND ENGLISH FOOTBALL For Club and Country

Daniel Burdsey

Focus

Racism and English Football

Racism and English Football: For Club and Country analyses the con­ temporary manifestations, outcomes and implications of the fractious rela­ tionship 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, influ­ enced 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 foot­ ball, at club and international level, Racism and English Football extends and expands our knowledge of how racism occurs and, criti­ cally, 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. Daniel Burdsey is a Reader in the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, UK; and an Associate Professor (Status Only) in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. His previous books include British Asians and Football: Culture, Identity, Exclusion (Routledge, 2007) and Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues (Routledge, 2011).

Routledge Focus on Sport, Culture and Society Routledge Focus on Sport, Culture and Society showcases the latest cutting-edge research in the sociology of sport and exercise. Concise in form (20,000–50,000 words) and published quickly (within three months), the books in this series represents an important channel through which authors can disseminate their research swiftly and make an impact on current debates. We welcome submissions on any topic within the socio-cultural study of sport and exercise, including but not limited to subjects such as gender, race, sexuality, disability, politics, the media, social theory, Olympic Studies, and the ethics and philoso­ phy of sport. The series aims to be theoretically-informed, empiricallygrounded and international in reach, and will include a diversity of methodological approaches. List of titles Who Owns Sport? Edited by Andrew Adams and Leigh Robinson Rugby in Global Perspective Playing on the Periphery Edited by John Harris and Nicholas Wise Doping in Sport A Defence Thomas Søbirk Petersen Racism and English Football For Club and Country Daniel Burdsey Referees, Match Officials and Abuse Research and Implications for Policy Tom Webb, Mike Rayner, Jamie Cleland and Jimmy O'Gorman For more information about this series, please visit: https://www. routledge.com/sport/series/RFSCS

Racism and English Football For Club and Country

Daniel Burdsey

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Daniel Burdsey The right of Daniel Burdsey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-42376-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-60778-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-85315-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is dedicated to Roger Charlery aka Ranking Roger (1963–2019). Football has played a major part in the development of my personal anti-racist politics. Music has been equally important. The songs of Roger’s band The Beat have provided much of the soundtrack to my life since I discovered their music in my teenage years. They underpin many of the guiding principles of my scholarship, demon­ strating the role of everyday popular culture in resisting hate, mobilising anti-racism and fostering inter-racial soli­ darities. I was lucky enough to meet Roger once, after a concert in Brighton, and he lived up to everything I hoped he would be. Roger died while I was writing this book. His legacy will live on: ‘love and unity, the only way’.

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword

viii ix xi

1

Racism and English football

2

Club

23

3

Country

63

4

Playing by different rules?

97

References Index

1

104 127



Illustrations

Figures 1.1 When Skies are Grey fanzine with anti-racist T-shirt advert, 1993 1.2 Banner in support of Moise Kean, Goodison Park, 28 September 2019

18 19

Tables 2.1 Football Association 2021 targets 2.2 Progress towards Football Association 2021 targets (as of 2019)

34 34

Acknowledgements

This book took just over one year to write, but it is, in many ways, the outcome of 20 years of researching football and nearly four decades of watching it. To this end, innumerable people have played a part in its realisation. Thank you to each and every one of them. I am grateful to all the students I have taught at the University of Brighton over the past 16 years, especially those who have taken my ‘Racism in Sport and Popular Culture’ and ‘Power and Politics in Sport’ modules. Many of the topics and arguments in this book were first delivered in these classes. Regrettably I am not sure I have ever been sufficiently convincing in articulating this, but I mean it sincerely when I say that, as a lecturer, I learn from my students too. My work is all the better for their contributions, insights and critiques. Thank you to Viji Kuppan for writing such a kind, thoughtful and poetic foreword to this book, and for the many occasions where we have exchanged ideas over a pint or two. He is a scholar of the highest integrity and always reminds me of the important things in research: positionality, reflexivity, accountability and responsibility. It is a friendship I cannot put a value on. I am incredibly fortunate to have a group of close friends and rela­ tives that I can turn to, often at short notice, for support and feedback on my work. In a gesture of extraordinary personal and intellectual generosity, Stan Thangaraj read and commented on the whole manu­ script for this book. Stan’s extensive knowledge of the field and sharp analytical insight were key to conceptualising the narrative and shap­ ing the structure, not least in helping me to break out of my linear thinking and to “join the dots” in different ways. Equally importantly, Stan knows how my mind works and my anxieties around deadlines, and was a constant source of reassurance as I completed the book. I could not ask for a better intellectual companion. Paul Campbell and Tom Carter provided detailed commentary on particular chapters.

x

Acknowledgements

Their keen eyes and learned minds were a breath of fresh air in helping me refine the clarity and nuance of my arguments. Jane Traies was always on hand to improve my writing. To read my work on football was an especially munificent act given that it already dominates so many of our family conversations! Kuljit Randhawa, my long term collaborator, continues to be a huge personal inspiration and role model in developing a progressive critique of racism in football. This book hopefully bears the imprint of his influence (as well as his astute observations on the text), and much of what I have written is the pro­ duct of our discussions over the past decade. I would like to acknowl­ edge the input of friends and colleagues in the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport (NASSS). Many of the ideas and arguments in this book have been presented at NASSS conferences over the last decade, and the constructive, critical feedback I have received shapes my thinking and writing immeasurably. Any mistakes, misinterpretations or inaccuracies in this book are, of course, my responsibility alone. Thank you to Jeanne Dekerle for her help with the photograph for­ matting. At Routledge, thank you to Simon Whitmore for his faith in this project, Aoife Byrne, Victoria Chow, Rebecca Connor and Megan Smith for superb editorial guidance, and the anonymous reviewers who commented constructively on the original book proposal. Most importantly, thank you to my mum, Margaret, for making it possible for me to start ‘going the match’, as we say in L4, all those years ago. DB Brighton May 2020

Foreword

In August 2018, Dan had invited me to spend a few days with him in his East Sussex home. It was a difficult period in my life as my mum had recently died, and her loss continued to weigh heavily upon me. However, seeing Dan presented a good opportunity for me to re-engage more fully with life once more. Dan is a thoughtful and sensitive man; in whose company I have always felt open and relaxed. Our friendship is built on critical conversations about race, space and place in which the personal and political is always alive. This intellec­ tual friendship ‘provokes and shelters [an] ongoing dialogue’ in which we are ‘engaged interlocutors’ (Scott 2017: 17), and also personal friends; both friendships are characterised by a commitment to racial justice in which the importance of speaking truth to power is never lost. These ‘dialogical virtues’ (ibid.) are as evident in the scholarly conference as they are in the everyday pleasures of a pint (or two) in his, or my, local public house, or through listening to the conscious rocksteady/reggae sounds of Phyllis Dillon. On one of those late summer days that I spent with him, Dan took me to visit a little-known artefact located on a remote and unremark­ able part of the South Downs. The Chattri is a site where Hindu and Sikh soldiers were once cremated. It was later to become a war mem­ orial, constructed to commemorate the service and sacrifice of around one million soldiers from the Indian subcontinent. Brown soldiers who fought to help maintain and protect the British Empire in its time of darkness during the First World War. It is a shame that more people do not know this history or of this memorial’s existence. The elisions of Empire, and its all-too-often forgotten subjects in history (Hall 1998), move us to discuss their extant entanglements within English men’s football: its cultures, policies and practices of exclusion and racism that permeate the field, and that this book so admirably addresses and articulates. During our discussion at the

xii

Foreword

Chattri, we also talk specifically about the uneven presence of South Asian peoples within the professional men’s and women’s game. At one point, Dan turns to me, and empathetically suggests, ‘I think we have let you down mate. I really do’. I was touched by his candour and concern for me, and Others like me. As someone ‘born overseas in a former British colony’ I am one of the named and nameless racially Othered people whose (sporting) life Burdsey’s book places in clear focus, caught within and without football’s structures of disavowal. Burdsey’s voice within the field of sport and leisure has always felt important. It is a voice that carries authority because I recognise his longstanding commitment to exposing the ‘governing structure of race and racial abjection’ (Thangaraj 2020: 30) is genuine. This is made all the more convincing because of his reflexivity; a term that is frequently overused within the social sciences, often becoming nothing more than an empty signifier, but not here. In this book, Burdsey uses reflexivity to disclose personal culpability not to exculpate it, and also to orien­ tate his theory and praxis. For example, he admits to moments of col­ lusion with white supremacy: ‘I still unintentionally reinforce structures of privilege and prejudice’ he confides, while also declaring ‘I have agency and power: I am not a victim, nor do I feel the consequences of racism personally’. For him, acknowledging complicity does not relieve his responsibility. Later in the book, he stresses his duty, ‘to use his professional position to critique the inequities and exclusions’ that exist within the game. I cannot emphasise strongly enough how relieving and refreshing it is to hear this. For a white, cisgender, middle-class, middle-aged, non-disabled man to be conscious of, and critique his own position, power and privileges while also actively working to challenge and disrupt discrimination, is a dialogical virtue and a hope­ ful sign. For those unfamiliar with Burdsey’s writing, the following pages provide a rich conspectus of his thoughts about the racial injustices that continue to haunt professional football. His lodestars, which include critical friends, colleagues and mentors, help illuminate his arguments without dimming his own distinctive narrative voice. Racism and English Football: For Club and Country is a book that shows assiduous sociological analysis in revealing the concealed operations of power that lie at the heart of this predominantly white footballing institution. Within this compelling cultural critique of the people’s game, Burdsey is also attentive to applying and amplifying a transna­ tional feminist perspective that ‘brings together the expansive insights of women of colour’ (Ratna 2018: 201), that unsettles football’s racial

Foreword

xiii

and gendered hegemony, while also highlighting the problems and possibilities in the emerging women’s game. Yiu Fai Chow and Anamik Saha (2020) argued, in a recent con­ versation, for the need to tell ‘better’ stories; stories that help us understand the present conjuncture while also helping us navigate towards a brighter, more racially just future. Burdsey’s stories share this quality; they are at once intimate and powerful. In this book he foregrounds stories of race and racism, his own, and those of people of colour, in a critical race style. In so doing, he prises open the buried, contested, denied, liminal and misunderstood lives of ethnic Others that exist in contemporary English football. Some of these stories are palpably painful in their retelling of racial oppression and struggle. This is necessary, but Burdsey also demonstrates how people of colour ‘refuse to be crushed by those destructive forces’ (Back 2015: 832) and showcases how Black and Brown people are also adept in asserting their own agency. As an academic and activist ally, Burdsey is unflinching in unmasking the racial beliefs and bigotry that lie sedimented within the footballing soil, but crucially, he also holds onto ‘moments of transcendence… not to deny racism… but to say there is a possibility and we see flashes of it’ (Carrington cited in Madu 2019). This is a book that deserves to be read beyond the Academy, by all those who are interested in football, and have a passion for the game. I am honoured to weave a few short threads into this important anti-racist and humanist text that asks us to con­ sider, like the reggae band Steel Pulse once did, ‘Doesn’t justice stand for all?’ Viji Kuppan April 2020

References Back, L. (2015) ‘Why everyday life matters: class, community and making life liveable’, Sociology, 49(5): 820–836. Chow, Y.F. & Saha, A. (2020) ‘No alternatives, always more, wilful optimism: new editors of the European Journal of Cultural Studies’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 23(2): 284–289. Hall, S. (1998) ‘Subjects in history: making diasporic identities’, in W. Lubiano (ed.), The House That Race Built. New York: Vintage Books. Madu, Z. (2019) ‘The promise that football holds: a conversation with pro­ fessor and sociologist Ben Carrington about racism in soccer and the sport’s hopes to transcend its norms’, SBNation, 27 February. www.sbnation.com/ 2019/2/27/18240027/soccer-racism-ben-carrington-conversation.

xiv Foreword Ratna, A. (2018) ‘Not just merely different: travelling theories, post-feminism and the racialized politics of women of color’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 35(3): 197–206. Scott, D. (2017) Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Generosity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thangaraj, S. (2020) ‘“I was raised a Buddhist”: Tiger Woods, race, and Asianness’, Sociology of Sport Journal, 37(1): 27–35.

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 nar­ rative 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

2

Racism and English football

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 antiBlack racism and class subjugation’ have eventually been ‘forced to confront its existence’ (Trimbur 2019: 259). These themes are unra­ velled 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 peri­ ods and spaces. Yet what might seem to be a fairly innocuous obser­ vation 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 resi­ dual 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 highprofile 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

Racism and English football

3

ethnic groups in some roles and a decline in overt workplace dis­ crimination were cited as ‘evidence’ of racial progress. The institutio­ nalisation and relative successes of a disparate anti-racist football movement – at the level of public consciousness-raising, if not neces­ sarily in implementing effective anti-discriminatory measures (Garland and Rowe 2001; Hylton 2010) – became a powerful means of repu­ diating and silencing allegations of racism. Racism, recognised pri­ marily 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 ret­ rospective 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 manifesta­ tion 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, selfassured 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 Cham­ pionships in 2012 and World Cup in 2018 were welcomed for identi­ fying 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).

4

Racism and English football

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, incred­ ibly, in the decision to use paintings of monkeys’ heads in an antiracism campaign (BBC Sport 2019m). Moreover, organised neo-fascist activity is evident among several fan groups in Eastern and SouthEastern 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 chal­ lenge 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 neces­ sary process of identifying and confronting racism ‘elsewhere’ did not prompt a sufficiently reflexive and informed consideration of the pro­ blems ‘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 recog­ nise 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, gov­ erning 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

Racism and English football

5

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 con­ vinced had disappeared? A frequent response is to interpret this phe­ nomenon as a recrudescence, manifest in the rhetoric of ‘return’. In other words, racism had gone away but now it has come back. Pro­ blematising 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 popu­ lar 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 tomor­ row. 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 mis­ taken 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,

6

Racism and English football

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 accu­ rate 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 con­ sensus has it. It is the literal manifestation of the political climate which sustains it.’ Citing an incident involving Arsenal’s Pierre-Emer­ ick 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 inti­ midation towards people of colour inside the ground and in surround­ ing streets, food outlets and railway stations on match days. To consider a comparative example, we live in a society – a governmentinvoked ‘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 mino­ rities 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

Racism and English football

7

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 encoura­ ging 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 representa­ tive 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

8

Racism and English football

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 pre­ vious 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 representa­ tives, players, managers and administrators. A number of issues were actioned: � � � � �

�

to review whether football’s current sanctioning regime goes far enough and, if not, what more is needed to act as a deterrent to this type of behaviour to ensure that the partnership between football authorities and the police is close enough to improve the identification and sanction­ ing of offenders at matches to ask whether we give enough support to stewards and whether we can improve their capacity to deal with discrimination con­ sistently throughout the leagues whether football can improve the information flow of incident reporting on the pitch, and support players how we can double down on efforts to ensure that match officials, stewarding operations and coaching and academy staff are all fully able to engage in their responsibilities to maintain an open and inclusive sporting environment initiatives to help to increase the numbers of people from black and minority ethnic backgrounds into football professions beyond playing, with transparency and opportunities in the recruitment process absolutely central to this (Woodhouse et al. 2019).

By the end of the year, Prime Minister Boris Johnson raised the possibility of further government involvement. These political

Racism and English football

9

interventions (actual and proposed) typify a particular position of racialised and classed power, comprising a specific interpretation, attribution and location of racism. They demonstrate which contexts prompt or are judged to warrant intervention, who is permitted to define racism and which people can or cannot be called racists (Titley 2019; Lentin 2020). In what represents another example of the dis­ placement frame, Johnson was able to speak about racism by football fans, while steadfastly denying that his own comments about veiled Muslim women (looking like ‘letterboxes’) and African Caribbean people (‘picaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’) were racist. Indeed, when these remarks were called out by a black woman, Dawn Butler MP, it was the challenge to racism, rather than the act itself, that was deemed illegitimate (Khorsandi 2020). Minority ethnic footballers’ own voices and experiences of racism have come to the forefront of the discussion too. This is a crucial development, both epistemologically and practically speaking, that I explore more fully in the next chapter. Players’ testimonies add an important experiential component to our knowledge on this subject. In particular, they illuminate the effects of some of the more structural and systemic forms of racism, together with individual and collective ways of resisting them. Long recognised by players of colour and documented by critical sociologists of sport, the physical, emotional and long-term employment costs of enduring racist abuse are enor­ mous (BBC Three 2020). Jadon Sancho stated that ‘no player wants to play football and have abuse like that. It puts the confidence down in the players and I feel the love of the sport will just go very soon if it doesn’t stop’ (Sky Sports 2019). Alex Scott reflected that ‘no matter how strong of a character you are, you can only take so much’ (BBC Sport 2018). Tammy Abraham spoke of the emotional impact on players’ families (BBC Sport 2019n), Danny Rose admitted that he could not wait to leave football because of racism (Hytner 2019a) and Marvin Sordell revealed that one of the ‘biggest factors to me retiring at 28 was due to the amount of racism that exists in the game’ (BBC Three 2020). Mention of Alex Scott – a woman of colour who is one of the most decorated English footballers of recent times and now a leading tele­ vision pundit – necessitates some immediate consideration of the posi­ tion of women in this appraisal of racism in English football. Although my arguments thus far technically refer to English football as a whole, I have talked mainly about the men’s professional game. Men’s parti­ cipation unavoidably provides much of the historical narrative on race and professional football so far, not least as the focus of popular

10

Racism and English football

discussion and debate. This highlights the contrasting status of men’s and women’s professional football in the popular imagination. It also speaks to the intimate and intricate relations between sport, racism, nation, gender, masculinity and heterosexuality, and how these are invested and invoked differently across the two variants of the game. The women’s game is rapidly putting in place the structures of elite competition through the Women’s Super League and the level of support given to the national team. So far it has eschewed many of the excesses and troubles of men’s football. Yet, as the following chapters demonstrate, racism is an issue in women’s football too, and this will bring forth an increasing number and range of issues and challenges. Sociologists of sport in the Global North have been awkwardly quiet on this topic. They have largely failed to address the experiences of female footballers of colour, and have rarely integrated race and gender together within an intersectional analysis of the game’s work­ ings. To date, studies on race and football have been dominated by research by men on men’s football (and I fully include in this critique the omissions and occlusions in my own previous work). The vast majority of scholarship on women’s football has ignored players, fans and employees of colour, and it has been silent on the role of race in the objectification and sexualisation of female players of all ethnicities. Very notable exceptions are the excellent contributions by Aisha Ahmad (2011a, 2011b) and Aarti Ratna (2010, 2011, 2014, 2017). Women’s football is critical to any sociological investigation into modern English football. This not just a matter of parity; rather, the women’s game provides some important trends and insights (see Chapters 2 and 3). I have deliberated avoided a distinct chapter on women’s football in this book, choosing instead to weave developments and examples throughout the narrative. This highlights the multi­ faceted nature of racism, which is articulated in similar and different ways within and across the men’s and women’s games.

Conceptualising and re/situating racism in English football Having put forward the rationale and context for this book, I now outline my own sociological interpretation and conceptualisation of racism in English football. I frame my perspective here through (rela­ ted) correctives on two established popular orthodoxies. I then discuss how recognition and attribution of racism in football are commonly particular and partial. I explain how this focus on limited aspects of the problem facilitates the denial and mitigation of others, which

Racism and English football

11

essentially allows clubs, governing bodies and other dominant organi­ sations to distance themselves from blame and accountability. Corrective one: racism in English football is historically rooted, structural and systemic Conventional popular perspectives on English football do not appreci­ ate that racism is a structural phenomenon. This oversight cultivates, instead, a predominant interpretation of racism as unusual, sponta­ neous and episodic. It is viewed as an individual, privatised matter rather than an intrinsic facet of the game’s organisations and opera­ tions themselves. It is regarded as the outcome of personal prejudices, and/or the loss of customary levels of self-control in highly charged, competitive sports fixtures; an aberration in otherwise ‘normal’, postracial times (Burdsey 2014; Müller et al. 2007). By contrast, I contend that racism is firmly embedded and historically rooted in football’s structures, cultures and institutions, and operates as a form of systemic discrimination. Over the past two decades, I have argued forcefully and consistently that claims of the eradication of racism from English football were accordingly erroneous. Relatedly, I have critiqued the discourses of denial that have been employed, often quite tenaciously and defiantly, to preserve the myth of the game’s post-racial composition and outlook (see, e.g., Burdsey 2007a, 2011b, 2014). Although racism in football routinely appears in crude and blatant ways, it can occur in a complex, covert and seemingly contradictory manner as well. It does not have to be intentional, obvious or involve hate words. In practice, however, a much narrower understanding of racism prevails. Such a reading oversimplifies the contents, modes and effects of racism, and posits that its ‘presence’ or ‘absence’ can be straightforwardly and unequivocally established. Hegemonic opposi­ tional categories of ‘racist’ and ‘not racist’ are thus reinforced (Rattansi 2007). This model does not provide a sufficiently sophisticated frame­ work for mapping the trajectories and ramifications of contemporary racisms. In contrast, I have argued for the need to map gradations of racism, and to explore nuances in intent, reception and context (Burdsey 2011b, 2014). A conceptual binary of ‘racist’ and ‘not racist’ is not an effective way of practically challenging racism either. Due to its very basic outline of what racism is and/or does, occurrences in football that do not meet these criteria go unrecognised or uncontested, and are dismissed or denied. This has led to a peculiar trend within football for the autho­ rities to find people guilty of racism, but then strenuously try to

12

Racism and English football

persuade the public that these people are not racists. In 2019, New­ castle United youth team coach Peter Beardsley was suspended for 32 weeks from all football-related activity after the FA found him guilty of racially abusing players. Despite the panel having ‘serious reserva­ tions’ about the defendant’s credibility and noting his totally unsub­ stantiated claim that some of his accusers had fabricated the allegations for financial greed, it concluded that, ‘We are satisfied that Mr Beardsley is not a racist in the sense of being ill-disposed to per­ sons on grounds of their race or ethnicity’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019g). Likewise, while finding that England women’s manager Mark Sampson had made racially discriminatory comments to Eniola Aluko (see Chapter 3), barrister Katharine Newton added that, it was ‘fundamentally important to emphasise that I have not concluded that [Sampson] is a racist’ (cited in Guardian Sport 2019a). Addi­ tionally, Leeds United’s Kiko Casilla was banned for eight matches in February 2020 for calling Jonathan Leko ‘a fucking N*****’. Casil­ la’s claim that he was ‘unaware of the existence’ of the term was rejected. However, the commission was satisfied that Casilla ‘is not a racist’ and that the language he used ‘was wholly out of character’ (BBC 2020c). Sara Ahmed (2012: 150) observes that ‘critiques of racism are heard as personal attacks on reputation (repeat: “how can you call me that?”), such that one of the biggest accusations you can make is the very accusation that you are accusing someone of racism’. In the above cases, assertions that the individuals are not really racists leave a sense of ambiguity in the verdicts and casts doubt on the sincerity of the penalties. The players’ behaviour is explained – and funda­ mentally justified – as merely an extemporaneous and abnormal speech act; in other words, a slip, a mistake or an accident (Müller et al. 2007). In turn, their actions are dissociated and detached from any inference that racism is an institutional and structural part of these (or any other) footballing organisations. Alongside a narrowing of the idea of what and where racism ‘is’, we see here a distinguishing of who is permitted to define it and evidence its occurrence (Lentin 2020; Titley 2019). English football evidently faces considerable challenges in bringing perpetrators of racism to account. Some of these result from the fact that its jurisdiction and liability requirements are out-of-sync with the law of the land. Within the past decade John Terry (Chelsea) and Fer­ nando Forestieri (Sheffield Wednesday) were fined and banned by the FA for using racist language towards opponents after they had first been acquitted in criminal courts. Other high-profile cases in the men’s

Racism and English football

13

game have been characterised by contradiction and inconsistency. In 2019, Wayne Hennessey was photographed at a Crystal Palace team meal, with one straight arm raised forward and his other hand held horizontally between his mouth and nose. He claimed that he was trying to attract the photographer’s attention, and informed the inquiry panel that he was unaware of the Nazi salute. Although one member of the FA panel felt that this fascist inference was the ‘only plausible explanation’, the two other members supported Hennessey’s claim that the gesture had been misinterpreted (Fifield 2019a). Chelsea’s Antonio Rüdiger reported monkey taunts during a match against Tottenham Hotspur at the end of 2019. However, Tottenham, who play at the most state-of-the art stadium in Britain (if not beyond) and the Metropolitan Police found ‘no evidence to corroborate or contradict the allegation’ (cited in BBC Sport 2020a). The failure to validate the personal testimonies and epistemologies of players of colour devalues their experiences of racism and underplays its physical and emotional effects. ‘At the end of the day I am alone in this case because I am the one who has to swallow this,’ Rüdiger stated, ‘For me, in this case, racism won’ (cited in Steinberg 2020). In 2020, Sam Finley of Accrington Stanley was banned for eight matches for calling an oppo­ nent, Paul McShane, a ‘P***y’ (BBC Sport 2020d). The FA did not implement the permitted longer punishment. Strangely its panel believed that Finley’s comment only invoked nationality (McShane is Irish) rather than ethnicity, despite that the fact that the term is routi­ nely used as a slur towards people of Traveller background (who are recognised in British law as an ethnic group). This serves to legitimise the perception that racism is not as bad or hurtful if the recipient is an indirect victim or the term used incorrectly classifies the recipient’s identity. Corrective two: football does not simply reproduce societal racism; it plays its own part too The old axiom that sport is a microcosm of society is deployed by many popular and media accounts of racism in English football. For instance, The Guardian’s Jacob Steinberg (2019a) states that, ‘Nobody transforms into a racist after walking into a football stadium. They bring their views in from outside, where society’s divides have been exposed by austerity, knife crime, a broken political system and the Brexit debate.’ In the same newspaper, Barney Ronay (2018) suggests that, ‘The fact remains “football” is not a discrete, concrete thing, but is simply a reflection and an extension of the society around it’. Former

14

Racism and English football

player John Barnes, himself a recurrent victim of racism throughout his career in the 1980s and 1990s, proposes: Forget about football, we have to stop compartmentalising it and thinking it is a problem in football and the rest of society is fine. We have to look at it holistically and as a whole and say let us tackle racism or discrimination in life. Then you can look to get rid of it in football. The only way you can do that is first to deconstruct the idea of where racism came from. (cited in Sanghera 2018a) Barnes goes even further to argue that the pressure on football to address the problem is ‘irrational’ and ‘stupid’, because the sport ‘can do nothing about getting rid of racism. Society can’ (cited in Press Association 2018). As I noted very briefly earlier in this chapter (and will argue more fully in Chapter 3), the effects of the hostile immigration climate and isolationist xenophobia initiated by the racial state are discernible in various social spheres, including professional football. However, to view racism as simply and only infiltrating football, in a one-way pro­ cess, from the outside represents a myopic interpretation of the rela­ tionship between race and popular culture, and a flawed analysis of the social dynamics of racism. Situating racism as external to institutions and residing at the margins of society is analytically weak and politi­ cally dangerous, as Paul Gilroy (1987) noted in his well-observed ‘coat of paint’ analogy. I am, as ever, influenced by the instructive theorisa­ tions of Ben Carrington in this regard. He argues that sport is some­ thing ‘that has effects in changing racial discourse more generally and that therefore reshapes wider social structures. Sports become produc­ tive, and not merely receptive, of racial discourse and this discourse has material effects both within sport and beyond’ (Carrington 2010: 66). Analysis of English professional football needs to include the influence of societal racism. It must also consider football’s intrinsic capacity to generate problematic ideologies and discourses, and to re/create its own racist structures of participation, selection and consumption. Talking to not talk: furthering the discourse of racial denial in English football The two popular orthodoxies critiqued here – how racism is regarded as an interpersonal and episodic phenomenon rather than a structural one; and is perceived to just permeate football via external factors and

Racism and English football

15

processes – do not simply represent naïve or mistaken positions. They can also signify racial ideologies that work, individually and collec­ tively, to intentionally make a certain designation of racism dominant (Lopez Bunyasi and Smith 2019), and to attribute it to various spaces and sources. The more explicit forms of racism in football clearly have more prominence within the public consciousness. This is a situation that football’s leaders, politicians and the media are happy to reinforce. Viewing racism as occurring outside their internal structures and being created outside their sport allows powerful elites to claim that it is thus outside their control, responsibility and fault. As Ahmed (2012: 44) argues, ‘if we recognize something as racism, we also offer a definition of that which we recognize. In this sense, recognition produces rather than simply finds its object.’ The act of racism and the figure of the racist continue to be projected elsewhere, leaving other racialised structures of power and white supremacy firmly intact. Talking about racism can, then, engender not talking about racism (Ahmed 2012, 2019). While much of the historic denial of racism in football has been a matter of silencing, as Gavan Titley (2019) points out, refutation can be ‘noisy’ too. It can involve considering and talking about racism even more; but in prescribed ways, in specific contexts and spaces, and uti­ lising particular tropes. Academics of sport are not exempt from this tendency. Some are restrained in the reach of their studies and the targets of their investigations, having been seduced by the very organi­ sations and power structures they should be holding to account (Randhawa and Burdsey 2018). We are at a stage where racism in English professional football is widely and frequently talked about. In this book, I argue that this conversation needs to extend its scope and widen the foci of its critique, taking in the organisations and institutions that are fundamental to the reproduction of racism.

‘What’s your problem, mate? You’re as white as we are’: a personal journey It is April 2012 and Everton are playing Liverpool in the FA Cup semi­ final. I am approaching the turnstiles at Wembley Stadium with my friends. Kick-off is half an hour away. Different shouts and chants drift in and out of earshot. Something stands out. I check again to compre­ hend if I have caught it correctly. I have. I don’t like it. A handful of young fans are chanting ‘Everton are white!’ and using other racist terms. I have not heard this sung in a ground since the early 1990s. It is offensive. It is inaccurate. As an institution and fan base, Everton are

16

Racism and English football

not white. We have fought long and hard for this to be the case. Evi­ dently the claim is not meant to be a descriptive statement. It is a means of dredging up a monoracial past and refusing to participate in a multi­ cultural footballing present. I cannot let this go. I approach the teenage boys and tell them that their behaviour is unacceptable. This is not what Everton is about, not what being an Evertonian entails. I am prepared for a response, a challenge, a confrontation even. The group seem sur­ prised, somewhat taken aback. One youngster chuckles and smiles at me. ‘What’s your problem, mate?’, he asks rhetorically, ‘You’re as white as we are.’ I am shocked. I don’t know what to say. The boys drift away into the crowd. My initial reaction to this encounter was one of anger. While our paths had crossed by happenstance – I had moved into the young men’s space rather than the other way round – how could they not realise that I, or others in the vicinity, would be offended? I am not sure that they were especially concerned with what was going on around them though. I did not get the impression that they were necessarily looking to provoke a response from onlookers either. Their actions seemed habitual and revealed no anticipation of censure. They epitomised what Leslie Houtts Picca and Joe Feagin (2007) refer to as a ‘racial backstage’. This is a space and/or a discursive realm where racist comments are openly expressed because individuals interpret that others present share their values and beliefs, and so will neither be affronted nor try to resist this behaviour (see Hylton and Lawrence 2016 for a further sporting example). Too often I have found the academic world to be a place where dis­ crimination in sport is discussed from a comfortable distance of power and privilege. The very system of institutional racism that permits only some voices and analyses to be heard is left intact, while scholars’ own roles in (re)producing the sporting inequality they speak about are left unaddressed. I am likewise accustomed to the tendency of many white academics in the field to discuss whiteness in a superficial and abstract manner. This entails speaking or writing generically about whiteness so as to avoid talking about their own whiteness; an act that Ahmed (2007: 165) describes as ‘re-position[ing] the white subject as some­ where other than implicated in the critique’. Deeper contemplation, sometime after the Wembley episode, forced me to acknowledge my own part – my own unwitting complicity – in creating the conditions that foster some of the insalubrious aspects of supporter culture. I reflected critically on the implications of my identity and embodied masculine whiteness in the social space of the football stadium. Most strikingly I faced up to the reality that, even as a committed anti-racist,

Racism and English football

17

I still unintentionally reinforce the structures of inequality I want to demolish (Applebaum 2010; DiAngelo 2019). I will always challenge discrimination at football matches. I am nonetheless mindful of the hazards in what Lentin (2019: 624) describes as a ‘heroic bystander’ approach. When opposing racism as an isolated public act, I retain agency and control. I am not a victim, nor do I feel the consequences of racism personally. Being able to oppose racism in an almost exclusively white environment without fear of serious reprisals is, in fact, a facet of my racialised power and positionality. My personal journey towards understanding and resisting racism in football began long before my adult years. Nearly 25 years before what happened at Wembley in the late 1980s, the BBC’s investigative jour­ nalism programme Inside Story dedicated an episode to racism in football. A number of examples came from the terraces of Everton’s Goodison Park. Around the same time I remember coming across Dave Hill’s (1989) Out of His Skin, a superb book about John Barnes, racism and the city of Liverpool. A couple of chapters were on the specific problems at Everton. As a young fan, I was heartbroken. I sent a handwritten letter to the club, requesting an explanation and reas­ surance, threatening to withdraw my support if they could not provide appropriate anti-racist guarantees. The response was not especially convincing. Nevertheless, on the advice of my mum I remained faithful to the club: ‘You need to stick with them,’ she said. ‘Just think what would happen if all the good fans were to leave them!’ Wise words and, in that moment, she committed, unintentionally, to regular 600-mile round trips to drive me to home matches through my teenage years. As I found out more about such matters, I realised I was far from alone. I became aware of the Everton fanzine When Skies are Grey. I took great interest in their work to rid racism from the stadium and to raise awareness about the absence of black players from the team. At the beginning of the 1990s, Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall was photographed at the club’s Bellefield training ground wearing one of the stylish No Al Razzismo T-shirts produced by the fanzine. My support for such a campaign was a given, but the sight of one of my boyhood heroes endorsing it had a profound effect on me. Big Nev continues to be a passionate advocate of leftist and social justice poli­ tics, not least through his Twitter account, which he routinely hands over to sexual minorities and other marginalised social groups. And I still have the T-shirt. In the middle of writing this book, I attend Everton’s home fixture against Manchester City in September 2019. As we await the sirens

18

Racism and English football

Figure 1.1 When Skies are Grey fanzine with anti-racist T-shirt advert, 1993 Source: Author’s personal collection

and playing of the Z Cars theme that announce the teams’ arrival on the pitch, this week’s fan banner is unveiled in the Gwladys Street stand. Such displays are comparatively rare at Goodison Park, but over the last couple of years a solitary large flag is raised before each game: ranging from a celebration of famous Number 9s (strikers) and a welcome to Brazilian stars Bernard and Richarlison, to more politically inspired messages, such as a call to donate to food banks and remem­ brance of the victims of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster. Today’s banner supports our recently acquired striker, Moise Kean, a 19-year-old Italian of Ivorian parentage. Kean made the headlines last year when playing for Juventus. After receiving racist abuse from opposition fans, Kean suffered the additional indignation of his own club captain Leonardo Bonucci publicly suggesting that Kean was somehow responsible for this treatment by celebrating a goal in front of them. On the banner, Kean’s face is framed by a familiar phrase to Evertonians: No Al Razzismo. The display was organised by fan group The County Road Bobblers and paid for by a crowdfunding campaign. As Dave Wycherley of the Bobblers stated, ‘Moise has joined the People’s Club. He is part of our family now and the message was clear: we will stand shoulder to shoulder against racism’ (cited in Everton Football Club 2019).

Racism and English football

19

Figure 1.2 Banner in support of Moise Kean, Goodison Park, 28 September 2019 Source: Anthony Brennan-McDowell

My life as a football supporter has run contiguously with some fundamental developments in English football, not least around racism and anti-racism. I include personal reflections on these configurations in this book to acknowledge how they intertwine with, and shape, my academic insight to forge a sociological imagination. As Nicholas Gane and Les Back (2012: 405) observe: the value of the sociological imagination is not simply that it can be used to produce an empirical understanding of the world, but also that it can promote a critical sensibility which seeks to link the most intimate personal experiences to wider social forces, and to seek out the public issue or problem contained in the private trouble. Being an academic and a football fan is common. Bringing these roles together in one’s research and writing is replete with difficulties and dilemmas, contradictions and confusions. It is also a standpoint that offers the potential for a progressive politics, via an embodied sense of experience, insight and reflexivity alongside one’s intellectual oeuvre.

20

Racism and English football

Throughout this book I accordingly refer to football fans as ‘we’ and ‘us’ rather than ‘they’ or ‘them’. In a practical sense, and following Back et al. (2001), my embrace of the sociological imagination represents an ongoing attempt to turn my frustrations from witnessing racist behaviour at and around matches into something productive. Inspired by Ian McDonald’s (2002: 100) incredibly influential essay, my work is ‘characterized by a concern to interrogate and expose relations of social power, not merely as a disinterested academic exercise, but as part of a broader project of pro­ gressive social transformation’.

For club and country Racism and English Football: For Club and Country comprises a pair of extended essays. One explores racism and anti-racism in the structures and cultures of English professional club football. The other addresses racialised notions of nation and belonging in conjunction with the England women’s and men’s football teams. These two domains of elite football participation, governance and consumption represent distinct entities. They relate to different social contexts and spatial scales, and hold separate connotations in relation to community, identity forma­ tion and the national popular imagination. They are guided by differ­ ent competitive and financial logics, rules of eligibility, structures and objectives, and they are accountable to distinct and varied sites of global male power. They are not mutually exclusive, however, and overlap in important ways. In this book I focus on participation in, and the organisation and representation of, elite football (and the pathways into it); but many of the issues and arguments raised here are applic­ able to, and interact with, considerations of race and racism in grassroots football too (see, e.g., Campbell 2016; Campbell and Williams 2013; Rosbrook-Thompson 2018, 2020). Throughout this book I draw on international contexts and compar­ isons when and where appropriate, and I outline the importance of global immigration and bordering processes on constructions of sporting national identity. It is, nonetheless, first and foremost a(nother) book about English football. There are two main reasons for this singlecountry focus. First, the domestic game provides an especially fertile contemporary sporting case study, due to: the extent and range of afflictions that currently affect the domestic game, its development of a high-profile anti-racist movement, and the particular discourses of denial and mitigation that are employed to sustain its post-race illusion. Second, the racialised socio-political climate in the UK at the moment – namely Brexit, the government’s self-proclaimed ‘hostile environment’

Racism and English football

21

around immigration, the Windrush Scandal, responses to Black Lives Matter and widespread racially motivated hate crime (see Chapter 3) – provide a compelling and timely context for exploring the connections between race and this aspect of popular culture. I acknowledge that this reliance on inter/national scales of analysis does not tell the whole story. It can obscure social, cultural and political entanglements that occur on other spatial scales, not least the diasporic identity formations and global solidarities of players themselves (Burdsey 2018, 2019). Conse­ quently, I conclude the book by extending the focus inward and out­ ward, outlining the role that transnational and local phenomena can play in creating more progressive and convivial footballing cultures. Hopefully this introduction explains why I believe another book on racism and English football is needed, and why it is warranted now. A routine element of any academic book proposal is to assess and justify how the planned volume relates to the existing scholarly field. An additional, welcome challenge is to align it with, and differentiate it from, the array of excellent commentaries written from outside uni­ versities. Journalists and bloggers have contributed purposefully and insightfully to the debate around racism in football, including Vaishali Bhardwaj, Jonathan Liew, Melissa Reddy and Daniel Taylor. Authors such as Derek Bardowell (2019), Emy Onuora (2015) and Stella Orakwue (1998) have penned excellent popular monographs on the topic. Podcasts like Burn It All Down (www.burnitalldownpod.com), I Think She’s Offside (https://soundcloud.com/ithinkshesoffside) and The Sport Spectacle (https://thesportspectacle.com/) provide terrific global, critical narratives on women’s football that often explore race. The experiential knowledge and critical insight of footballers them­ selves – in the British context often mistakenly regarded as apolitical and overshadowed by the actions of sportspeople of colour across the Atlan­ tic – represent arguably the most noteworthy contributions to current debates. As the players who feature so centrally in the succeeding pages of this book make clear, their ability to provide informed analysis, call out racism and advocate for social change is a model for many of us who write and care about football to follow. In Racism and English Football: For Club and Country I attempt to provide a distinct but complementary contribution alongside these extremely valuable popular sources. The arguments I make, and the examples I use, in this book are contemporary, but they are situated in dialogue with wider historical, social and political trajectories. They are grounded within my own two decades of contributions to the field and almost 40 years of fandom. I do not offer solutions as such. That, I admit, is beyond my remit and expertise. Yet, as I noted with colleagues in the Transforming Sport

22

Racism and English football

collection (Carter et al. 2018), we have to start somewhere. Social change in sport arguably needs to begin by thinking differently and including previously excluded types and sources of knowledge, before we can modify its practices and structures. In this book I challenge orthodoxies, ask questions and raise possibilities. I return throughout to what I believe to be the task of academics in our field: speaking truth to power and resisting incorporation into the dominant sporting structures we want to dismantle (Randhawa and Burdsey 2018). This is not just a requirement; it is a responsibility. My overarching ambition with this book remains, unashamedly, both professional and personal. In both senses, I strive to play some small part in making English football a better, and more socially just, place. No al razzismo. Il blu è l’unico colore.

2

Club

Introduction Club football is, to use a popular cliché, the ‘bread and butter’ of the English game, providing its organisational, economic, cultural and social bedrock at all levels of competition. This chapter focuses on the clubs that play in the four fully professional men’s divisions (Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two) and the two top women’s divisions (Women’s Super League [WSL] and Women’s Championship). There is a degree of crossover, as several ‘parent’ clubs field both men’s and women’s sides. All these men’s clubs have histor­ ical roots in local white communities, founded in various state, public and private institutions, yet their trajectories since then intersperse with the changes brought forth by post-war immigration. Their playing squads are now unremarkably multiethnic, and in the top echelons truly multinational. As Panikos Panayi (2020) notes in his history of migrant London, footballers born outside the UK and Ireland now comprise more than one-third of all male professional players in the city. Many top clubs attract global fan bases and are owned by over­ seas billionaires, including those based in China, India and West Asia. Teams in the lower divisions remain characterised by more locally and nationally bounded procedures, employment, networks and spheres of influence in many respects, yet their engagements with minority ethnic communities are still notable, primarily through the recruitment of their playing staff. The establishment of the current elite women’s teams is a much more recent phenomenon. Multiethnic women’s teams are similarly common in the capital, but the game remains over­ whelmingly white elsewhere in the country. In all of these instances and contexts, football clubs, as private organisations that interact so promi­ nently with the public, are important sites for sociological investigation into race.

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Professional football clubs are at the forefront of the exclusion of particular communities (and intersectional segments therein) too. Racialised power dynamics influence clubs’ fundamental remits of recruitment, selection, high performance and success, and the conver­ sion of bodily capital into economic wealth. They literally play out in their intrinsic physical activities and spaces, from everyday training and locker room culture to boardroom manoeuvrings. On the pitch, club football is the source and site of most of the incidents of racism that I discuss in this book. Many of these are a matter of inter-club affairs, involving fans and/or players of opposing teams. Problems evidently exist within clubs as well. This is important to recognise as it reiterates that racism is structural, systemic and operates in the ‘normal’, routine workings of organisations; it is not something that just seeps out during intense momentary periods of contact and contest with others during matches (Burdsey 2014; Müller et al. 2007). This came to light in a most disturbing way in 2018 when a litany of historic racist abuse and violence towards black male youth team players at Chelsea in the 1980s and 1990s was uncovered. This mistreatment was instigated by coach Gwyn Williams who, a report by the Barnardo’s charity estab­ lished, had engaged frequently in ‘humiliating and ridiculing black players by making racially derogatory remarks’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019e). Football clubs (among other organisations) can, then, foster an internal occupational culture of racism, which pervades different spaces and endures over several years. This can force the victims of racial abuse (among other forms) into silence, and protect its instigators from being revealed and punished. The assumption that organisations are race-neutral is critiqued compellingly by Victor Ray (2019: 30), who argues instead that they ‘magnify the power and depth of racial projects and are a primary terrain of racial contestation’. Ray proposes that organisations estab­ lish, and are comprised by, racial processes that influence both pre­ judice at an individual level and more structural policies of exclusion. In professional football these systems do not comprise purely the types of overt, blatant racism that was intrinsic to the historical youth set-up at Chelsea. They materialise in the mundane micro and macro opera­ tions of organisations too, even those that are diverse and ostensibly forward-thinking (see later in this chapter). Ray demonstrates that the absence of clear and blatant prejudice, in conjunction with a veneer of race neutrality, can actually create the fundamental conditions for dis­ crimination to be reproduced as well. Indeed, ‘the organizational reproduction of racial inequality may work best if organizational pro­ cedures appear impartial’, as differential treatment of people of colour

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can be obfuscated and justified (ibid.: 35). The individual agency of minority ethnic employees and their group effectiveness are inhibited, while the volition, comfort and power of whites are secured. Along with the focus on clubs themselves, in this chapter I address the organisations, communities and groups that are sociologically sig­ nificant at club level. I examine those entities associated with clubs or involved as part of the management, regulation and reporting of this aspect of the game. This includes supporter cultures, governing bodies, anti-racism campaigns and the media. I situate clubs as symbols of the communities in which they are based and/or draw their supporters and personnel (across a wide geographical scale). Specifically, the following themes and issues are investigated: the shortcomings of institutional anti-racism and the emergence of black player activism; organisational politics and practices of equity and inclusion; consumption and control of the black male footballing body; intersections of race and gender in women’s football; challenging racism in the stands through a fandom of progressive politics; racism and anti-racism in sport and social media; and structures and cultures of systemic racial exclusion.

The ‘By Any Means Necessary’ generation: the shortcomings of institutional anti-racism and the emergence of black player activism The introduction and development of elite competitions in men’s (Pre­ mier League) and women’s (Women’s Super League) football over the past 30 years encompass myriad associated social and cultural changes. One of the most significant is the establishment of anti-racism. Resis­ tance to racist behaviours and structures has evolved from a loose coalition of rudimentary, grassroots, supporter-led collectives to for­ mally constituted and funded groups and agencies (Back et al. 2001; Garland and Rowe 2001). Discourses and practices of anti-racism are now institutionalised at the centre of the game’s operation, governance and media production. The profile and scope of anti-racist activity have increased exponentially, most notably through the campaigning of Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card. These developments and configurations have fashioned a number of positive outcomes and continue to offer a distinct range of possibilities. They also face several obstacles to progress. To this end, at a moment when we have reached a pivotal stage with regard to racism in English football, we have arrived at a potentially critical position on anti-racism too. Following its inception in the 1990s, it was commonly assumed that a discernible anti-racist movement in English football meant that

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adequate, functioning anti-discrimination arrangements and proce­ dures were in place. Exemplifying the post-race consensus and its con­ comitant simplistic model of racism (see Chapter 1), the sheer dominance of this interpretation deflected and discredited any disputes as to its veracity. This nominal embrace of anti-racism was not accompanied by critical examination of the structures of racism that infiltrated all parts of society, and which emerged on and off the foot­ ball pitch. Sociological commentaries subsequently questioned the rationale, effectiveness and outcomes of extant strategies and policies. To use the language of Sara Ahmed (2006), anti-racism in football has been shown to be fundamentally ‘non-performative’. A failure to match anti-discrimination rhetoric with tangible action is ‘evidenced in the number of organizations that sign anti-racist charters in sport, but then proceed to do little if anything to establish the necessary condi­ tions to foster change in their own sphere of influence’ (Hylton 2010: 346). In my own work – in which I owe a great intellectual debt to the theoretical interventions and praxis of Paul Gilroy (1992) – I have questioned the conceptual basis for, and practical implementation of, dominant approaches to anti-racism in English professional football, especially responses to the exclusion of British Asian communities. As I discussed in the previous chapter and expand upon in the next sec­ tion, my critique centres on two main themes: the reliance on a sim­ plistic, binary model of (anti-)racism; and a failure to implement more radical anti-racist measures which, beyond the mere celebration of diversity, actively challenge the structures and mechanisms of inequality (see, for instance, Burdsey 2007a, 2011b; Randhawa 2011). Arguably the most substantial impediments to implementing more effective anti-racism measures in English football are the unequal power dynamics and expedient relationship between anti-discrimina­ tion bodies and the professional game (Randhawa 2011). To suggest that this bond is detrimental may appear counterintuitive and even contentious, given that local and national organisations alike rely on their parent clubs and/or governing bodies for much of their authority, management, (limited) funding and public profile. However, this lack of independence is more problematic than productive in relation to current structures and practices (and, as I argue below, a non-aligned anti-discriminatory body would therefore be a desirable development). Essentially this is because anti-racist organisations do not have a gen­ uine regulatory mandate in football. They are not afforded the power to hold the game’s governing bodies, clubs and players accountable for their actions, and so possess very little capacity to bring about social change. This heavily loaded power dynamic ultimately secures the

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hegemony of football’s dominant actors. They are outside the reproach of the anti-racist procedures they endorse, and exempted from having to acknowledge their own role and culpability in the reproduction of racism. Anti-racism organisations are, in turn, unable or reluctant to ‘bite the hand that feeds them’. The system that enables their existence at the very same time prevents them realising their purpose. Empow­ erment will only be achieved by breaking the bonds of financial dependency and resisting incorporation into key stakeholders’ agendas (Randhawa and Burdsey 2018). This incapacity has not gone unnoticed by the group with most at stake here: communities of colour themselves. Romelu Lukaku of Inter Milan and Marcus Rashford of Manchester United have both con­ tended, frankly, that the fight against racism is ‘going backwards’ (Fifield 2019b; Hunter 2019). Jonathan Leko of West Bromwich Albion spoke about the lack of support from Kick It Out and the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) following his complaint against Leeds United’s Kiko Casilla (see Chapter 1). Leko doubted whether he would endure the process of submitting a complaint if he received abuse again in future (Guardian Sport 2020). Confidence among British footballers in the formal, institutionalised structures of anti-racism has been decreasing for the best part of a decade. There is evident disillusionment with what they perceive to be derisory penalties for offenders and inadequate support for recipients of racism. Responses from some influential players to the charging of John Terry by the Football Association (FA) for racially abusing Anton Ferdinand in 2011 indicate the beginning of this trend (see Burdsey 2014 for a full analysis). A year after the incident, during the annual week of anti-discrimination action, a number of players including Fer­ dinand’s older brother Rio refused to wear T-shirts promoting Kick It Out during their match warm-ups. They were not prepared to pub­ lically endorse anti-racism in English football at a time when they felt its handling of the Terry–Ferdinand incident (and the abuse of Patrice Evra by Luis Suárez the very same week) had been wholly inadequate. Rio Ferdinand went as far as to label Kick It Out ‘useless’ (Riach 2014). As I have observed previously, the extent to which Kick It Out was the most appropriate target on this occasion is debatable (Burdsey and Gorman 2015). It is primarily an awareness-raising, education and reporting agency. It can condemn discriminatory acts, but it cannot formally investigate or penalise them. Nonetheless, as the public face of anti-racism in English football, resistance to Kick It Out’s operation and activities was an important exercise of power and resistance by these players. Perhaps more significantly, the football authorities were

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happy to let the organisation take the flack and distract attention from their own failings in these cases. Following the Terry–Ferdinand and Suárez–Evra episodes, the PFA proposed a six-point plan of action. It intended to: speed up the com­ plaints procedure and introduce closer monitoring of racist incidents; discuss increasing penalties and implementing an educational pro­ gramme for guilty parties; consider introducing a variation of the Rooney Rule from the National Football League in the United States, ensuring a minority ethnic candidate is shortlisted for all senior coaching and management jobs; monitor the number of black coaches and managers; make racial abuse a matter of gross misconduct in player and coach contracts (which means they could be sacked if found guilty); and address other residual issues of inequality in the game (Professional Footballers’ Association 2012). The Society of Black Lawyers (SBS) immediately dismissed the plan as ‘ineffective’. The use of terms like ‘discuss’, ‘consider’ and ‘monitor’ naturally did not bring much confidence that structural reform was afoot (see next section). This assessment has been borne out in practice, with little evidence of substantive progress in most of its target areas. The SBS offered its own more radical rejoinder, recommending lengthy bans for acts of racism (six to nine months, rising to five years for a third offence), officials to be empowered to abandon games in response to fan racism and the establishment of a Black Players’ Association (BBC Sport 2012). Pro­ fessional football has been far less stringent on the first two aspects, although the Premier League launched a black, Asian and minority ethnic advisory group in 2019 (BBC Sport 2019h). The words and deeds of several black footballers mean that there is now a tangible corpus and essence of player-led anti-racist activism in English football. They have had enough of racism and are prepared to take matters into their own hands. They resent being defined purely as passive victims and they recognise their growing oppositional agency. They have their own social media platforms from which to raise their concerns, and know that there is a critical mass of support if and when they decide to speak out. As Lucia Trimbur (2019: 253) articulates: At this moment, activism in sport allows us to see larger political alliances, affinities, and solidarities in a particularly useful way… the world of sport is fostering discussion uncommon and largely unavailable in other spaces. This, in turn, is opening up a new counterpublic, or discursive space where those excluded from the dominant public can contest mainstream interpretations, interests, and norms and articulate their own.

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This group of black British footballers is, as ex-player Ian Wright notes, the ‘By Any Means Necessary’ generation. Speaking on television after England’s match against Bulgaria in October 2019, Wright stated that: We’ve got a generation of players – not just black players – who won’t tolerate [racism] no more. My generation was the generation of ‘Turn the Other Cheek’, Martin Luther King. This is the ‘By Any Means Necessary’ generation, the Malcolm X generation. They don’t need to take [racism] no more. (ITV broadcast of Bulgaria v England men’s international match, 14 October 2019) Such an invocation of African American history shows how global and local white supremacy are resisted across transnational lines. Blackness becomes a mobile reference where other cultural spaces and histories provide the context to practise anti-racism in the UK (see Chapter 4). Players’ activism in English football is still incipient and partial. Speaking out is not possible for all players, and those who put their heads above the parapet are frequently abused even more or subjected to vitriolic censure (see section on the media below). Nonetheless players’ opposition to racism is powerful. It is shaking the foundations of whiteness on which the game is situated. Ben Carrington (2010: 177) notes the possibilities of sporting and social empowerment and emanci­ pation that might accrue ‘if the black athlete can once again find the means to speak’. This is, of course, not simply about the physical act of enunciation; it refers to the structural changes that permit agency and ensure that what is said is heard. The governing hegemons of the sport, and associated elements of state apparatus such as the mass media, are being called out over their perpetuation of systemic racism and lack of effective anti-racist activity. It is the responses by those in power that will evidence how successful footballers have been in calling for change. The proclamations of several players evoke, in essence if not in name, what Joe Feagin et al. (2001) term ‘social alexithymia’; that is, the inabil­ ity of the powerful – in this case primarily white football club owners and elite leaders – to comprehend or relate to the experiences of oppressed people. In 2019, ex-player Emmanuel Frimpong spoke about systemic whiteness in football’s global structures and governing bodies. He outlined how this racialised positionality and concomitant lack of empathy funda­ mentally inhibits challenges to racism. Frimpong stated that: I don’t blame [football’s leaders] personally but how can somebody feel your pain if they’ve never been in that situation? Most of these

30 Club people have never been racially abused; they don’t know what it feels like so any punishment they give comes from their world, not understanding the black person’s point of view. (cited in Ames 2019) That same year, following the abuse of his Belgian teammate Romelu Lukaku, Vincent Kompany (head coach of Belgian club Anderlecht) likewise concentrated the focus of his critique on the game’s dominant institutions. He said: It goes back to who is expected to make a decision on these issues, and it’s in these organisations that the problems lie. The real racism lies in the fact none of these institutions have representatives that can actually understand what Romelu is going through. You are dealing with a crowd of people and decision-makers who are telling him how he should think and feel about this when you have no decision-makers who are remotely in touch with what he has experienced in his life. That’s the real issue – if you go through the boards at Uefa or Fifa [the game’s European and global governing bodies, respectively], the Italian League or the English League, there is a real lack of diversity. If you don’t have diversity in places of power like boardrooms then you can’t have the right decisions in terms of sanctions – it’s as simple as that. (cited in BBC Sport 2019k) The disconnections between the almost exclusively white governance and multiracial participation of professional football are summed up poignantly by Chelsea’s German defender Antonio Rüdiger. Reflecting on receiving racism from supporters, he states that ‘I’m not trying to offend but you [white] people will never understand what goes through my mind in this moment. Or other black players’ minds. I am alone. I am totally alone’ (cited in Steinberg 2020). In 2019 Raheem Sterling of Manchester City presented an antiracism manifesto, signed by a plethora of players, coaches, politicians, media outlets and anti-discrimination workers (Sterling 2019). Pub­ lished in The Times newspaper, its key demands were: � � �

More BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people in senior positions running the game More consistent and suitable punishments for racist and discriminatory behaviour with an education action plan part of the sanction Players never to be sanctioned for walking off the pitch if racism is happening

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31

Social media and media to take more responsibility Sponsors to be sought to promote anti-racism programmes Authorities should always enforce the three-step protocol

Perhaps the most topical aspect of this proposal to date has been the subject of walking off the pitch. This was enacted by Manchester City’s under-21 team in a match against Croatian side HNK Rijeka in 2014 and by Queens Park Rangers’ under-18s when playing Spanish side Nervión in 2019, after they were abused by their opponents. Haringey Borough’s players left the pitch after receiving racist abuse from opposing supporters in an FA Cup tie against Yeovil Town in 2019. A similar reaction has yet to be seen at the very highest level in England. Responses seem to be influenced, at least in part, by generation. A number of younger elite players have expressed their willingness to leave the field of play. Others, including Sterling and former player Howard Gayle – who has spoken incredibly powerfully elsewhere on race, Empire and anti-imperialism (Burdsey 2020) – dispute its effec­ tiveness (H. Gayle 2019). Of course, these responses can be influenced by identity and positionality too. In 2020, Porto’s Malian striker Moussa Marega walked off the pitch after being racially abused by opposing fans in a Portuguese Primeira Liga match. The sight of his white team-mates and coaches trying to physically prevent him doing so, in spite of his visible trauma, revealed a great deal about inter­ racial empathy and solidarity, and a reticence for many of those who are not direct victims of racism to stand against it. In line with wider developments in anti-discriminatory philosophies, the participation (and absence) of allies or accomplices has also been a matter of debate. Megan Rapinoe is perhaps the most noteworthy white sportsperson to act and speak out against authoritarian, racist politics across the Global North in modern times (Edwards-Dashti 2019; see also Thangaraj 2017b; Thangaraj et al. 2018). Famous for taking a knee during the playing of the United States national anthem before international football matches (following the actions of African American NFL player Colin Kaepernick), on receiving the FIFA Women’s Player of the Year award in 2019 Rapinoe delivered a pow­ erful riposte to narrowly defined identity politics. Indirectly channelling Audre Lorde’s (1984: 142) contention that ‘you do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other’, Rapinoe called for solidarity and support for victims of oppression across social boundaries (in relation to gendered and sexualised subjectivities as well as racial ones). ‘I feel like if we really want to have meaningful change,’ Rapinoe stated, ‘what I think is most inspiring would be if everybody other than

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Sterling and [Napoli player Kalidou] Koulibaly were as outraged about racism as they were’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019a). Ex-England interna­ tional Joleon Lescott spoke about the need for white players’ support and solidarity as well. He considered what the repercussions might have been had Harry Kane, the white captain of the England men’s team, led the players off the field in response to racism during their 2019 match in Bulgaria. Lescott remarked, ‘It’s great that we’re look­ ing to do it collectively but if Harry Kane just took that ball and said we’re going, the message that would send to the world would be huge, more than Raheem Sterling’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019b). This is a call to understand racism as a social and moral issue that everyone needs to act upon, instead of something that only affects players of colour or that they are solely responsible for speaking out against. The role and hegemony of formalised anti-racism in English football is at a critical point. I acknowledge the progress made by Kick It Out and other anti-racist organisations over the past near 30 years. Yet different times call for different measures. The requirements of English professional football in the 1990s are not the same as those of the current juncture, and what worked to some extent then is not necessa­ rily appropriate now. Racism has not itself essentially changed; but its targets, manifestations and channels of expression have shifted, and broader ways of thinking about, theorising and responding to it have evolved. The Premier League introduced its own ‘No room for racism’ campaign in 2019, subsequently achieving strong visibility in stadia, on team captains’ armbands and on match television coverage (Premier League 2019). This move reflects the ‘silo’ thinking and working of English football’s key stakeholders, which prevents collaborative, long­ itudinal strategies to tackle discrimination. New strategies, policies and powers are required to remodel what Lord Ouseley, ex-chair of Kick It Out, labels the game’s ‘dysfunctional’ approach to tackling racism (BBC 2019i). With the game’s power-brokers at the centre of the implementation of anti-racism, it is increasingly apparent that English professional football requires its own form of independent regulatory commission. Its composition must include hitherto excluded voices and expertise. Power-brokers and stakeholders must be brought to account through this procedure, rather than control its remit, scope and functionality. The dwindling faith of professional players in the formal organisa­ tions and structures of anti-racism in English football is especially meaningful. In 2019, former player and media pundit Garth Crooks resigned as a trustee of Kick It Out. He lamented the minimal invol­ vement and influence of contemporary players. He said that ‘I felt that

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Kick It Out needed to be player-led, more now than at any stage in its history’ (cited in Rumsby 2019). Going on previous appointments, this means a former, male player, who has been placed at the peak of the hierarchy of experiential knowledge. However, today’s players are instead turning to Twitter, Instagram and their own, organic, colla­ borations as a means of direct action. Antonio Rüdiger, for example, is unequivocal in how black players need to respond to racism: ‘we have to deal with it in our way’ (cited in Steinberg 2020). While Kick It Out may need player endorsement as a source of representation and cred­ ibility, players, it seems, do not feel that they need Kick It Out. This is a form of social critique that we must listen to in order to understand the larger structural manifestations of racism, and bring about the most inclusive, empowering and effective means of opposing it.

What’s in a word? Institutional politics and practices of equity and inclusion In the context of the issues discussed in the previous section, the direction taken by English football on race equity and inclusion work in the third decade of the twenty-first century will be decisive. After various indignities – such as those in 2011 discussed above, and the experiences of Eniola Aluko and fellow players of colour in the elite England women’s set-up (see Chapter 3) – the FA has been compelled to reiterate its commitment to fostering open and equal participation in the national sport. In August 2018, it launched In Pursuit of Pro­ gress: The FA’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Plan 2018–21 (Foot­ ball Association 2018). Both the nomenclature and content of this plan are symptomatic of institutional politics and practices of equity and inclusion in sport at the current time. As the governing body of English football, I use the FA’s strategy as an example here. The thematic cri­ tique I provide is applicable to many other professional level clubs and organisations. In Pursuit of Progress identifies a number of key objectives for the FA. It states that the organisation will: � � � � � �

Deliver better recruitment practices Support talented future leaders Reduce pay gaps Educate and hold individuals to account Promote diverse boards and councils Improve the recording of diversity data

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�

Achieve the advanced level of the Equality Standard for Sport (ibid.: 9)

All but the last point represent generic targets which one would find in the strategic plans of any large organisation across a range of public and private sectors. This demonstrates the standardised, prescriptive nature of equity and inclusion rhetoric within primarily white profes­ sional establishments. The FA plan maps three areas of employment – leadership roles (frustratingly, we are not informed exactly what these are beyond them being ‘senior management’, or in which specific areas of the organisa­ tion they operate), England coaching staff and all employees – against two of the nine protected characteristics established under the Equality Act 2010: race (‘BAME’ [black, Asian and minority ethnic]) and gender (‘female’). It provides the (then) current levels of representation and sets out a small, incremental three year target (ibid.: 5): Table 2.1 Football Association 2021 targets Employee type

Category

Now: 2018

Target: 2021

All employees

Female BAME Female BAME Female BAME

32% 13% 30% 5% 26% 13%

36% 16% 40% 11% 29% 20%

Leadership roles England coaching staff

A review after the first year of the plan’s implementation revealed that its impact had been limited (Football Association 2019b: 5): Table 2.2 Progress towards Football Association 2021 targets (as of 2019) Employee type

Category

Baseline: 2018

Now: 2019

Target: 2021

All employees

Female BAME Female BAME Female BAME

32% 13% 30% 5% 26% 13%

34% 12% 33% 6% 22% 20%

36% 16% 40% 11% 29% 20%

Leadership roles England coaching staff

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Although the target for minority ethnic England coaching staff had been met, this was achieved solely through strategic appointments of men in the men’s national set-up. In autumn 2019, minority ethnic coaches Kevin Betsy, Marcus Bignot, Jason Euell, Michael Johnson, Chris Powell and Omer Riza were appointed to work with various age categories from the senior team to under-15s. They joined existing coaches of colour Justin Cochrane and Lee Skyrme. The percentage of women employed as England coaches and the overall representation of minority ethnic staff in the organisation have both decreased since the plan was introduced. The latter, the FA claim, is a ‘temporary issue’ (ibid.). What these figures do not reveal is that there are no women of colour in England senior coaching roles. This is because the strategy fails to employ an intersectional analysis of its data (see next section). By establishing race and gender as separate categories (and, by impli­ cation if not explicitly named, racism and sexism as distinct, singular forms of oppression) it cannot recognise, let alone address, the specific adversities and exclusion of women of colour. Moreover, the homo­ genous grouping of ‘BAME’ obscures the absence of other commu­ nities of colour. The initial strategy says that ‘Over time, we will add targets for other under-represented groups’ (Football Association 2018: 5), but none were evident after the first year. Black men are therefore used to assert the organisation’s multiculture, marginalising the identities and experiences of other minorities. These disparities and the overall lack of progress highlight the diffi­ culties in implementing change in organisations that are dominated by white male leadership and personnel, values and occupational cultures. They also illustrate that what happens at the elite level of sport does not necessary trickle down to the grassroots. Race equality policies can be met with resistance (Spaaij et al. 2020) especially within county football associations, where decision-makers tend to have less lived experience of multiculture and lack understanding of the experiences of players of colour (Lusted 2009). The FA’s employment and leadership statistics do not display a unique or isolated pattern. They are symp­ tomatic of the systemic exclusion of people of colour from positions of power and influence in all the major sports governing bodies in the UK (Burdsey 2012). A 2019 report found that two-thirds of the boards of Sport England and UK Sport funded bodies had no members from minority ethnic backgrounds (Sport England/UK Sport 2019). Further afield across Europe there is an absence of people of colour in leader­ ship roles, especially women (see later in this chapter), in elite clubs, national league associations, national governing bodies and UEFA itself (Bradbury et al. 2014).

36 Club It is apparent, then, that well-intentioned equity and inclusion poli­ cies in sport can be ineffective. Some are inadequately designed and operationalised in a practical sense to demand tangible social change (Spracklen et al. 2006; Spracklen and Long 2011). Schemes such as the Premier League Equality Standard and English Football League’s Code of Practice essentially become ‘tick box’ exercises to protect them from thorough examination and critique. Success can also be inhibited by an organisation’s fundamental ideology, and the intrinsic concepts and discourses used in their strategic documentation. In this regard, a key development in the politics and practices of sport participation and governance over the past decade has been the emergence of a nomen­ clature of diversity (Burdsey 2012). It is to the use of diversity ideology that I now turn. In Pursuit of Progress reiterates a series of vague, overarching objectives that, ironically, demonstrate little evidence of advancing what the FA had previously put forward: �

� �

�

At the FA, equality, diversity and inclusion means valuing and celebrating our differences. Nurturing the right working envir­ onment and culture means everyone thrives and can be themselves. For the game, it means everyone’s welcome, ensuring differ­ ences between us do not create barriers to getting into football and staying involved. Differences can be something tangible like gender, race and ethnicity. Less obvious differences include heritage, religion, sexual orientation, unseen disabilities, family or social status and age. We believe embracing equality, diversity and inclusion makes us stronger, and better equipped to meet the challenges of the modern game. (Football Association 2018: 3)

A basic discourse analysis of these objectives highlights the use of ‘diversity’ as a key concept. It shows the related – indeed con­ sequential – absence of more critical and radical terms, such as racism, anti-racism, exclusion or social justice. This choice of vocabulary is key. It conveys the ideological position towards the management of race that underpins this strategy and it reveals, fundamentally, what the plan of action wants to (not) change. Diversity ideology represents a distinct and ostensibly progressive move away from colour-blind strategies of denial (Bonilla-Silva 2006)

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towards more ‘race-conscious’ ways of thinking and behaving. In practice, these approaches work in conjunction and are mutually rein­ forcing in their effects (Smith and Mayorga-Gallo 2017). Instead of trying to elide racial difference, diversity ideology appreciates and celebrates it. Customarily this is done in legible ways that essentialise communities and reinforce ethno-cultural stereotypes (Burdsey 2011a; Murji 2006). Diversity ideology also nominally acknowledges some aspects of contemporary structural racial inequality. It does not deflect racism as purely a thing of the past, an aberration involving incorrigi­ ble racists or the result of the predilections of minority ethnic people themselves (Mayorga-Gallo 2019). Utilising the ideology and discourse of diversity provides a palatable and non-threatening way of engaging with racial difference in con­ temporary organisational policy terms. It is, as Sara Ahmed (2019) writes, a friendly word. Thinking and speaking with the language of diversity appeal to dominant organisations, in sport and beyond. It dovetails neatly and earnestly with their inherently conventional values, and the conservative content and aspirations of their strategic equality plans. It can be expressed publically to paint a positive picture of an organisation; and, in the process, dismiss any perceived requirement for rigorous, critical appraisal of the effectiveness of their actions and the sincerity of their message. Organisations can distance themselves from complicity in the problem of racism. Indeed, they can position them­ selves as its solution rather than its source. Theoretically the emphasis on diversity can engender desirable outcomes of inclusion, equity and anti-discrimination. Well-meaning approaches of this ilk may even generate small progressive developments. In practice, however, diversity ideology rarely meets its expressed aims, creating a disconnect between principle and policy (Smith and Mayorga-Gallo 2017). Its inherent rationality fosters an institutional scenario that actually constrains what it is hoped to achieve. The foremost critiques of the language of diversity in dominant institutional discourses and practices have come from feminists of colour, who identify it as a form of power (Ahmed 2012). Sarah Mayorga-Gallo (2019: 1791) shows how this is formalised as a domi­ nant work practice, whereby whites ‘consider themselves progressive and perhaps even antiracist, yet enact practices and policies that per­ petuate systemic whiteness’. Those who support this agenda are viewed as good, anti-racist people with worthy goals; but they are able to rea­ lise their values without essentially having to ensure rightful outcomes for people of colour. As Ahmed (2012: 65) writes in her foundational critique of diversity discourses and practices in institutions, ‘diversity

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becomes identified as a more inclusive language because it does not have a necessary relation to changing organizational values’. Racialised social dynamics and authority are simultaneously obscured and strengthened, solidifying existing sources and materialisations of power rather than subverting and redistributing them. The advancement of people of colour is inhibited and the possibility of racial change is suppressed. Whiteness remains a hegemonic organisational and occu­ pational value. In diversity ideology, racial inequality is understood as being under­ pinned by absence (Mayorga-Gallo 2019). According to this logic, it will be solved by the representation of people of colour (or other min­ ority groups when appropriate). In practice this means that ‘inclusion is not about addressing power or structure, but everyone having “a seat at the table”’ (ibid: 1795). This explains the emphasis in In Pursuit of Progress on numbers and symbolic forms of representation. An illusion of diversity is created through visible inclusion in limited roles (such as the organisation’s Inclusion Advisory Board), rather than by trans­ forming occupational structures or the design and delivery of the organisation’s programmes. The FA strategy contains no plans for more radical, long-term and structural shifts around ethics, values and culture, despite the fact that these have been shown to be fundamental to creating inclusive and anti-discriminatory sports organisations (Long et al. 2005). The work of diversity becomes, then, essentially about impression management rather than social change (Ahmed 2012; Bhopal 2018). It entails creating a desired ‘right’ image and amelior­ ating any ‘incorrect’ (read: fundamentally accurate but too critical) ones. This is a matter of ‘changing perceptions of whiteness rather than changing the whiteness of organizations’ (Ahmed 2012: 34, emphasis in original). In the case of the FA and other football organisations, diversity ideology allows the subjugation of black women within its professional playing cultures to be ignored as a result of the substantive presence of black men on the pitch. This approach to inclusion shows how orga­ nisations can admit that racism is a problem somewhere and among some people in the game, while at the same time extrapolate and make claims about particular inclusions to sidestep the other problems under their jurisdiction.

Consumption and control of the black male footballing body The number of black male professional footballers in England is greater now than at any other time in history. Their names are sung by

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stands full of white supporters and adorn their replica shirts. This relationship is just one element of a historically rooted power dynamic, and the consumption of black sporting prowess occurs equally in invi­ dious, discriminatory and exploitive forms. One of these is racial ste­ reotypes. The ways that black footballers are talked and written about, and depicted visually, reflect the colonial antecedents of racism in English football (Burdsey 2018; King 2011). These frames are char­ acterised by long-established themes of racialised objectification, sex­ ualisation and dehumanisation. Racism in the modern day ‘draws selectively upon the past, present and imagined future, distilling com­ plex fears and anxieties’ (Meer and Nayak 2015: 13), and it can ‘build on – and recycle – former images and discourses’ (Alexander 2014: 1785). The vast majority of the stereotypes of black footballers that circulate in the public sphere focus on men. It is these frames that I address in this section. Gender, sexuality and masculinity are everpresent though, intersecting closely with race to subjugate and control the black male body. As the experiences of Eniola Aluko and Drew Spence make clear, black women are stereotyped in English football too, and they are ostracised when they do not fit or endorse the domi­ nant script of legibility (Neal 2013; Rand 2012). These cases form a central component of the analysis in the next chapter. Ralina Joseph (2013: 3) states that ‘racialization works by means of cultural representations, and representations actualize racialization; put another way, lived experiences of race inform representational ones, and representational race informs experience’. The content and reper­ cussions of hegemonic portrayals of black male and female sporting bodies have been well-observed and appropriately critiqued within the sociology of sport (e.g., Adjepong 2019; Boykoff and Carrington 2020; Carrington 2010; Douglas 2018; Ferber 2007; Ifekwunigwe 2009; Ismond 2003; Leonard and King 2011; Mwaniki 2017). The scope and influence of these discourses and images are especially prominent during neoliberal late-capitalism – what David Andrews (2019) refers to as the ‘uber-sport assemblage’ – with sporting blackness simulta­ neously valorised and demonised in residual and novel ways. Access to, and reproduction of, such imagery is accentuated by ‘dense transna­ tional networks of media flow and communicative connectivity that provide unprecedented possibilities to both extend and challenge racializing discourses, images, frameworks and information’ (Titley 2019: 2–3). The media play a key role in legitimising these stereotypes, on television and radio commentary, and in the writing and imagery of the popular press (van Sterkenburg and Spaaij 2015; see later in this chapter).

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The indiscriminate ascription of attributes of pace, power and muscularity to black footballers is one of the most prevalent tropes found in sports media reporting, punditry and comments by fans in stadia and online forums (see van Sterkenburg et al. 2019 for recent examples). Manchester United’s black French midfielder Paul Pogba is a case in point. As journalist Sachin Nakrani (2019a) points out, Pogba is almost identical in size and weight, and relatively similar in style, to Everton’s white Portuguese playmaker André Gomes. While the latter is widely described as possessing craft, artistry and poise, Pogba is described routinely through his physical characteristics. In exceptionally odious instances, the physicality of black players is subjected to zoomorphism and dehumanisation. Terms such as ‘beast’ are used commonly to describe the way a black male player has used strength and power to break through a defence or dominate an opponent. Limiting black players solely to their bodies and instinc­ tual rather than cerebral talent ultimately positions them concurrently as super- and sub-human. The black athlete thus becomes ‘typically exceptional’, emblematic of an essentialised category of blackness, but also beyond human in terms of stereotypical physical capacities (Carrington 2010). Some racial frames have nothing to do with football or the ability to play it whatsoever. Black men’s supposedly large penises continue to fascinate many white football fans. As Patricia Hill Collins (2005) notes, historically, ‘White elites reduced Black men to their bodies, and identified their muscles and their penises as their most important sites’. This obsession synthesises the desire, fear, objectification and control of the racialised Other that is central to the upkeep of white supremacy (Carrington 2010; hooks 1992; Yancy 2017). A queer reading of the anxieties around black male players thus shows how popular cultural practices and resources are drawn upon to protect the whiteness and hetero-patriarchy of the nation (Ferguson 2004). Bambo Diaby, Romelu Lukaku, Yerry Mina, Divock Origi and Ivan Toney, to name just a handful of examples, have all been reduced to, and maligned by, this stereotype via fans’ chants and banners (BBC Three 2020; Guar­ dian Sport 2019b; Hughes 2018; Nakrani 2017). A song about Marve­ lous Nakamba by some of his own Aston Villa supporters combined comments on his penis with a further careless homogenisation of blackness, linking the player’s father to Rastafarianism despite him coming from Zimbabwe. It even went as far as to proclaim that a white teammate was Nakamba’s ‘master’ (BBC Three 2020). A big penis is framed almost universally in popular culture as a positive masculine attribute. Outside of the necessary historical context of race, power and

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colonialism, talking about black penises can be presented as a form of admiration rather than denigration. In turn, this allows such depictions to be dismissed as not racist. Yet, essentially this discourse is about white supremacy and power, with white supporters able to discursively diminish the perceived threat of black men and their sexuality by con­ trolling their presence and value within bounded frames of reference. Alongside this captivation with aspects of black footballers’ bodies, stereotypes abound about their perceived lack of mental character or assiduousness (St. Louis 2005). Remarks by Crystal Palace chairman Ron Noades in the 1990s about black players not having the spirit to get through a cold winter and needing to be helped by ‘hard white men’ are infamous in this regard (Back et al. 2001). In 2019, Sky Sports pundit Graeme Souness made an unsubstantiated ad hominem attack on Everton’s Moise Kean. Souness insinuated that Kean had problems with his attitude, purely on the ‘evidence’ of being sold at a young age by Italian giants Juventus. Souness claimed that Kean’s ‘off­ the-field activities are not the best’ and that ‘there must be other issues there’ (cited in Independent 2019). Similar sentiments were expressed by pundit and ex-player Craig Ramage on BBC Radio Derby’s Sportscene podcast the following year. ‘When I look at certain players, their body language, their stance, the way they act, you just feel, hold on a minute, he needs pulling down a peg or two,’ claimed Ramage. ‘So I’d probably say that about all the young black lads,’ he continued, ‘when you are struggling for form, you are going through a sticky patch, it’s about going back to basics, working hard, and doing the right things’ (cited in BBC Sport 2020b). Oftentimes, racism draws explicitly on colonial histories and other global locations through the denigration of Africa and African players. For instance, British entrepreneur Lord Sugar tweeted a crass photo­ graphic comparison between the Senegal men’s national team and vendors on a Marbella beachfront, while BBC pundit Martin Keown likened Nigeria’s Ahmed Musa to a gazelle during a match commen­ tary (Yeku 2018). Discourses of African ‘primitiveness’ and ‘unabated emotion’, in contrast to supposed European development and control, reared their heads as well during the 2019 Women’s World Cup. After England beat Cameroon, England manager Phil Neville was asked by a television interviewer to comment on his opponents’ on-field protests following a series of contentious refereeing decisions throughout the match. Neville declared that he was ‘completely and utterly ashamed of [them]’, while maintaining that his (nearly all white) team had ‘kept their concentration fantastically’ (cited in Gibbs 2019). British tabloid newspaper headlines screamed disgrace and shame, and in a

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repugnantly insensitive framing of blackness and mental health, label­ led the players ‘Camerloons’ (ibid.). Racial stereotypes are reproduced through pictorial as well as textual representations. In 2019, Manchester City’s Bernardo Silva tweeted an old photograph of his black team-mate Benjamin Mendy as a child. Next to Mendy was an image of the figure used by the Spanish Con­ guitos brand (literally ‘little people from the Congo’) of chocolate covered peanuts: a simplistically drawn, small, brown man with no clothes on, and accentuated eyes and lips. The caption on Silva’s tweet read: ‘Guess who?’ Predictably the mitigation machine came into full effect. Time-honoured defences of perceived misinterpretation and misunderstanding were rolled out (Burdsey 2014), together with ‘evi­ dence’ of Silva’s putative cosmopolitanism and affection for people of colour. The Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola stated that: Bernardo is one of the most lovely people I ever met in my life. An exceptional person. A guy who can speak five languages. It’s because he’s open-minded – nothing about the colour of the skin, nationalities or whatever. One of his best friends is Mendy. He’s like a brother for him. (cited in Liew 2019) Guardiola added that, ‘It was just a joke. It’s a cartoon and the face is quite similar. The same happened a thousand million times with white people’ (cited in Jackson 2019a). Only it has not. White sportspeople are simply not stereotyped in this way. This averred universality of racial framing symbolises what Miri Song (2014: 108) refers to as a ‘culture of racial equivalence’, whereby varied and unrelated forms of racialised contact and communication are awarded an inherent simi­ larity. Emphasis on the cartoon attempts to make the act innocent and innocuous, despite the fact that caricatures are fundamental to how racial signifiers are embedded in everyday consumption (Pitcher 2014). The claim that the tweet was ‘just a joke’ absolves the teller of delib­ erately causing offence and places the burden on others for ‘mis­ interpreting’ their intentions. More importantly, it exonerates the act as not really racism, clarifying that the protagonist is, thus, not really a racist. This episode also shows how (other) black footballers can be com­ promised through the expectation that they will refute accusations of racism against their teammates. Raheem Sterling, for instance, was widely quoted as defending Silva. Clubs, as collective organisations that are required to ‘stick together’, are thus key to upholding systemic

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racism, by restricting what their players can say publicly about their internal operations with regard to race. In fact, players of colour can face a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ scenario, as evidenced in the backlash to Ashley Cole’s refutation of John Terry’s racism in 2011 (Burdsey 2014). The meanings attached to the black athlete have been struggled over and contested continuously throughout modern times, resulting in multifarious, blurred and often contradictory social representations. As Carrington (2010: 2) points out, black sportspeople have been regarded as ‘submissive and threatening, often obedient, occasionally rebellious, revolting and in revolt, political and compromised, a commodity and commodified’. In my own experiences of fandom, the hero worship of players such as Joseph Yobo and Yakubu Aiyegbeni has occurred directly through or alongside the denigration of their blackness and Africanness. I have heard frames of ‘beastliness’ and ‘laziness’ used at many matches, nearly always in relation to black players. Incredibly, in some cases they have been directed towards the same player, in the same match, from the same supporter. The inconsistency of these con­ structions reflects what Stuart Hall (1981: 41) labels the ‘double vision of the white eye’. The reproduction of racist stereotypes about black bodies and minds in football has harmful consequences. It attaches to the re-emergence and creeping revalidation of a colonially embedded racial science, unpicked forensically in Angela Saini’s (2019) superb book Superior. Although the frames examined here are found primarily on the sta­ dium terraces, within internet forums and in the media, racial stereo­ typing spreads much more widely and deeply within the game, including clubs’ recruitment and selection of players and coaches. In 2018, the FA suspended Tony Henry, West Ham United’s director of player recruitment, after he was revealed to have expressed his reluc­ tance to sign any more African players because ‘they can have a bad attitude’ and ‘cause mayhem’ when not in the team (Austin 2018). In 2019, Paris Saint-Germain were fined 100,000 euros for racially profil­ ing players, with scouts requested to categorise players as ‘French’, ‘North African’, ‘black African’ or ‘West Indian’ (BBC Sport 2019f). The action was deemed illegal under French law, specifically the pro­ hibition of collecting ethnic data. While no proof was found of the policy being used for discriminatory purposes, it does not take a huge leap of imagination to consider how it might have played out inequi­ tably in recruitment practices. These classifications also give succour to the notion pedalled by the Far-Right party Rassemblement National that people of colour are ‘not really French’ (see Chapter 3). This case

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followed a similar controversy, almost a decade earlier, in the French national set-up. Proposals were uncovered that would limit black and Arab players to 30 per cent of those recruited by the Fédération Française de Football into its youth development system. The raciali­ sation of physicality and playing approach was again apparent. The federation claimed that ‘reducing the number of minorities would allow a change in “the style of play” of French national sides – one away from an emphasis on tall, powerful, and fast players towards a pre­ ference for those with better ball technique and strategic minds’ (cited in Crumley 2011, see also Goldblatt 2019). It would be naïve to think such protocols do not exist elsewhere. Colin King (2011) provides a powerful critique of the processes by which African footballers are scouted, developed and transferred to European clubs. His analysis demonstrates how football’s talent identification systems reproduce specific features of the transatlantic slave period, namely the exploita­ tion and commodification of the black body, the underdevelopment of African societies and the (forced) migration of black footballers. The outcome is the accumulation of sporting prowess below the market value and the generation of profit for largely white-owned football clubs in Europe.

Intersections of race and gender in women’s football The 2019 Women’s World Cup was a major catalyst for the latest phase of development in English women’s football. Although England fin­ ished some way below the team’s own expectations in fourth place (and has struggled since that competition), coverage of every tournament match on the BBC – across its various terrestrial and digital plat­ forms – gave the women’s game an unprecedented level of visibility and status. In the season that followed, domestic football went from strength to strength. WSL games were held for the first time at male clubs’ stadiums, with local derby fixtures in Liverpool, London and Manchester pulling in large crowds. Over 38,000 supporters attended the game between Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. The Eng­ land–Germany international at Wembley Stadium drew nearly 78,000 spectators, the largest gathering for a women’s match in this country to date. Matches are now televised/streamed live every weekend by BBC, BT Sport and the FA, and the BBC screens its own dedicated pro­ gramme, The Women’s Football Show. Several negative elements have come to the fore too. These include a lack of duty of care given to injured players (Wrack 2019a) and the infiltration of offensive terrace chants grounded in male football

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rivalries (Wrack 2019b). Racism, on the other hand, has received very little attention. This can be explained partly by the fact that racism evidently does not occur on the scale of English men’s professional football, in terms of its overt public expression on the pitch or in the stadium. It can also be attributed to the ideological structures of whiteness that permeate the women’s game (as well as the men’s), which materialise in a failure to think intersectionally about female footballer’s identities and acknowledge multiple oppressions in relation to gendered discrimination. As Aarti Ratna (2017) argues: as girls and women are often fighting for the right to play football, and to be taken seriously in a traditionally male pastime, sexism seems to trump racism. But this does not mean racism (and/or other forms of discrimination) do not exist in relation to sexism. In an interview on talkSPORT radio, Claire Rafferty (playing at the time for West Ham United) was asked if she thought that there was racism in women’s football. ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I think it exists in every game and I think we’d be naïve to say it doesn’t’ (cited in Moore 2019). Similarly, Danielle Carter of Arsenal reflected that, ‘I think we’re trying to distance ourselves from the men’s game and for us to now be under that same umbrella, that same brush as the men’s game, I think it’s a real shame for the women’s sport’ (cited in Sky Sports News 2019a). In 2019, Sheffield United forward Sophie Jones was found guilty by an Independent Regulatory Commission of racially abusing Tottenham Hotspur’s Renee Hector. In addition, the commission ruled that Jones lied to ‘conceal wrongdoing’ (BBC Sport 2019c). She was banned for five matches but immediately retired after her contract was terminated by mutual consent. The repercussions for Hector were severe. She spoke of experiencing depression in the aftermath; and she detailed the abuse she received on social media, which included pictures of baby gorillas, comments about her weight, and accusations that she had ‘played the race card’ (BBC Three 2020; Gornall and Magowan 2019). This rhetoric is used in football (and other institutions) to silence and devalue the experiences of player of colour. It insinuates that black players disingenuously invoke race as a characteristic of their plight, and use it as a barrier to acknowledging alternative, deracialised interpretations (Burdsey 2014). The backlash against Hector shows how black women are positioned outside the category of human (Joseph 2013), seen both as possessing an unfair advantage in sport and imper­ vious to the pain of racist discourses and images. The inclusion of

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female players of colour in English professional football remains condi­ tional and subject to the control of sport’s white gatekeepers, both women and men. This applies to their participation and sense of belonging, and the capacity for their voices to be heard and validated as authoritative interlocutors on their occupational condition. At the beginning of 2020, global superstar Sam Kerr, a player of Indian and white Australian heritage – who was voted the best in the world in 2019 by The Guardian newspaper and The Offside Rule website (Laverty 2019) – made her debut for Chelsea Women. This sug­ gests that English women’s football is gradually beginning to replicate the global migratory player routes and recruitment practices of the men’s Premier League. The WSL is still some way off the multicultural demographic of the men’s game. Fadumo Olow of I Think She’s Off­ side podcast and journalist Melissa Reddy connect this scenario to the dearth of minority ethnic women in the England national team (see Chapter 3). These commentators argue that the future grassroots development of minority ethnic girls will be inhibited if they do not see women from their communities at elite level (Sky Sports News 2019d). This is essentially a matter of representation, but it is also about who is permitted to personify the national game. Like men’s football, the women’s game excludes people of colour from coaching roles and institutional positions of power. For example, no people of minority ethnic background were elected to the 12-person board of governance, announced by the FA in 2019, to work on the strategic direction of the WSL. This calls into question the stated intentions of the FA in In Pursuit of Progress. Leadership consultant Michelle Moore describes this omission as a ‘staggering but unfortu­ nately unsurprising… lack of understanding’ (cited in Tomas 2019). Baroness Young of Hornsey states that ‘these appointments appear to confirm the widely held view that sports governing bodies really do think they can get away with paying lip service to the diversity and inclusion mantra’ (ibid.). A 2014 report identified no women of colour in senior roles in elite clubs or national governing bodies across Europe, and none in UEFA itself. The only exceptions made up 0.2 per cent of senior governance roles in national league associations (Brad­ bury et al. 2014: 7). Two-thirds of senior coaching positions in women’s national senior, under-19 and under-17 teams were held by white men. The remainder of positions were held by white women. There were no minority ethnic women employed in these capacities whatsoever (ibid.: 12). Interviewees cited a lack of role models and the negative experi­ ences of their predecessors, plus experiences of racism in the coach education and employment environment (ibid.: 12–13). The hegemony

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of white men and the exclusion of people of colour is apparent in women’s football as well as men’s. These exclusions are confronted, at least symbolically, through developments involving women of colour in wider popular culture. The opening titles for the BBC’s coverage of the 2019 Women’s World Cup centred around Ms Banks, a British rapper of Nigerian and Ugandan heritage, performing a version of US hip-hop outfit Fort Minor’s ‘Remember the Name’. Reflecting its multiracial, ‘urban’ advertising aesthetic, JD Sports turned to pop and R’n’B star Ella Eyre to promote the sale of the England replica kit for the tourna­ ment. Likewise, classic British football manufacturer Umbro chose Leigh-Anne Pinnock from the pop group Little Mix to showcase its 1990s-inspired X sportswear collection. Footballer and songwriter Chelcee Grimes presented Match of the Day spin-off show MOTDx, while sisters Mollie and Rosie Kmita moved effortlessly from playing to media careers on Women’s World Cup 606 and Match of the Day. Alex Scott has made the most notable transition from player to pundit, becoming a mainstay of men’s and women’s football cov­ erage on BBC and Sky Sports. Opposition to the racialised and gen­ dered hegemony of sports media is frequently resisted though (see later in this chapter). Alongside Eniola Aluko, Scott’s role in TV coverage of the 2018 men’s World Cup received totally unwarranted criticism, from some male pundits and on social media. Tellingly, this discrimination was interpreted through a routine frame of sexism (see, e.g., Woodward 2018), rather than an intersectional lens of gendered racism. The experiences of minority ethnic women and girls in English football, as players and in other roles, require interpretation through an intersectional analytical lens (Ratna 2017, 2018). The concept of intersectionality emerged from black feminisms in response to conven­ tional framings that interpreted the oppression of women of colour in relation to singular subjectivities and experiences, and as the result of discrete social processes and forms of power (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). As Sumi Cho and colleagues observe, intersectionality: was introduced in the late 1980s as a heuristic term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social move­ ment politics. It exposed how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice. (Cho et al. 2013: 787)

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Addressing sport, Ratna and Samie (2018: 1) note that ‘the critical use of intersectional thinking, as advanced by scholars of colour more broadly, has helped to uncover and critically analyse the multiple rea­ lities of ethnic “Other” women’. In the present context – as is made evident in this book, both in women’s and men’s football – intersec­ tional thinking illuminates the connections and tensions between race and, among other things, ethnicity, nation, gender, sexuality and mas­ culinity (and its applicability lies in areas beyond the scope of this book, such as disability, too [Kuppan 2018]). As Joseph (2013: 4–5) contends, ‘Gender is not a floating additive characteristic… it is an essential intersectional category that structures and restructures race, as well as other imbricated categories, such as class and sexuality… gen­ dered identity helps racialized identity become operative, and vice versa’. I acknowledge that my endorsement of an intersectional framework is possibly contentious. My own racial and gendered identity, posi­ tionality and power are far removed from the backstories of the women of colour who have forged its necessary establishment and continue its development today. To be more candid, my subjectivity as a white man embodies and reflects the source of their subjugation and marginalisation, together with others in their communities, in acade­ mia, sport and society. I strive to use an intersectional framework productively, reflexively and accountably throughout this book: to cri­ tique the design and implementation of organisational equity and inclusion strategies, to illustrate the nuanced racialisation of black male footballers in popular stereotypes, and to expose the racial exclusions in leadership and governance in women’s and men’s football (outlined above); and to analyse the experiences of players such as Eniola Aluko and Drew Spence (along with Hector), together with the configurations of gender, race and nation in women’s football more generally (see Chapter 3). In doing so, I centre the experiential knowl­ edge, struggles and achievements of black women footballers, not as ‘prototypical intersectional subjects whose experiences of marginality are imagined to provide a theoretical value-added’ (Nash 2008: 8, emphasis in original), but to shed light on and trouble the particular racialised and gender power dynamics found in elite English football.

Challenging racism in the stands through a fandom of progressive politics As I began writing this book, I attended a benefit concert for antiracist organisation Hope Not Hate at Islington Assembly Hall in London. Headliner Billy Bragg performed an acoustic version of one

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of my favourite songs in his repertoire, the near 30-year-old ‘The Few’. Introducing the song and restating its meaning – its lyrics refer to the belligerent xenophobia of some English football supporters – Bragg spoke gravely about the threat of new right-wing football ‘fan’ organi­ sations, the Football Lads Alliance (FLA) and its offshoot the Demo­ cratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA). At a time when organised Far Right activity within football crowds is largely displaced discursively elsewhere in Europe (see Chapter 1), Bragg provided a pertinent remin­ der of the threats posed by racism, Islamophobia and neo-fascism in English football. According to Chris Allen (2019: 639), the FLA and DFLA ‘self­ describe as street-protest movements that encourage rival “football firms” to reject acrimonious hostilities to unite against the extremism and extremists it believes threatens Britain, its culture, values and way of life’. In 2019, the media reported DFLA activity among supporter groups at Crystal Palace and West Ham United, and a youth coach at the latter club was exposed as having attended one of the organisation’s marches in London (D. Gayle 2019; Steinberg 2019b). This follows a long history of (neo-)fascists’ attempts to infiltrate supporter groups in English football, stretching back to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Colin Jordan’s White Defence League (Garland and Rowe 2001). As has been the case over the past 40 years, contemporary racist and Islamophobic movements have been opposed by grassroots sup­ porter organisations, such as Football Lads and Lasses Against Fas­ cism (BBC News 2019). As sociologically significant as such developments are, my interest here lies primarily with the articulation of racism and forms of resis­ tance among ‘ordinary’ fans, in and around stadia, rather than within the activities of organised neo-fascist and anti-racist collectives. I make this distinction to reiterate that racism is not epiphenomenal to foot­ ball (Back et al. 2001; Gilroy 1987), but is central to its operation. Moreover, I argue that meaningful opposition requires racism to be rejected and made unwelcome in stadia by the currently silent majority, not just dedicated, progressive activists. In the early 1990s, when Eng­ lish football’s dominant institutions looked the other way, a small number of grassroots fan groups, primarily white and often with backgrounds in trade union and/or anti-discriminatory politics else­ where, took the lead in fighting racism at their clubs. They challenged overt racism on the terraces, disrupted the sale of Far Right publica­ tions outside grounds, and produced their own fanzines with a distinct anti-racist ethos, such as Everton’s When Skies are Grey (Bradbury 2011; Thomas 2011; see Chapter 1 of this book). What is now a

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national, institutionalised anti-racist movement was, then, moulded in individual clubs and local fan bases. Without these groups, the political climate and momentum for initiatives such as Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card to emerge would not have been possible. Although they may be supportive of its fundamental ideology and message, anti-racist politics are marginal to the identities and procliv­ ities of the majority of supporters today. Re-forming this relationship is one of our key challenges for the contemporary period. English foot­ ball would, I argue, benefit from the (re)establishment of an organic, inclusive and pragmatic anti-racism. This would operate in conjunction and dialogue with – but critically also outside and beyond – the topdown, bureaucratic structures of institutionalised anti-racism, from which the ‘average’ fan is increasingly alienated. To take on racism effectively, supporters do not just need to be involved in the move­ ment – we need to be at its forefront. As the source of one of its most prominent manifestations, suppor­ ters largely represent the ‘public’ face of racism in English professional football. This is portrayal that, as I noted in the previous chapter, football’s authorities are content to reinforce, for it diverts critique from their own in/actions. The banana skin thrown at Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang at the Emirates Stadium, and the experiences of players who were abused by supporters in matches at Forest Green Rovers, Haringey Borough, Hartlepool United and Tottenham Hotspur, all drew attention in 2019 (BBC Three 2020). These incidents are sadly not uncommon. Racist remarks can be heard in stadia up and down the country every week. In recent years, I have witnessed a supporter goading a group of white Leicester City fans with a reference to their city’s large South Asian population: unlike them, he proclaimed, he did not live ‘in a town full of P***s’. On a different occasion in Leicester someone described Islam Slimani, an Algerian Muslim, as ‘a bomber’. At a match at Chelsea I heard a man instruct two of the home side’s black players, Willian Borges da Silva and Loïc Rémy, to ‘get back on the jam jar’ – a reference to the Golly dolls historically printed on the labels of the Robertson’s brand of preserves. He subsequently proposed that the players should be put in a ring of tyres and burned. At the end of his vile pronouncement, the man announced confrontationally, ‘Has anyone got a problem with that?’ In hindsight, I can picture a Sparta­ cus style moment, where more and more fans stand up, one by one, and respond, ‘Yes, I have’. The racist is then forced to leave the stand by the self-policing of the crowd. Of course, that was not the case. Such an absence of opposition inexorably ensures racial complicity. As Robin DiAngelo (2012: 5) argues, ‘when white silence follows a

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particularly problematic move made by a white participant, that silence supports the move by offering no interruption; in essence, white silence operates as a normative mechanism for these tactics’. Racist hate crimes such as these amalgamate with other problematic aspects of terrace culture, such as the stereotyping of black players described earlier in this chapter, to make football stadia routinely unwelcoming environments for fans of colour (ITV 2020). Research I undertook with Kuljit Randhawa established why British Asians, as the focus of that particular study, feel excluded from English grounds. Along with factors that would affect anyone regardless of ethnicity, such as work and family commitments, and the cost and availability of tickets, perceptions and/or previous experiences of racism were an overriding factor inhibiting attendance. Interviewees referred to an atmosphere of aggressive white masculinity, usually fuelled by alcohol and sometimes recreational drugs, which makes the stadium a very uncomfortable space (Burdsey and Randhawa 2012). Similar findings have emerged in subsequent studies (Lavigueur 2018; Lawrence and Davis 2019). Football stadia are becoming slowly more ethnically diverse, especially those in London and other metropolitan locations (Burdsey and Randhawa 2012). Bradford City, Derby County, Sun­ derland and Wolverhampton Wanderers have official British Asian fan clubs (Kilvington 2017), and West Ham United launched BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) Hammers in early 2020. Sky Sports reported the emergence of a British Asian England supporters’ group after the 2018 men’s World Cup (Trehan 2019). However, live specta­ torship is still an overwhelmingly white and male activity. Many min­ ority ethnic fans consequently choose to watch and consume football in a variety of alternative spheres and spaces, from cafés to digital streams and internet forums (Burdsey and Randhawa 2012). Fan power has been shown to facilitate forms of progressive politics in the stadium and beyond (Cleland et al. 2018). In the run-up to the 2019 General Election, Liverpool supporters could be heard singing ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’ at a Champions League match in Salzburg. At around the same time, in response to an iteration by Manchester United supporters of the tiresome Christmas-time chant of ‘Feed the Scousers’, Everton fans mocked their opponents with the response of ‘Tory, Tory Man United’. Some supporters are prepared to mobilise and articulate, in person or online, their concerns over broader racial injustices in football, especially when they affect their own clubs. For instance, several West Ham United fans publicly opposed the club’s signing of Lee Bowyer in 2003. Bowyer had once assaulted a British Asian employee at a McDonald’s restaurant. He was acquitted of the

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racially aggravated assault of a young British Asian man, Sarfraz Najeib, in Leeds in 2000, although the player later agreed an out-of­ court settlement with the victim (Burdsey 2007a). Similarly, the 2014 appointment of Malky Mackay as manager of Wigan Athletic was criticised by some of the club’s followers, as he had sent sexist, racist and homophobic text messages while employed at a previous club (Herbert 2014). At my own club, Everton, anti-racism initiatives have come primarily from the fans, with the banner supporting Moise Kean organised by The County Road Bobblers supporter group the latest prominent example (see previous chapter). These protests are more than just symbolic acts. They signify fans’ struggles to exhibit a degree of control over the meanings and reputations attached to their clubs, and are part of their broader efforts to promote more expansive and inclusive visions of which communities these institutions are seen to represent. Standing up to a racist in situ is a different matter entirely. Fandom, like all other aspects of the game, is a source and site of power, based on race, gender and class (among other) subjectivities. Confronting bigots head-on can be a frightening and dangerous matter. It is made even more difficult by the fact that, without appropriate institutional support structures in place, anti-racism in the stadium has been essen­ tially reduced to an individual act. It is certainly easier for those people whose identities reflect the dominant demographic of the crowd – white males – to publically oppose racism, with fans of colour under­ standably anxious about how their difference might compromise their presence even more and lead them to become the target for (further) personal abuse. One might assume that crowd stewards can control the problem to some extent, but they lack any real power to prevent pre­ judicial behaviours. Indeed, encounters between fans and stewards are, in my experience, one of the key fault lines of racialised conflict – usually verbal but sometimes involving physical violence – in stadia. At many clubs, the majority of stewards (as well as refreshment opera­ tives) are from minority ethnic backgrounds. For some fans, especially when visiting opposition stadia, this presents a challenge to their racialised power that is too much to take, and they feel they have to actively reassert white authority and control of the terraces by abusing and intimidating the very people who are there to help them. If the fight against racism in the stands is to be won, fans as emblems of communities must be positioned at the forefront of this work. We have the numbers to make a difference. History tells us that fighting for social justice is often most successful when it is organic, popular and involves a bottom-up approach; an anti-racism that is

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cultural as much as institutional. The often ‘silent’ majority of sup­ porters must be engaged and empowered, and made to feel comfor­ table and supported by the authorities when speaking out. Those of us that can must take the mantle on behalf of those that cannot. We need to override the tribal ethos of football that blinkers some supporters to the problems at their own clubs. We are no less committed or loyal to the team if we speak out against our fellow fans. The self-regulation of the terraces can become an opportunity, rather than a threat. This to not to deny or underplay the responsibility of professional clubs, the FA, the Premier League, Women’s Super League and UEFA for one minute. Their role in leading the fight against racism is unquestionable. They have the power and institutional clout to enforce the penalties that could make a difference, but they are clearly reticent at present to fully enact their rhetoric. We cannot afford to wait for them. Fans are the lifeblood of English football. It is our game. We have an important role to play in creating a popular politics of anti-racism, where multiculture, anti-discrimination and inter-racial solidarity are represented off the pitch as much as on it.

‘You attack him, you attack us all’: racism and anti-racism in sport and social media On the evening after the Bulgaria versus England men’s international in October 2019, BBC Radio 5 Live hosted a phone-in show about the events at the match in Sofia. Play had been halted twice, under the protocol of the European governing body UEFA, due to racist beha­ viour by sections of the home support. It was reported that some Bul­ garian journalists had refuted the seemingly incontrovertible evidence of racism in the stadium. The radio presenter Sarah Brett put it to one of the studio guests, Sun journalist Neil Custis, that problematic approaches to race in the mass media were not unique to this cultural context. Racism by the British press, Brett posited, was also part of the wider problem surrounding football. An angry and incredulous Custis disputed any connection. Essentially replicating and validating the silencing of racism by his Bulgaria counterparts, Custis refused to dis­ cuss the matter any further and shut the conversation down immediately. Custis’ repudiation was patently at odds with the public proclama­ tions of Raheem Sterling, who had previously spoken eruditely and authoritatively about how the British media – sports or otherwise – re/ produce racist and anti-migrant narratives. In an Instagram post at the end of 2018, Sterling uploaded screenshots of two stories published

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earlier that year on the Daily Mail website. A different young Man­ chester City teammate, Tosin Adarabioyo and Phil Foden, provided the focus of each feature, both of which reported the players’ generosity in purchasing houses for their respective mothers. The headlines, angles and tones were, however, contrasting. Adarabioyo is black and Foden is white. The discourse racialised the players in very different ways. Sterling made the following observations: Good morning I just want to say, I am not normally the person to talk a lot but when I think I need my point to [be] heard I will speak up. Regarding what was said at the Chelsea game [an incident of racist abuse towards him] as you can see by my reaction I just had to laugh because I don’t expect no better. For example you have two young players starting out there [sic] careers both play for the same team, both have done the right thing. Which is buy a new house for there [sic] mothers who have put in a lot of time and love into helping them get where they are, but look how the news papers get there [sic] message across for the young black player and then for the young white payer [sic]. I think this in [sic] unacceptable both innocent have not done a thing wrong but just by the way it has been worded. This young black kid is looked at in a bad light. Which helps fuel racism an [sic] aggressive behaviour, so for all the news papers that don’t understand why people are racist in this day and age all i [sic] have to say is have a second thought about fair publicity an [sic] give all players an equal chance. (cited in Fifield 2018) Various white sports journalists reflected earnestly on the points raised in Sterling’s post. Others buried their heads in the sand, steadfastly denying their contribution and blame. Worse, some resorted to dis­ courses of the ‘uppity’ black footballer who did not ‘know his place’. Ex-professional player Stan Collymore (2018), one of the most cri­ tical, experiential voices on race and English football, highlighted what he perceived as journalists’ double standards: So yes, we have a race problem in this country and it’s nice to see so many people acknowledge that. Especially all the white middle‑class men who work in the national, mainstream media who simply couldn’t wait to get on Twitter on Sunday and tell the world how they feel Sterling’s pain and how it’s time to ease not only that pain but the pain of all young black people in this country. Yet how much do you want to bet that, come Monday morning,

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this will all be forgotten by those same people? They’ll move on to the next story, feeling they’ve done their bit, while in truth they have done nothing at all. Romelu Lukaku offered a similar critique in a video post for the play­ ers’ website OTRO. Condemning the media’s portrayal of black play­ ers, its influence on societal racism and the duplicity of certain journalists, he declared ‘you all know who you are’ (Guardian Sport 2019c). In addition, following the troubling decision of Italian news­ paper Corriere dello Sport to headline an article about him and Roma’s Chris Smalling ‘Black Friday’, Lukaku pointed out that ‘You guys [the media] keep fuelling the negativity and the racism issue’. Smalling called for the publication’s editors to ‘understand the power they pos­ sess’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019l). As Ben Carrington (2011: 85–6) argues, the sports/media complex possesses ‘an important role – a role arguably more powerful than any other social institution – in the ideological transmission of ideas about race: [it] becomes the modality through which popular ideas about race are lived’. The mainstream sports media is in need of fundamental transfor­ mation. Progressive changes are required in terms of personnel, repre­ sentation and ‘voice’. Current statistics on the employment of minority ethnic people are damning and demonstrate the overbearing whiteness of the industry. A recent Black Collective of Media in Sport (BCOMS) (2019: 5) report examined 338 roles in broadcast and written media related to several sporting mega-events in 2018. Only 32 individuals in these positions were people of colour. Just five of them did not have a professional sports background. This highlights the limited career pathways into the sports media for those outside the existing frame­ works and networks of sport, suggesting that minority ethnic journal­ ists and pundits are recruited on account of their sporting experience rather than their analytical skills. Across 109 newspaper roles in the study, there were no women of colour. At the FIFA men’s World Cup, there was only one black writer out of 63 roles. BCOMS’ Leon Mann sets out a challenge to colleagues in the industry, proposing poignantly to journalists: ‘don’t just report on the change, be the change’ (Mann 2019). The organisation recommends: � �

A set of values to be adopted by all media outlets for reporting on race and BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) sports people, drawn up with BCOMS Set targets on the diversity of all sports desks and departments across newspapers and broadcasting

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Publicly acknowledge the challenge ahead with full transparency on BAME pay gap in the sports media and sharing BAME employment statistics to monitor progress Ensure there is diversity on all interview panels for jobs across the media Paid internships for BAME journalists at all national media outlets A firm commitment to put a stop to expert panels for TV and radio programmes, as well as in newspapers, with no diversity Media outlets to develop their own in house exec/junior talent scheme to attract applicants from diverse backgrounds and to increase/champion a greater cultural and ethnic diversity in sports media, in collaboration with BCOMS and/or other relevant organisations.

These are encouraging and timely proposals. Other positive devel­ opments include organic, minority ethnic fan-led media, such as AFTV (Arsenal) and The Asian Kop (Liverpool). Platforms like these are resisting traditional forms of reporting, and represent incipient moves towards more democratic and racially-inclusive forms of digital football coverage. The BCOMS statement demands that we do not just consider the ‘end product’ of the story or accompanying image in our analysis of sports coverage. It speaks to the very heart of the racialised systems, structures and occupational cultures of the sports media industry itself. Vaishali Bhardwaj, a sports journalist and reporter, offers a similarly critical evaluation, underscoring the importance of addressing produc­ tion and the necessity of shaking up the systemic whiteness (and patri­ archy) of the power elites who hold decision-making positions (Sky Sports News 2019c). The need to explore structures of racism in the media and cultural industries, and specifically to direct critique towards the role of racialised, institutional production values, is articulated compellingly by Anamik Saha (2018) in his groundbreaking book Race and the Cultural Industries. Saha demonstrates that the existing aca­ demic orthodoxy in cultural and media studies is to focus on the politics of representation, ‘resulting in the proclivity to treat the text – whether a film, a book, a television programme or a piece of music – in isolation, as though it sprung directly out of the imagination of the author’ (ibid: 6). As a corrective, Saha calls for ‘recognition of how such texts are a product of the cultural industries and also of rationalized and standar­ dized industrial processes that determine the way that the text appears at the point of consumption’ (ibid.). Addressing the issues that Raheem Sterling and others speak about requires a recognition of systemic

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racism in the media industry. Change can only be achieved via a fun­ damental overhaul of its power dynamics, recruitment structures, and practical and occupational mechanisms. In one of the most notable developments of the past few years in this area, social media platforms, especially Twitter, have been used increasingly to express racism towards/about players of colour. As Hayley Bennett and Anna Jönsson (2017) outline, not only is the scale of abuse huge, but online discrimination is also generally more tar­ geted, and the words used frequently more offensive, than in ‘face-to­ face’ social encounters. ‘Nowadays,’ summarises journalist Musa Okwonga (2019), ‘racist messages can be fired at black football players with the precision of missiles.’ Poe Johnson (2020: 170) theorises this development as a particular configuration of power, control and casti­ gation that he labels ‘remediated lynching’. This operates as ‘an ideo­ logical practice and a tool wielded by white sports fans to discipline black athletes who, because of their wealth and fame, [are] out of their reach’ (ibid.: 171). There have been widespread calls for tightened regulation of social media platforms (MacInnes 2019). The response of social media and football authorities alike has been characteristically weak. Daniel Kilvington and John Price (2019: 76) identify ‘systematic failings in their efforts’, arguing that ‘the structures, policies, and cultures of some of football’s key organisations and clubs have, at times, undermined attempts to tackle this racism and, at others, actively prevented it’. These authors, along with the practice-based observations of Bennett and Jönsson (2017), highlight various institutional obstacles to con­ fronting and punishing these online hate crimes: an absence of clear policies and guidelines; and ineffective coordination and collaboration between key agencies, including clubs, governing bodies and the media platforms themselves. For instance, instead of undertaking any proac­ tive, anti-discrimination activity, Twitter stated that it would ‘monitor’ the accounts of 50 black footballers (Rathborn 2019). It is easy and more convenient for these organisations to shift responsibility rather than take it on. Moreover, like the dominant framing of racism analysed in the previous chapter, some have an interest in locating the problem through the prism of the externalised lone racist ‘keyboard warrior’, as this denies any structural underpinning and lessens the requirement for an institutional response from within professional football. This failure by elites to exercise their power in clamping down on social media racism is, in effect, an abuse of this self-same authority. In April 2019, the PFA offered its own take on the situation, coor­ dinating a 24-hour boycott of social media under the hashtag

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#Enough. Offering some brief practical guidance, the players’ union advised its members made the following statement on their accounts: #Enough We are making a stand against racist abuse. We recognise that our platforms come with responsibility, and so we are using our voice to stand against racist abuse. Together, we are calling on social media platforms and footballing bodies to do more! (Professional Footballers’ Association 2019) Several footballers, of different ethnicities, signed up in support. Many others, sometimes younger ones, but all with enduring experience of racial abuse, were more critical. They either refused to endorse the boycott or offered lukewarm support. Eniola Aluko (2019a) argued that ‘we will get nowhere with platitudes and press releases’. Marcus Rashford stated that the campaign ‘doesn’t change anything’ (cited in Hunter 2019). Raheem Sterling pointed out that ‘it is a social media post that will happen for one day. In two days’ time it will all be for­ gotten about’ (cited in BBC Sport 2019j). Stan Collymore questioned the PFA’s motives, accusing them of putting on ‘a 24-hour campaign to make some people feel good about themselves’ (cited in Taylor 2019). The boycott did little to lessen the abuse of players on social media, and a number were actually targeted further (Press Association 2019a). Some took to Twitter to challenge the racists head on. After the racial abuse of Manchester United’s Paul Pogba, his team-mate Harry Maguire called out ‘pathetic trolls’. Marcus Rashford’s comment was perhaps most poignant: ‘Enough now, this needs to stop Twitter. United is a family. Paul Pogba is a huge part of that family. You attack him, you attack us all’ (cited in Jackson 2019b).

Left on the sidelines: structures and cultures of systemic racial exclusion Inclusion and exclusion are not binary positions. There will be oscilla­ tions towards either category or embodiment of both over time and space. Some of the minority ethnic communities once kept out of English professional football are now afforded participation in its mainstream structures and cultures. This inclusion remains condi­ tional, limited to certain roles and does not exempt these communities from discrimination or racial stereotyping (see earlier in this chapter). Moreover, a degree of progress for some groups and in some aspects

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can obscure and vindicate – in that it is actively used by clubs and authorities for this very purpose – the exclusion of other communities of colour. The institutional whiteness of professional football is resi­ lient and the game shifts constantly to maintain white supremacy. In direct contrast to multiethnic representation on the pitch, spectators remain overwhelmingly white, male and abled-bodied (and increasingly middle-class). The absence of minority ethnic board members, high-level administrative leads and officials continues to be a major institutional failing of English football. The game has also been found especially wanting in improving the involvement of British Asians in all aspects of the game, and in appointing black managers and coaches. Having focused on governance roles earlier in this chapter, it is to these latter areas that I now turn. I do not intend to reiterate fully here my contribution to research on British Asian footballers over the past two decades (I direct readers to, for instance, Burdsey 2007a; Randhawa and Burdsey 2018). I do, how­ ever, wish to establish that during the period of my scholarship on this topic the situation regarding their exclusion has changed very little and hardly any tangible progress has been made. Indeed, in some respects, the likelihood of a significant breakthrough of male professional players actually looked more likely (if still very small) in the early 2000s, when I started my doctoral study. Too much emphasis is still placed on what journalist Jonathan Liew refers to as ‘creating future stars through exemplars’ (cited in Sky Sports News 2019b), instead of implementing the fundamental structural changes that would facilitate more sub­ stantial, bottom-up development. Men and boys still receive the vast majority of attention, both excluding British Asian women and reinfor­ cing stereotypes about them (Ratna 2011). Informed discussion and debate has been superseded by ‘a publicity-fuelled awards industry, tar­ geted “ethnic” talent competitions, and sporadic media coverage which simply repeats the existing orthodoxies and hegemonic explanations’ (Randhawa and Burdsey 2018: 155; see also Randhawa 2011). This approach disputes the reality and disguises the effects of institutional exclusion. It is supplemented by accounts that, while acknowledging sporadic incidences of interpersonal racism, purport that it can be over­ come by individuals’ hard work and ‘mental toughness’ (see, for exam­ ple, Nakrani 2019b). By calling for industriousness and mental strength – two code words that racialise and devalue athletes of colour – the moment(s) of racism are turned back to the originator of the complaint. This individualisation of the problem delegitimises racial discrimination as a common experience and ultimately underplays, incorrectly from my perspective, its role in British Asians’ exclusion.

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Increasing the number of British Asian male professional players was a key objective for Kick It Out in the mid-1990s. It now appears quite marginal as the organisation focuses on other communities and parts of the game. Prioritisation of the issue has fluctuated within the FA’s strategy over the past quarter-century too. In the past five years, it has re-emerged as a focus through its Bringing Opportunities to Com­ munities plan. The 2014 launch document (Football Association 2014) epitomises several of the problems identified earlier in this chapter in relation to the FA’s approach to equity and inclusion: statements such as ‘creating platforms for cross-community integration through foot­ ball’ are nebulous in nature; the desire to ‘develop a wider talent pool’ seems odd given the huge number of British Asians who already play amateur football and the fact that much smaller minority ethnic populations are well represented at the highest level of participation; the plan to ‘deliver a healthier lifestyle choice for individuals’ reinforces the pathologising discourse of British Asian poor health and diet; and the aim to engender ‘more confidence that structured football is an inclusive environment’ flies in the face of the facts (ibid.: 6). Most problematically, the document ignores and denies the extent of the racism experienced by British Asians in recreational football (Burdsey 2007a; Sheikh 2019). The follow-up document (Football Association 2019a) exhibited some moderately more positive signs, but it still emphasised vague aspects of development such as ‘embed[ding] inclu­ sion across The FA and its people’, and accentuated awareness-raising and communication rather than structural change (ibid.: 2). As is the case with the nomenclature found in the FA’s In Pursuit of Progress strategy, dominant discourses characterise the absence of British Asians as a matter of underrepresentation. Critically, it is not interpreted as exclusion. I made the concept of exclusion paramount in the subtitle of my first monograph, British Asians and Football (Burd­ sey 2007a). I argued that, in this particular scenario, it: operates in overt ways through acts of blatant racism and the reproduction of racial stereotypes, but also in much more subtle, complex and less ‘visible’, yet equally ingrained, ways by influen­ cing who are ‘insiders’ and who are ‘outsiders’, what is ‘normal’ or ‘traditional’, what are regarded as desired cultural traits, and how one becomes involved in the professional game. (ibid.: 4) Exclusion is about power. To not name it explicitly elides and thus reinforces the racial power of organisations. Racism is not mentioned

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once in Bringing Opportunities to Communities either. A policy of inclusion will understandably accentuate the positives, but a failure to admit and address such a major factor in players’ playing lives is an alarming omission. Bringing Opportunities to Communities quotes Brendon Batson OBE, a pioneering black footballer of the 1970s and long-term advo­ cate for the anti-racist football movement. Batson states that: The underrepresentation of Asian communities across the game is a long standing concern for football. It’s a collective problem the football family all need to work together on. We don’t need to re­ invent the wheel, just do things differently. (cited in Football Association 2014: 13) Herein lies the crux of the problem. Essentially ‘reinventing the wheel’ is required, for the effectiveness of current approaches is evidently limited. I was once asked by an individual working in football gov­ ernance what I thought would be the best approach to engage British Asians. I responded that this organisation should start by acknowl­ edging its own role and responsibility in excluding this group, and affirm this publically by way of an apology. I was told that this was not possible. As I have argued with Kuljit Randhawa – my long-term col­ laborator, and one of the foremost critical thinkers and practitioners on this topic – ‘key stakeholders lack the resources, strategy and will­ ingness to be bold and tackle the real problems of inequality, inacces­ sibility, and racism that still pervade the game’ (Randhawa and Burdsey 2018: 155). Short-term agendas and a silencing of critical voices restrict expansive thinking and reinforce orthodoxies, resulting in key stakeholders not being strategically positioned to engender social change. Randhawa’s (2011) roadmap to transforming this aspect of the game remains key: acknowledging racism, committing resources, providing access to youth football, and creating sustainable opportu­ nities and pathways. The number of minority ethnic managers in English professional football at any given time has never surpassed single figures. The amount of coaches of colour in other professional capacities is likewise very low. Various measures have been introduced to remedy this exclusion. Most notable is the English Football League’s mandatory and voluntary codes on interviewing minority ethnic coaches for man­ agerial vacancies. These have been shown to be inconsistently imple­ mented and unproductive to date (University of Greenwich 2019). Steve Bradbury and colleagues (2018) identify a series of recurrent

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issues preventing minority ethnic football coaches gaining employment at the highest levels of English professional football. These include difficulties in accessing, and discriminatory experiences within, elite coach education settings; racism in the workplace; and the dominance of existing networks, rather than more transparent and objective cri­ teria such as qualifications, in recruitment practices (see RankinWright et al. 2019 on the experiences of black sports coaches more broadly). As noted above, the barriers facing women of colour coaches are even more pronounced (Bradbury et al. 2014). Colin King’s (2004) scholarship and experiential knowledge on race and coaching are especially edifying in this regard. King critically centralises the influ­ ence of racism, using the Fanonian allegory of the ‘white mask’ to ‘show how black players moving into playing, coaching and manage­ ment spaces, use it as a public performance and an internal mechan­ ism’ in the face of white supremacy and control (ibid.: 4). Paul Campbell’s (2020) highly original study of the experiences of retired black male players offers further insight into the difficulties faced by these footballers once their racialised physical value on the field of play is exhausted. The obstacles preventing British Asians from accessing all areas of English professional football, and the difficulties faced by managers and coaches of all minority ethnic backgrounds in gaining employ­ ment, highlight specific processes of exclusion. Collectively, they show how racism can permeate and even dictate the broader occupational structures and cultures of English professional football, especially the workings and recruitment practices of clubs themselves. For this to be any different, the game and their component organisations require underlying transformation. This requires more than tinkering around the edges of the problems. They must be taken on directly and con­ vincingly, in a manner that actively undermines the whiteness of foot­ ball and its clubs. Unfortunately at the moment it is not clear whether this a challenge that the hegemons of English football are prepared to take on.

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Introduction In a formative contribution on the topic, Ben Carrington and Ian McDonald (2001: 2) establish that ‘sport is a particularly useful socio­ logical site for examining the changing context and content of con­ temporary British racisms, as it articulates the complex interplay of “race”, nation, culture and identity in very public and direct ways’. Two decades into the twenty-first century, sport is unmistakably much more than merely a useful sphere for exploring and explaining the race/ nation/culture triad. It is the most significant area of popular culture in which these notions are articulated and resisted. The intensification of this relationship is perhaps to be expected. Racist structures, cultures and discourses are central to dominant constructions of belonging and practices of citizenship in contemporary Britain (Goodfellow 2019; Valluvan 2019; Virdee and McGeever 2018; Yuval-Davis 2011). These include: an upsurge in authoritarian and populist politics; the regres­ sive, isolationist departure from the European Union; the acceptance and validation of racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-migrant rhetoric by certain mainstream politicians and segments of the mass media; deportations and the withdrawal of citizenship; and everyday prejudice and discrimination towards those regarded as outsiders (Thangaraj et al. 2018). As the social canvas on which much of this island’s aspirations and anxieties about nationhood are projected, it is in football that racialised expressions of nation routinely find their outlets, both in residual and emerging forms. It is through football that they are defied too. In this chapter I explore how, over recent years, the symbolism of the England men’s and women’s football teams has been harnessed to contest racialised notions of nation and to promote more progressive modes of nationhood. Specifically, I consider the claims made during

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the men’s World Cup in 2018 that the England squad’s multiethnic demographic signified some form of post-racial antidote to the pre­ vailing exclusionary political climate embedded in post-Brexit times. I offer a critical rejoinder to this position, disputing the assumed role of sport, and sporting teams and celebrities, in facilitating an enduring progressive politics of nationhood. I question the impact and symbolic potential of the team at a time of such a pervasive racist immigration climate in the UK, notably the government’s self-proclaimed ‘hostile environment’ and the scandal over the revoking of citizenship and deportation of members of the ‘Windrush Generation’. In doing so, I make a very brief socio-historical detour across the English Chan­ nel to France. I use events and debates there to illustrate how popu­ lar and political resistance can inhibit football’s possibilities for wider multicultural nationalism being realised in practice. I then focus on two star black England players, Eniola Aluko and Raheem Sterling. Their racist treatment at the hands of the game’s occupa­ tional cultures and mass media sheds (further) light on how racism underpins the cultures and structures of English football and the principle institutions of the racial state, sustaining the whiteness of the nation.

The boys of summer: a changing team, a changing country? The warm summer nights of 2018 will live long in the memories of many English football fans. Thousands travelled to Russia to cheer on England in the men’s World Cup, and millions more back home gath­ ered around televisions, in homes and pubs, to watch their exploits. England progressed quietly and efficiently through the tournament, wildly surpassing most people’s expectations and eventually finishing in fourth place. Fans’ responses during the tournament, and on the team’s return to home soil after their semi-final exit, made one thing very clear: slowly but surely the nation was falling in love with its football team again. The string of victories on the pitch was obviously key to this re-emerging bond. Something else seemed to take place as well. England had not won anything for more than 50 years, since the team’s sole silverware, the Jules Rimet Trophy (World Cup), in 1966. Up until now, many star players were regarded as being more inter­ ested in their salaries, conspicuous consumption and celebrity partners than the millions of people cheering them on. Some, it was reported (probably quite accurately), even saw playing for the national team as a hindrance, impeding their opportunities for club glories, and eclipsed by

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the financial rewards to be achieved from competing in the Premier League and UEFA Champions League. England’s participation in major international tournaments over recent years had also been blighted by instances of hooliganism and xenophobia among its fol­ lowers. All but the most committed, belligerent or naïve supporters had consequently dissociated themselves from the national team. But 2018 appeared to be different. Across the nation, there was an affective connection between players and fans. There was a profound sense of shared national identity, underpinned by a feeling of common social location, not least in terms of class background. These were accessible, ‘normal’ lads, as epitomised by Harry Maguire’s friends watching him from the stands. This relationship was assisted in no small part by the unprecedented access the media were permitted to the team during the tournament. Footage of goalkeeper Jordan Pickford playing darts with a BBC reporter, for example, signified a huge shift from exclusive, high-security training camps at previous competitions. Popular interest and support were especially piqued by the compo­ sition and character of the England playing squad and its manage­ ment. Together with interest in the rather banal personal backstories of the England players (driven largely by the mainstream media’s pre­ dictably gendered fascination with their partners), something much more important, sociologically, gripped the nation’s attention: discus­ sions about race and multiculture. Out of a squad of 23 players, just over half were black or mixed-race: Trent Alexander-Arnold, Dele Alli, Fabian Delph, Jesse Lingard, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Marcus Rashford, Danny Rose, Raheem Sterling, Kieran Trippier, Kyle Walker, Danny Welbeck and Ashley Young. Such team compositions were hardly new to the players themselves. Their club sides in the multiethnic, multi­ national Premier League had made similar selections for a number of years and everyday multiculture was already an unexceptional feature of their playing lives. Yet in the context of the national team, the sheer number and visibility of people of colour on the field as representatives of the English (sporting) nation was undoubtedly a momentous occur­ rence. This was a team that was seen to stand for a progressive, multi­ cultural England, and one that embodied the presumed commonplace acceptance of racialised difference in a modern, post-racial society. Things had not long been quite different, when the loyalty and commitment of minority ethnic footballers (among other sportspeople) to the nation was routinely questioned (Burdsey 2016; Carrington 1998, 2010; Marqusee 1998). Earlier in 2018, Cyrille Regis, one of the best centre-forwards of his generation – and a player I had once had the pleasure of meeting – had died. As he prepared to become the third

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black player selected for the full England side in 1982, Regis infa­ mously received a package in the post. There was a bullet inside, with an accompanying note threatening that Regis would get something similar in his leg if he stepped onto the turf at Wembley Stadium. Two years later, Far Right followers figuratively discounted a goal – argu­ ably the greatest from an England player in modern times – that the Jamaican-born winger John Barnes scored in a victory against Brazil in the Maracanã Stadium. This sporting exclusion reflected broader poli­ tical and cultural times. By the end of the twentieth century, the pop­ ular and political fusing of narrow notions of race, nation and culture meant that the dominant narrative on national identity was a racially exclusive one (Gilroy 1987). Englishness and minority ethnic identities were perceived to be oppositional and incompatible. This was identified in the 2000 publication, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, known more colloquially (after the commission’s Chair) as the Parekh Report. ‘Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British’, it stated, ‘but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness, is racially coded’ (Runnymede Trust 2000: 38). Fifty years after the formal end of Empire, during which time draco­ nian immigration legislation and racist politicking were never far away, the nation’s popular identity was clear. ‘To speak of the British or English people’, summarised Paul Gilroy (1993a: 28) at the time, was ‘to speak of the white people’. The reproduction of national identities occurs, argued Stuart Hall (1992: 293), through ‘the narrative of the nation, as it is told and retold in national histories, literatures, the media and popular culture’. To this end, racially exclusive discourses and manifestations of Englishness have traditionally found a comfortable home and a responsive audi­ ence in sport. Academic considerations of nationalism in this realm have focused historically on dominant groups, which usually equates to those present within the structures, cultures and spaces of sport. They long ignored the communities who were not in the team or those that may have been on the pitch but were not represented in the stands. Some time ago, in response to the academic canon – and its deriva­ tives – which inferred that sports teams were wholly and plainly representative of nations (see, e.g., Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1990) I asked: who are ‘the people’ that these teams are perceived to repre­ sent (Burdsey 2006a)? As Sivamohan Valluvan (2019: 14) states, ‘in the making of the nation, definitional emphasis is placed on who is not part of nation’. Indeed, ‘nationalism is, in the final instance, primarily about its own exclusionary racisms’ (ibid.: 17). Those who are seen to

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not belong are as significant to the creation of (sporting) boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as those who are. However, with its simultaneous capacity to generate positive as well as problematic social outcomes, sport plays a central part in the pur­ suit – if not customarily the realisation – of more progressive notions of nationhood and national identity too (Burdsey 2006a; Carrington and McDonald 2001; Fadil 2018). Hence the England squad at the 2018 men’s World Cup brought forth eager consideration of the pro­ mise of an everyday (sporting) multicultural Englishness. For manager Gareth Southgate, it was straightforward: his team ‘represent[ed] modern England’ (cited in Rosser 2018). This perspective abounded in popular, political and media circles, with the team heralded as a demotic counterpoint to contemporaneous exclusionary and isola­ tionist politics. Two years beforehand, in the summer of 2016, the British electorate had voted in a referendum marginally – by 52 to 48 per cent – to leave the European Union (a decision that was finally enacted in early 2020). According to Nadine El-Enany (2020: 212), this was the latest episode ‘in a long line of assertions of white entitlement to the spoils of colonialism’. Highlighting the political counterpoint presented by the England players’ racial difference, youthful age profile and urban backgrounds, Prospect magazine deputy editor, Steve Bloomfield (2018) wrote that, ‘If this team represents anyone, it’s the 48% who voted to remain’. Aaron Bastani (2018), co-founder of the radical alternative media organisation Novara Media, remarked that, ‘were you to choose an image of modern Eng­ land, those young men running towards Jordan Pickford after his final penalty save [against Colombia] is a better fit than the iconic signifiers offered in recent years’. With this in mind, as the 2018 World Cup progressed I was cogni­ sant of the dis/connections between popular assumptions about the team’s multicultural impact on one hand, and my own research on, and personal experiences of, racialised nationalism in football on the other. As a sociologist, football fan and someone who identifies as British rather than English, my feelings towards the England national team have always ranged from disinterest to disapproval. Like many others, most notably people of colour, I found the aggressive masculi­ nity and the racist, xenophobic and militaristic rhetoric and behaviour that have historically characterised elements of its followers repugnant. For much of my life as a fan I have adopted the ‘anyone but England’ position, habitually favouring other British teams, the Republic of Ireland or ‘underdogs’ from the Global South.

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In 2018 I was certainly not bothered about England winning the tournament; but, for the first time since I was a child, I did not keenly want them to lose. What had changed? Witnessing the hope and posi­ tivity of a new generation of young football fans rendered the claims made by the above commentators compelling. Playing football that summer with a group of young boys in east London – my nephew and his black, brown and white friends – who all wanted to emulate penalty-save hero Pickford made me (re)consider that a youthful, multi­ cultural sporting Englishness might just be possible (see Chapter 4). These scenes were reminiscent of the burgeoning affiliation to the England football team I encountered among young British Asians some years ago in my doctoral research in that part of the capital (Burdsey 2006a). These trends confront symbolically those who yearn for a retrograde, exclusionary, white Englishness, in sport or otherwise. Yet other memories live long too, offering a reminder that these happy vistas of inclusion and multicultural sporting visibility – so celebrated by the corporate world – exist alongside aggressive, racialised nation­ alism. In the early 2000s, I observed first-hand how extreme English xenophobia could be mobilised through football – even when England were not even playing – to intimidate and exclude Indian supporters (Burdsey 2007a). Likewise, an episode I witnessed in a pub in Brighton, over a decade before the summer of 2018. After watching an England men’s qualifying match for the 2008 European Champion­ ships on television, a conversation between a group of men at an adjacent table turned to the specific physical and cultural attributes they expected England players to possess. The issue of race eventually reared its head. One man declared that, ‘The day an England player runs onto the pitch wearing a turban is the day I leave this country’. As I reflected at the time, the statement represented ‘a demotic resistance to an inclusive, multicultural national identity’, and illustrated that ‘a belligerent, racist interpretation of Englishness, remains alive and still very much kicking’ (Burdsey 2008b: 208). The race/nation/sport relationship is evidently fluid, messy and sometimes contradictory. Determining the sociological meanings and gauging the social implications of nascent sporting multiculturalisms is consequently complex. It unquestionably benefits from a longer analy­ tical timeframe than I am able to employ here. Nonetheless, I want to now outline and assess some of the shortcomings found in overly optimistic and decontextualised readings of what the England World Cup squad signified. I do not negate any positive impact entirely. It may well have led individuals to adopt a more enlightened racial con­ sciousness at that time. The multiethnic selection might even have

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generated a momentary antidote to invidious racial politics at a macro level. More extensive and enlightened racial outcomes are unlikely, however. Previous claims about the social effects of symbolic, repre­ sentational racial difference in sport have rarely been realised in prac­ tice. Sport stars and teams can do little to disrupt ingrained public perceptions towards race outside the spaces and times of their partici­ patory acts (see, e.g., Burdsey 2007b, 2015, 2016; cf. Alrababa’h et al. 2019). By way of illustration, a British Social Attitudes survey found that people stating they have some level of racial prejudice dipped during the 2012 Olympics. This was followed by a rapid increase after the event, with nearly one-third of Britons admitting to being racially prejudiced (NatCen 2014). A 2019 study co-produced by independent think tank British Future with the Centre for English Identity and Politics suggested that only 10 per cent of the population believed you had to be white to be English. ‘An inclusive England may be symbo­ lised by Raheem Sterling and Nikita Parris scoring goals for England, or Moeen Ali taking wickets in the World Cup,’ concluded British Future director Sunder Katwala, ‘but it also reflects the lived reality of who most of us now think of as English’ (cited in Alexander 2019). However, a YouGov poll from three years earlier had established that only one-fifth of respondents thought Empire was a ‘bad thing’ or that Britain’s colonial past ‘should be regretted’. In addition, one year pre­ viously a YouGov poll showed that one-third of people would still like Britain to have an Empire (Valluvan 2019: 111) and in 2020 the same proportion felt that Britain’s colonies were better off having been under British rule (Booth 2020). Such trends point towards a reaffirming of white supremacy in the context and articulations of nation, not its subsidence via sport or other means (Valluvan 2019). None of this diminishes the importance of sport stars of colour to the fundamental aim of the national political project, namely the upkeep of whiteness (Gilroy 2004; Valluvan 2016). Irrespective of their outward-looking manifestations, dominant sporting celebrations of multiculture are not always or even necessarily underpinned by a desire to actually make the nation a more inclusive place for minority ethnic people. Instead, they function to make the white majority feel good about ourselves, convincing ‘us’ of our cosmopolitan outlooks and inclusive, liberal tendencies (Burdsey 2016; Wemyss 2009). As AnneMarie Fortier (2005: 573), who has written so eloquently on the links between racial politics and nationalism, states: In a mimetic relationship between representation and identity, the assumption is that if the visual referent changes, ‘we’ change,

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Fundamentally, these Others ‘are part of “our” nation, but only in so far as “we” accept them’ (Hage 1998: 89). In practice, the superficial invocation of sporting multiculture therefore leaves racial inequality firmly intact and the role of whiteness in the upkeep of the nation is unquestioned. Writing on the England team, Sanaa Qureshi (2016: 401) sums the situation up well, asking ‘can it be considered realistic for people of colour to reform an identity whose values are intrinsically bound up with whiteness?’ Despite the symbolic significance of an England squad in which those players categorised as white British were in a numerical minority, a reliance purely on statistical representation is, then, a weak and narrow measure of inclusion. It is an especially tenuous gauge to determine broader shifts in power dynamics in any institution, sporting or otherwise (Burdsey 2011b, 2014; see also Chapter 2 of this book). At the time of the 2018 World Cup tournament, an enthralling dis­ cussion took place on this topic between social scientists (several themselves of colour) on the Darkmatter website. Anamik Saha, a leading thinker on race and popular culture in Britain, stated that ‘I see nothing particularly radical about this [England] team or moment’ (cited in Darkmatter 2018). Saha questioned both the newness of the trends and the extent to which the team was technically multiethnic in terms of representing all of England’s racialised communities (see also Malik 2018). For example, reflecting their marginalisation from other festivals of sporting Englishness and/or Britishness such as the London 2012 Olympic Games, British Asian players and fans were absent from the World Cup (Burdsey 2007a, 2012). Extrapolating the trends in the 2018 team, the Guardian’s Ed Aarons (2018) predicted that future England squads will have ‘a heavy south London accent’, detailing the number of gifted black and mixed-race players from that part of the capital (see also Pitt-Brooke 2018). The rich vein of talent of current players from south of the Thames, like Tammy Abraham, Callum Hudson-Odoi, Jadon Sancho and Aaron Wan-Bissaka, is undoubtable; although as Ian Wright, Rio Ferdinand or David Rocastle, to name but a few, would attest, it is hardly a new development. These narrative cartographies racialise the spaces and inhabitants of south London, ‘sticking’ race to their urban environments and bodies (Saldanha 2007) and synonymising particular neighbourhoods with blackness. At the

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same time black and mixed-race identities are casually appropriated and generalised as a social bellwether for broader national multiethnic dynamics. Race is essentialised, a black–white binary is substantiated and the identities of other communities of colour are elided. Mixed-race players have been relatively common in the England men’s team since the beginning of this century (Christian 2011), but they still received keen political and media attention in 2018. Repre­ senting the fastest growing ‘minority’ category in the UK (as recorded in the 2011 Census), their prominence in the squad was claimed to denote English football’s – and therefore England’s – post-race present and future. As Ralina Joseph (2013: 2) observes, ‘the mixed-race person functions as a bridge between estranged communities, a healing facilitator of an imagined racial utopia, even the embodiment of that utopia’. Underpinning this framing is both a fetishisation of ‘mixed­ ness’ and an implicit anti-blackness. The England squad’s mixed-race players were presented as the agreeable, boy-next-door form of sporting blackness. They were the ‘exceptional multiracial’ person of colour (Joseph 2013: 6): good-looking, down-to-earth, sufficiently both ‘like us’ and not ‘too black’, and labouring on and off the pitch for the benefits of the nation and white capital. Their marketability to con­ sumers of all ethnicities was illustrated soon after the tournament. Dele Alli collaborated with the BoohooMAN label to create his own fashion line, while Jesse Lingard introduced his clothing brand, JLINGZ. Their subjectivities supplied a ‘palatable blackness’, providing ‘the dominant culture black bodies without the stereotypical racial embo­ diment, a face of diversity without the problems of difference’ (DuCille 2018: 236). The superficial adoption of mixedness as a sign of racial progress therefore silences and debases blackness (Joseph 2013). It also obscures and underplays the structural racism encountered by these communities (Christian 2011; Joseph-Salisbury 2019; Lewis 2019). As has been shown compellingly with other sports figures, this selective invocation of blackness does not transcend race; it simply displaces it elsewhere onto other working-class communities of colour (Andrews 2000; Carrington 2010; Thangaraj 2020). Mixed-race identities are sometimes overlooked too. As Remi Joseph-Salisbury (2019: 1756) notes, ‘the white gaze is often unable and/or unwilling to see mixedness’. More ‘visible’ players of colour can be subsumed into a broader homogeneous black categorisation (Christian 2011). Conversely, the mixed-race identities of lighter-skin­ ned players can be ignored and silenced. In both instances, these cate­ gorisations result from dominant constructions of race, the dynamics of racism and/or players’ own personal identifications. They reflect the

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very nature of sport too, which relies on a black–white binary in how it is played and talked about (Thangaraj 2012, 2015, 2020), and in how racism is challenged (Burdsey 2007a). Players such as Kieran Trippier and Ross Barkley potentially accrue the privileges of ‘passing’ as white, due to public unaccustomedness with the variances and nuances of embodied multiculture. Yet the implications of misrecognition are det­ rimental: delegitimising identities and lived experiences, concealing family histories, and subjecting individuals to racism as bystanders as well as direct recipients. For example, in 2017, Barkley, whose grand­ father is Nigerian, was subject to a racist slur – he was likened to a gorilla – in a newspaper column by disgraced former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. MacKenzie attempted to mitigate the act by denying any knowledge of the player’s black heritage. According to Joseph-Salis­ bury (2019: 1763), ‘we might think of Black mixed-race men as demonstrating not only double consciousness, but multiple conscious­ ness’. They have to develop what he calls ‘post-racial resilience’ as a means of challenging this identity erasure (Joseph-Salisbury 2018). Away from the field of play, over the summer of 2018 public displays of xenophobia and racism in the streets of England sat, once again, alongside carnivalesque fan gatherings. Highlighting the double stan­ dards in the ways that the excesses of white football fandom are toler­ ated, ignored or exonerated in the name of national pride and feeling, Sivamohan Valluvan and Malcolm James (2018) argue that: such good grace is rarely extended to racialised minority commu­ nities should they engage in comparable behaviour. The racist over-policing and moral indignation that meets Notting Hill Car­ nival, Wireless [music festival], the Roma street corner, and Black nighttime leisure more broadly, is made all the more stark when the civic excesses of white festivity is seen as mere good natured, public camaraderie – on the grounds that it is supporting the nation. In the context of what has been described as a ‘stag do’ mentality of many travelling England fans (Taylor 2018), violent, militaristic, racist and anti-Catholic rhetoric endures within the repertoire of some Eng­ land fans, as demonstrated, for example, in Porto in June 2019 (Ingle 2019). It is difficult to separate such belligerent jingoism and xeno­ phobia at overseas sporting contexts from the incidences of people shouting ‘go home’ to migrants and minorities, and the material incarnations of the racial state under the Home Office’s ‘hostile environment’, in the streets of England (see next section). As Nadine

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El-Enany (2020: 30) puts it, ‘street and state racial terror are thus mutually reinforcing’. Moreover, it is apparent that the construction and contestation of sporting multicultural nationalism does not involve just those playing on the pitch or the thousands watching in the sta­ dium; its inclusions and exclusions are generated and validated by the millions outside too. Just over a year after the 2018 World Cup, England took on Bul­ garia in a men’s European Championship qualification fixture in Sofia. The match was halted twice, under the protocol of the European gov­ erning body UEFA, due to racist behaviour by sections of the home support. Early in proceedings the ITV television cameras captured Tyrone Mings as he turned to the adjacent assistant referee, question­ ing whether he was noting the abuse that was echoing around the Vasil Levski National Stadium. As the game progressed, England’s black and mixed-race players were subjected to extensive monkey chanting while groups of fans made Nazi salutes. An interviewer asked manager Gareth Southgate after the match to describe the feelings of his Eng­ land players. With characteristic consideration, Southgate made a timely connection between racism ‘there’ and ‘here’. Deploring the treatment of his young players, he cautiously reminded observers not to ignore the problems found in English football as well. ‘Sadly, because of their experiences in our own country, they are hardened to racism’, he stated, ‘I don’t know what that says about our society but that’s the reality’ (cited in Hytner 2019b).

Football versus the racial state: playing ‘at home’ in the ‘hostile environment’ Gareth Southgate’s proposition that the 2018 World Cup squad repre­ sented modern England was one of the most notable appraisals of its social significance. It was an aspirational evaluation as opposed to an accurate one. Mainstream British politics was out of step with the mul­ ticulture and inter-racial solidarity that the team embodied in 2018. It has moved even further away and rightward since then. We live in a period in which racial minorities are increasingly Othered and margin­ alised. Some are even forbidden to live in, and receive the rights of, the country in which they hold citizenship. It has become clear that con­ temporary English nationalism and the desire for British ‘independence’ from the rest of Europe are driven by concerns around race and migra­ tion, and a desire to externalise the interior Other from the white national space. On the day the UK formally left the European Union at the end of January 2020, multiple copies of a poster, entitled ‘Happy

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Brexit Day’, demanding that all residents speak English, were put up in a block of flats in Norwich. ‘You won’t have long till our government will implement rules that will put British first,’ the poster stated, ‘So, best evolve or leave. God Save the Queen, her government and all true patriots’ (cited in Weaver 2020). The contemporary racisms of the state, and other private and public spheres, cast serious doubt on football’s abilities alone to engender broader social change. Yet, ironically, it is precisely because of the wider political climate that such great responsi­ bility is placed on football and so much optimism surrounds its pro­ gressive possibilities. The comforting permanency and putative apolitical nature of football teams and events become cultural anchors on which to pin hopes and fears about the nation’s composition and future. As is customary during major tournaments since the mid-1990s, in 2018 the England players were serenaded by their fans to the exhorta­ tion of ‘football’s coming home’. This refrain derives from ‘Three Lions’, a hit song recorded by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner with the band The Lightning Seeds to coincide with England hosting the 1996 European Championships. The song’s content and oeuvre have been perceptively critiqued for their celebration of a backward-looking, whitened (sporting) Englishness and ethnocentric view of football’s historical development (Carrington 1998). The racialised nostalgia of ‘Three Lions’ was out of sync with develop­ ments within the game itself at the commencement of the Premier League, and it jarred with the more enlightened and racially inclusive elements found in British dance music and popular culture at the end of the twentieth century (Arday 2020; Gilroy 2004; Melville 2020). The England and Englishness of ‘Three Lions’ feel even more out of place and time today. That, however, is fundamental to its continuing popu­ larity. It is a song about the past, not the future. While it is a mere terrace ditty for some, its uptake is inexorably politicised for others. ‘Taking back control’ was the slogan of the Brexit Leavers’ campaign, referring to shutting borders, capping immigration and resisting exter­ nal political influence. ‘Three Lions’ is essentially a call for England to take back control of global football and retain its ‘rightful’ place at the top of the world sporting order. In both senses, this is a matter of endeavouring to secure the nation’s power in the face of the rise of various ‘Other’ communities. That the dominant exposition of ‘home’ remains such an explicit and steadfast leitmotif at this current political juncture, when domicile is such an unstable and disputed notion, is revealing (Yuval-Davis 2011). Ben Carrington’s (1998) analysis of race and nation in late 1990s Eng­ lish football posed the key question of whose home exactly was being

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referred to in ‘Three Lions’. It remains a pertinent enquiry. The idea of ‘home’ mentioned in the song does not resonate with all the popula­ tion, who are prevented, physically or metaphorically, from being able to claim it as ‘theirs’. For some communities of colour (see below), what was once seen as home – as a building, a town, a community or a nation – has been systematically and brutally taken away from them by the biopolitical machinations of the racial state. As Hannah Jones (2019: 2434) writes: ‘Home’ is commonly considered to be a place of safety and value. Yet there is an underside to the surface pleasantry of ‘home’. The right to claim a place as ‘home’ is frequently contested in the pol­ itics of nation and belonging, with the racist call of ‘Go Home’ at once imagining a place where the person told to ‘go home’ will be safe/welcome, and refusing that their current location could be their home. In a similar vein, in a powerful essay on the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Gracie Mae Bradley (2019) notes that cultures of racism and xeno­ phobia in the UK preclude the possibility of ‘home’ being a secure space for all. This is, argues Bailey, a political climate that ‘disavows Britain’s imperial past and, for the most part, is prepared to tolerate the lawful entry of only the richest and whitest would-be immigrants, meting out the violence of destitution, detention and deportation to the rest’ (ibid.: 138–139). To claim that football is coming ‘home’ thus has particular connotations for how England is imagined and the role of football in securing that. The widespread retreat from political multiculturalism by David Cameron and other European leaders was a major ideological shift in right-leaning governments during the 2010s (Valluvan 2019). In the succeeding decade, Prime Minister Theresa May amplified and extended these developments, boasting about the creation of a ‘hostile environ­ ment’ for im/migration and migrants under her government (Goodfellow 2019). This was all, it was claimed, in the name of restricting and managing the arrival of ‘newcomers’ into the (white) national space, and removing those that were deemed to ‘not legally belong’. Yet, of course, this project was not designed to be applied universally or equally. Its indiscriminate targets were largely people of colour (Bhambra, 2017; Valluvan 2019). In practice this ‘hostile environment’ comprised: policies which have the avowed aim of making life impossible for migrants and refugees who do not have permission to live in the

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The public face of the Home Office’s ideology and methods was the patrol vans of ‘Operation Vaken’. Descending on the neighbourhoods of racialised communities, their officers intimidated and cajoled people designated to be living illegally in the UK to ‘go home’ or face arrest (Jones et al. 2017). The lengths to which the government was prepared to go to meet its targets on reducing net immigration came to a head perhaps most infamously through the struggles of what has become known as the ‘Windrush Generation’. These were upstanding, predominantly Caribbean-born people (plus some from other Commonwealth countries) who had arrived in the UK before the early 1970s. Many of their for­ mative years and their entire adulthoods had been spent in Britain. They had paid their taxes, and contributed positively to various social institutions, the economy and their communities. In 2017 they were suddenly categorised as illegal immigrants by the Home Office. The ‘Windrush Generation’ descriptor was provided by campaigner Patrick Vernon, highlighting their shared history and a common experience of injustice, even though it was technically inaccurate given its application to people who came to the UK sometime after the pioneering migrants of the 1940s (some of whom on the SS Empire Windrush ship). Resi­ dents without documentation detailing their right to be in the UK – which had never previously been required when they arrived as British citizens – now had to provide multiple forms of official ‘proof ’ of their continuous residence in the UK since their arrival (following the sti­ pulations of the 1971 Immigration Act). Often unable to fulfil a patently unattainable task due to the sheer volume of evidence required and the fact that much of it had not, quite understandably, been retained, these citizens were told in no uncertain terms that Britain was no longer their home. An undefined number of British people of colour – running into the thousands – were forced into unemployment; refused access to benefits, healthcare and pensions; and even physically deported or refused re-entry to the national space (Gentleman 2019; C. Taylor 2020). The political consequence of this debacle ‘has been most usually presented as an accidental pothole in the road to Britain’s post-racial

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present’ (Alexander and Byrne 2020: 1). The government undertook a rapid volte-face. May offered a belated apology. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd resigned and the government’s approach was renounced by her successor Sajid Javid. An annual Windrush Day celebration was hastily introduced to celebrate the contribution of these migrants to British life. The damage, however, had been done. Victims of the scandal faced unfathomable levels of stress and mental health difficul­ ties. Some were forced to live apart from their families. Tragically, Sarah O’Connor died before the outcome of her case. An independent report, led by Wendy Williams, an inspector of constabulary, was pub­ lished in March 2020. Williams concluded that the Home Office’s ‘fail­ ings demonstrate an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race and the history of the Windrush Generation within the department which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism’ (cited in Gentleman and Bowcott 2020). The outcome of the ‘hostile environment’ policy ‘points to a world where definitions of citizenship are being pushed to the point of mean­ inglessness by governments desperate to retain control over a visibly fragmenting national space’ (Wardle and Obermuller 2018: 3). The con­ temporary political climate in the UK is diametrically opposed to inclu­ sive and progressive thinking around citizenship and identity. Instead it reinforces historical racist models, and continues to squeeze the bound­ aries and categories of national belonging that have been introduced and modified since the formal fall of the British Empire 70 years ago. This is clearly out-of-sync with the direction of travel around race and English­ ness in men’s international football. The game’s eligibility rules are far more enlightened than those of many states’ citizenship ones. Taking account of family heritage back to one’s grandparents, they interpret identity as dynamic, provisional, and temporally and spatially fluid. They demonstrate awareness of how intricate colonial and diasporic histories play out in current places of residence and affective affiliation (Farred 2018). This disparity with the citizenship laws of the state casts serious doubt on the social outcomes that can be generated at this time, in this country, by a multicultural football team alone. The implications of the ‘hostile environment’ might not just inhibit football’s future potential; they may even impact deleteriously on its current players. In simple terms, the England players who were cele­ brated were part of the very same African Caribbean communities whose presence and right to the nation space were questioned and refuted through the Windrush Scandal. England was no longer desig­ nated legally as home to people who were conceivably families and friends of some of these players, or at the very least shared backstories,

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and racial and political solidarities. These entanglements are indicative of how an ostensibly post-racial position, and a dominant discourse of pride in (sporting) nation, can sit alongside post-colonial anxieties and exclusionary politics (Patel and Connelly 2019). Players such as Eniola Aluko, Ryan Bertrand and Troy Deeney have all attributed racism in English football stadia to the prevailing political climate (Hytner 2020; Okwonga 2019). As was noted earlier in this chapter, Gareth Southgate has observed how the domestic discrimination occurring around Brexit acclimatises his players to what they experience at matches overseas. Gary Neville, who has used his position as a media pundit to become an unexpected advocate for social justice, makes it clear that there are demonstrable connections between political authoritarianism, national populism and a discriminatory immigration system on the one hand and racism in football on the other (de Menezes 2019; see Thangaraj et al. 2018). ‘It’s almost impossible to produce a hostile environment for immigrants,’ Labour MP Diane Abbott concludes succinctly, ‘and not produce a hostile environment for people who look like immi­ grants’ (cited in Gentleman 2019: 132). It perhaps goes without saying that these trends are not unique to England. As David Goldblatt (2019: 12) states, in a number of instan­ ces and global locations ‘the changing make-up of the national team has served as both an optimistic emblem of successful integration and a lightning rod for accusations of inauthenticity’. France’s victory, on home soil, in the men’s World Cup of 1998 illustrates football’s capa­ city to create the conditions and opportunities for an alternative future of multicultural nationhood and national identity. It also epitomises the incontrovertible constraints on making these advances long-lasting and the nefarious political stances that try to suppress progressive racial change (Hare 2003; Dubois 2010). The French team at this tournament was immediately heralded for embodying a forwardfacing, diverse and inclusive cultural triptych – black, blanc, beur (the latter a French colloquialism for European-born North Africans, spe­ cifically Maghrebis). Like the English players discussed earlier in this chapter, this was far from a new phenomenon for France either, which already had a long history of selecting players of migrant background. Nonetheless the sheer number of minority ethnic players, and the range of migration trajectories and diasporic histories represented in the 1998 squad – encompassing Europe, West and North Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific islands – was a potent symbol of inclusion. The squad was widely regarded as creating a republican unity out of difference and proving that anyone or any team could achieve ‘success’ in a postracial sporting world. For a while, a different, post-colonial France was

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imaginable. This was not desirable for some, however, and they sought to prevent it coming to fruition. The story of the two decades after that triumph – culminating in France’s next victory in the men’s World Cup in 2018 – is relatively well-known. It is worth reflecting on briefly here. It did not take long for the hopes and possibilities of 1998 to evanesce, as the composition of the team and what it stood for came under attack via a panoply of racist political and popular discourses. Jean-Marie Le Pen, then leader of the Front National, declared that players with migrant backgrounds were ‘foreigners’, whose supposed unfamiliarity with the words of ‘La Marseillaise’ was pivotal ‘proof ’ of their ‘unbelonging’ and affective loyalties elsewhere (Downing 2018; Silverstein 2018). Midway between the triumphs of 1998 and 2018, the team played a calamitous cam­ paign in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, losing all three of their group stage matches. The white coaching staff largely escaped criticism, with culpability instead attributed to the squad’s black and Muslim players. Racist condemnation of the squad proliferated, including the defamatory claim of philosopher Alain Finkielkraut that they were a ‘gang of thieves with mafia morals’ (cited in Downing 2018). Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, current leader of the Rassemblement National (for­ merly Front National), exposed a malicious and discriminatory under­ standing of diasporic identities and the politics of nation, arguing that the players foregrounded ‘another nationality in their hearts’ (ibid.) and did not portray an image of France that she recognised (Guesmi 2018). France’s new hero is Kylian Mbappé, a player of Cameroonian and Algerian heritage from the Bondy suburb of Paris. In a 2018 poll, Mbappé was chosen by the French public as its favourite player. He won 57 per cent of the votes, beating white, star teammates Antoine Griezmann and Hugo Lloris. The elevation of Mbappé to this status, in the context of broader retrograde racial politics, is neatly summed up by Tunisian writer and critic, Haythem Guesmi (2018). He illus­ trates that, at the same time, the majority of French people polled felt that the country had ‘too many immigrants’. Over half of the voting public backed the government’s refusal to allow a rescue ship with over 600 migrants and refugees to dock in Marseille. What seems like a contradiction, Guesmi argues, is actually a logical manifestation of contemporary racial politics. Like many other successful sport stars of colour, Mbappé is cherished by the political Right as much as the Left, ‘because his exceptional talents and attitude confirm [sic] to their ideal of citizenship for black and brown people’. This scenario illuminates how the ‘exceptional’ migrant or person of colour is esteemed and afforded belonging, while those that do not fit the right image or

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perform the hegemonic script are Othered. It is also a question of labour. Footballers of colour (re)institute the supposedly democratic and liberal tenets of the nation. They become commodities whose labour can be used to benefit the nation-state while the broader rights of their communities are dismissed. The veneration of Mbappé, like all players of colour, is still conditional and vulnerable. Such individuals, Guesmi concludes, are ‘black and brown bodies in white spaces. They are never safe’ (see also Dubois 2018; Pierrot 2018b). Twelve members of the 2018 French men’s World Cup squad had African ancestry, encompassing nine different nations. This diversity was acclaimed in Vegedream’s pop hit single of that year, ‘Ramenez la Coupe à la Maison’, which namechecked several players. The reper­ cussions of the French triumph at this tournament again divided opi­ nions, even on the same progressive side of the political spectrum. Some commentators proposed that the team’s players of colour ‘who wear French Bleu… also play for Africa, and the legions of African soccer fans who share their continental roots’ (Beydoun 2018). Others riposted that this ignored France’s (post-)colonial history in, and with, the African continent, and underplayed France’s subjugation, removal and appropriation of black people, labour and resources (Attiah 2018; Pierrot 2018a). As the educator and activist Kamal Ahamada (2018) predicted at the time of the 2018 victory, ‘France will always be France: an imperial nation whose greed, racism and cruelty know no bounds. Postcolonial migrants will return [after the World Cup] to their position as outsiders in the French republic’. Somewhat predictably, public, media and academic debates on this topic – in all nations – tend to focus on male players and teams. Little consideration has been given to the position of women in constructions of multicultural national identity and belonging (Agergaard 2019). This obscures the fact that processes of racialised inclusion and exclu­ sion are inherently gendered. The emergence and elevation of certain male footballers of colour in respective national imaginations at the same time produces the marginalisation and silencing of sportswomen from these communities (Burdsey 2008a). Sine Agergaard (2019) pro­ vides a nuanced analysis of the gendered politics of belonging in foot­ ball, showing how the process of dominant representation involves forging and dismantling affective links, in the country itself, the place of migration and the diaspora more widely. Through a compelling account of the Afghanistan-born Danish star Nadia Nadim, Ager­ gaard argues that representing Denmark does not just compel the player to perform national identity in a prescribed way; in addition it ‘deprives her of linking herself with a broad group of stigmatised

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minority ethnic populations in Denmark, whose feelings of belonging are excluded rather than included by the boundary work of the nation state’ (ibid.: 139). This section has made apparent the difficulties in reaching the goal of long-lasting and unrestrained sporting multicultural nationalism, due to the anti-immigration policies and actions of the racial state, and their connected street-level manifestations of everyday racism. These discriminatory discourses and practices resound within the workings and occupational cultures of football itself and related social institu­ tions, such as the sports media, as the followings sections explore. Taking up calls to centre the experiences of female players in analyses of football, race and nation (Agergaard 2019; Ratna 2018), I now address the experiences of black former England star Eniola Aluko.

Speaking truth to power: Eniola Aluko, gendered racism and institutional white supremacy in English football In the final stages of writing this book, Eniola Aluko retired from playing professional football – most latterly for Juventus in the Italian women’s Serie A league – to take up a position as sporting director at Aston Villa Women. This brought to a close the on-field career of one of the most successful black woman footballers (alongside Alex Scott) in English history. Aluko was born in Lagos in 1987 and came to Bir­ mingham with her family at the age of six months. Her honours speak for themselves. She is one of only a handful of players to win over 100 caps for England, and she won trophies with top clubs in England, the United States and Italy. This is only part of her story. While Aluko rightly refuses to be defined by her ethnic background and experiences of racism, her life in football will always be associated with the racism she endured within the England senior team set-up: principally from (former) England manager Mark Sampson, the coaching staff, her teammates, and the senior administrative and executive staff of the FA. As much as this is a matter of interpersonal and institutional racism, it is also a narrative of fighting back. I underscore the presence of agency and the act of cultural resistance because I recognise that analysing entirely negative portrayals of black women can unintentionally dehumanise them further and be counterproductive by reducing opti­ mism for social change (Bobo 1995). Aluko refused to acquiesce to conventional and prescribed ways of ‘being black’ – specifically of being a black woman – in English football. She challenged the assim­ ilationist (sporting) social project that is white, cisgender, heterosexual, male, and middle-class; and she disrupted the cosy institutional

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discourse of diversity. Her encounters inform us about the configura­ tions of race, whiteness, patriarchy and masculinity that combine to dictate forms of access, being and belonging within the institutions of elite English sport. They illuminate the experiences of black women (and men) in sport more generally who do not ‘toe the line’: namely those who speak out and challenge racialised authority, who identify the structural and systemic characteristics of racism in sport and who speak truth to racialised (and gendered) power. Given her very public identification of, and resistance to, racism in English football’s institu­ tional structures and occupational cultures, I contend that Aluko is the most socially significant black English footballer/coach – male or female – of the contemporary conjuncture. Indeed, she is one of the most important English footballers of our times, period. ‘The need to produce critical scholarship about women of colour and their complex, multifarious, and changing relationships to sport and physical activity has never been more urgent’, writes Aarti Ratna (2018: 197). As Delia Douglas (2018: 571) identifies, to date ‘both feminist and physical cultural sport studies scholarship have demon­ strated a negligible interest in the lives of black female athletes’. In the UK in particular, although research has explored the experiences and lives of English elite sportswomen in relation to popular constructions of nation (e.g., Bowes and Bairner 2019), the role of race and the experiences of black women are largely absent. Much of the weight of ‘unhing[ing] uncritical knowledge and/or redress[ing] the epistemic erasure of alternate ways of knowing and thinking with and through difference’ has fallen on scholars of colour (Ratna and Samie 2018: 2). Ratna’s (2018) powerful critique of the marginalisation of black female voices and knowledge demands that we listen to black sportswomen’s auto/biographies. Others have outlined the importance of black and Global South feminisms in improving our understanding and theoris­ ing of sport (Adjepong 2020; Brown 2018; Kyeremeh 2020; Mwaniki 2017; Ratna et al. 2018; Toffoletti et al. 2018). In the latter period of Aluko’s England career, the team was mana­ ged by Mark Sampson. Aluko describes his tenure as characterised by a ‘culture of bullying and harassment’, peppered with racial microaggressions and overt racist abuse (cited in Taylor 2017e). Racial microaggressions are ‘brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to people of colour because they belong to a racial minority group’ (Sue et al. 2007: 273; see Burdsey 2011c on their prevalence in sport). Aluko recalls one occasion when she was watching a recorded video analysis of a match. A coach on the touchline could be heard saying: ‘Her [Aluko’s] fitness results are good’, to which a colleague

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replied, ‘Yeah, but she is lazy as fuck’ (cited in Aluko 2019b: 283). Sampson recurrently accused Aluko of being unreliable, lacking fitness and not being a team player, even calling her a ‘pain in the arse’ in front of her teammates (Hattenstone 2019). This reinforces residual racist stereotypes in football of black indolence and resistance to being managed, and it places Aluko outside the system of merit that struc­ tures sport and the nation. It also shows how ‘black female athletes’ relationship to sport is influenced by longstanding race-sex-gender conceptions and perceptions of black women that locate their status and identity in their corporeality’ (Douglas 2018: 572). On several occasions, the denigration of Aluko’s blackness combined with her depiction as a ‘foreign’ body, marginalising her within the squad culture and the white sporting nation more generally. Before a friendly match against Germany at Wembley (the first time England’s women had played there), players were requested to populate a sheet detailing which friends and relatives were coming to watch. Sampson asked Aluko which guests she had invited. After she replied that her family were visiting from Nigeria, Sampson insisted she ‘make sure they don’t come over with Ebola’ (Aluko 2019b: 310). Nigeria was not one of the countries primarily affected by the mid-2010s Ebola out­ break and, indeed, it arrived it the UK via a white Scottish aid worker (who had travelled from Sierra Leone). Lee Kendall, the goalkeeping coach, spoke to Aluko routinely in a mock Caribbean accent as well (Aluko 2019b: 339), despite the player having no immediate personal or family history in this part of the world. Sampson’s and Kendall’s comments show how institutional anti-blackness by white, male authority figures operated in this elite national sporting set-up. In this setting they blended a careless and inconsistent essentialisation of black culture (sited primarily in the Caribbean) with a malicious and ignorant pathologisation of Africa. Such discursive homogenising and dehumanising of black athletes (especially women) is found recurrently in sport, where ‘the corporeal integrity and personhood of black women is not simply being questioned, it is being violated’ (Douglas 2018: 573). This reflects broader social trends, such as the admission from Dawn Butler MP in 2020 that she is confused with other black female colleagues on a weekly basis (Mason 2020). These incidents speak also to the necessity of considering nation, diaspora and im/ migration in conjunction and intersection with race and gender in analyses of black sportspeople (Zenquis and Mwaniki 2019). Aluko’s England teammate Drew Spence was subjected to a different racist ‘joke’, exposing the varied repertoire and framing, and multiple racialised meanings, through which people of colour are denigrated in

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sport. This one involved the stereotype of black criminality and fixed blackness to a local rather than global spatial register. In a completely out of context comment during a team talk, Sampson inferred that Spence, as a woman of colour from London, would have numerous experiences of being arrested (Aluko 2019b: 336). Several of her teammates did not see the ‘funny’ side of Sampson’s remark, which left Spence quite understandably distressed (Taylor 2017e). Drawing on queer black feminist Moya Bailey’s (2010) notion of misogynoir, Lisa Amanda Palmer (2019: 512) analyses the subjugation and oppression of black women in such circumstances. This is a ‘distinctive brand of hatred directed at Black women’, which ‘produces a binary of “good” White womanhood at the top and “bad” non-womanhood for Black women at the bottom of this hierarchical structure of domination’. These processes of dehumanisation are, Palmer adds, ‘mediated and regulated through ideological protections of and investments in White normativity and White hegemony underpinned by notions of White racial purity’ (ibid.: 509). The attacks on Aluko and Spence were per­ sonal. They also displayed a broader function of sustaining the white masculinity of the management and the white femininity of the team, displaying how gender intersects in various ways with whiteness to sustain the racialised essence of the sporting nation. Aluko’s resilience and courage in challenging not just racism itself, but also the accompanying culture of racialised silence and complicity within the team set-up and the FA, meant that she was eventually able to bring her discrimination to public attention. This was a slow and painful process, hindered by the FA’s deliberate fudges and obstruc­ tions, and its attempts to sweep the situation under the carpet. Sara Ahmed (2019: 156) describes how submitting a grievance ‘requires becoming an institutional mechanic: you have to work out how to get a complaint through the system’. She employs the term strategic ineffi­ ciency to show ‘how organizations have an interest in slowing or stop­ ping complaints’ (ibid.: 162). Mentioning racism can actually shut off a complaint from being heard (Ahmed 2012). After her written com­ plaint to the FA in 2016, the governing body finally carried out its own investigation and then convened a confidential independent inquiry. The latter was undertaken by barrister Katharine Newton, a black woman, who FA Chief Executive Martin Glenn later admitted was appointed on the basis of her gender and ethnicity (Taylor 2017a). This inquiry, like the internal review, rejected Aluko’s complaint, with no case found for disciplinary action against Sampson or his colleagues (Taylor 2017e). A third inquiry (again overseen by Newton) – promp­ ted by the diligent journalistic exposés of Daniel Taylor in The

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Guardian and followed by a Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) inquiry into sport governance in autumn 2017 – overturned the previous findings and agreed that Sampson had made dis­ criminatory remarks. It concluded that Sampson ‘did treat [Aluko] less favourably than he would have treated a player who was not of African descent’ (cited in Taylor 2017a). Newton found that Sampson had ‘on two separate occasions…made ill-judged attempts at humour, which, as a matter of law, were discriminatory on grounds of race within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010’ (ibid.). The manner in which the initial investigations were undertaken is alarming, underpinned by an apparent lack of due process. Senior FA figures refused to acknowledge the original allegations. Chairperson Greg Clarke responded to concerns raised in an email from the Pro­ fessional Footballers’ Association with ‘I have no idea why you are sending me this. Perhaps you could enlighten me?’ (cited in Aluko 2019b: 388). There was a failure to interview victims and witnesses of racism, evidence was withheld, and contradictions were identified in Sampson’s testimony (Aluko 2019b; Taylor 2017b, 2017d). Aluko was paid a sum of money by the FA which she describes as ‘bordering on blackmail’, and of which half was contingent on her writing a state­ ment exonerating the governing body of institutional racism (Aluko 2019b: 426). During the government hearing, it also came to light that a black woman actor was once hired for a squad roleplay exercise about a poorly behaved, self-centred player, leading many teammates to believe it was a conscious depiction of Aluko (ibid.: 395). Glenn was offered four opportunities during the inquiry to apologise for failings in the FA process of investigating Aluko’s claims. He refused to do so. Clarke eventually accepted the FA had let her down (Kelner 2017). Aluko’s predicament drew numerous negative responses from inside and outside professional football, all exemplifying the ‘rules of racial standing’ theorised by Critical Race Theory pioneer Derrick Bell (1992). I used this framework to analyse the cases of Patrice Evra and Anton Ferdinand in 2011, namely how reactions to their allegations of racism were characterised by racialised perspectives on experiential knowledge, veracity and reliability (Burdsey 2014; see also Chapter 2 of this book). Bell articulates the rules in his foundational text, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: Rule One: No matter their experience or expertise, blacks’ state­ ments involving race are deemed ‘special pleading’ and thus not entitled to serious consideration. (Bell 1992: 111)

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Country Rule Two: Not only are blacks’ complaints discounted, but black victims of racism are less effective witnesses than are whites, who are members of the oppressor class. This phenomenon reflects a widespread assumption that blacks, unlike whites, cannot be objective on racial issues and will favour their own no matter what. (ibid.: 113) Rule Three: The black person who publicly disparages or criticizes other blacks who are speaking or acting in ways that upset whites…[is] granted ‘enhanced standing’ even when the speaker has no special expertise or experience in the subject he or she is criticizing. (ibid.: 114) Rule Four: When a black person or group makes a statement or takes an action that the white community or vocal components thereof deem ‘outrageous’, the latter will actively recruit blacks willing to refute the statement or condemn the action. Blacks who respond to the call for condemnation will receive superstanding status. Those blacks who refuse to be recruited will be interpreted as endorsing the statements and action and may suffer political or economic reprisals. (ibid.: 118)

Aluko’s credibility and motives in calling out racism were inter­ rogated by those unwilling to accept her critique of football’s governing body and, by extension, sport in general and the broader English nation. Labelling the FA report ‘a shambles’, Aluko states that: It basically said: ‘Eni lied about racism. Mark Sampson never said anything racist. The team is very happy. We’ve interviewed a lot of players, and they say it’s a great culture’… I was gutted. Gutted. I was publicly being called a liar. (cited in Hattenstone 2019) Like Renee Hector (see Chapter 2), Aluko was accused of ‘playing the race card’, denying the legitimacy of black women’s experiential accounts of racism. Former England goalkeeper David James felt that Aluko had made up the allegations to disguise what he perceived as her declining ability and the debatable merit of her place in the team (de Menezes 2017). White male journalists on Sky Sports’ Sunday Supplement show concluded, in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the

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contrary, that the allegations were a figment of Aluko’s imagination (Aluko 2019b: 409). In The Times, Matthew Syed suggested incredu­ lously that the episode was in danger of ‘trivialising racism’, and that Sampson’s Ebola comment was ‘innocuous’ and even a ‘misjudged joke’ (cited in ibid.: 413). Several disparaging comments were posted in the customer reviews section on the Amazon website for her memoir, which was published in 2019 and addressed her torment in detail (Aluko 2019b), including: ‘Your biased views are totally unfounded and biased!’, ‘Written in substandard, childlike English, the author comes across as a selfcentred narcissist who goes out of her way to look for ways she can be “offended”’, “The main character come [sic] out rather sell [sic] centred to be honest’, ‘Poorly written and with the wrong attitude’ and ‘Book is a work of fiction and hence is falsely advertised’. These responses reveal that it is not just the person accused of racism who takes offence or seeks to quell the complaint. Others come forward when they feel that the assumed post-race status of national sporting cultures, and by extension the nation itself, has been called into question. The com­ plainant must be silenced, externalised and disparaged as the root and cause of the problem (Ahmed 2012). Players who speak out against discrimination, or talk about race outside the terms of the dominant discourse, risk being marked, mar­ ginalised and excluded. They can be labelled ‘trouble-makers’ and subsequently not accepted as ‘one of the team’ or the sporting nation itself (Burdsey 2004; King 2004; Puwar 2004). In the eyes of many, Aluko had crossed the unwritten subcultural line of professional sport by ‘blowing the whistle’ on race. She had chosen, it was purported, to complain rather than play on, unlike the black men who had withstood racism over many years for club and country (despite the fact that she continued playing for England until she was not selected). She was dismissed as the ‘angry’, ‘over-emotional’ and ‘too clever’ black woman (using her skills as a qualified lawyer to bring the FA to task). Her complaint was seen as displaying a lack of gratitude, taking for granted and rebuffing the opportunities that the country had given her, from infant migrant to adult superstar. She had peeled back the façade of sport’s self-congratulatory management of racial diversity and established that it was, in this instance, a fabrication. This represented a threat that had to be suppressed, in order to sustain the whiteness and hetero-patriarchy of the nation and its popular cultural outlets. Aluko’s own summary is enlightening: ‘The minute you are brave enough to talk about race, you are in a difficult situation’ (cited in Taylor 2017c).

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Like all accounts of racism, this case says something about whiteness too. Specifically it shows that, despite the hyperbole about English football’s diverse and inclusive playing cultures, when it comes to the crunch allies and inter-ethnic solidarity can be found wanting. The silence of white bystanders not only avoids challenging racism, it actively reinforces it (DiAngelo 2019). Aluko reveals that while close friends in the England set-up, including (then) Chelsea teammates, provided support, others did not come forward. She states that: To this day, [captain] Steph Houghton and a lot of leaders in that team have not come out and apologised to me for what I went through. People say: ‘D’you want them to sacrifice their careers for you?’. No, I don’t. But I do expect a team of people to say: we do not share these values, we do not accept that what the manager said was correct. (cited in Hattenstone 2019) The sight of teammates mobbing Sampson after England had scored a goal against Russia, in a match (not involving Aluko) following the announcement of the third inquiry, said a great deal about racialised positionality and solidarity. It was a sharp reminder of how dissent towards the powers of white patriarchy in sport can be repressed by white women as well as men. Actions as well as words are used to sta­ bilise the white sporting nation. The harm caused by institutional reactions to discrimination can be interpreted by the victim as com­ pounding and even exceeding the original act (Ray 2019). Indeed, Aluko (2019b) describes this behaviour by the squad as one of the most upsetting aspects of her ordeal. After her formal allegations against Sampson and his staff, Aluko was informed by her manager that she had not been selected for the next England squad. It was claimed that her attitude at a recent train­ ing camp showed ‘un-Lioness behaviour’ (Lionesses being the ‘nick­ name’ of the women’s team). Aluko did not play for England again. She notes that other players of colour who questioned their treatment saw their international careers hit a dead end too, including Anita Asante, Danielle Carter, Lianne Sanderson and Drew Spence (Aluko 2019b). Sampson was dismissed in 2017 after the FA revisited an his­ toric safeguarding investigation pertaining to his employment as man­ ager of Bristol Academy and concluded that he had had inappropriate relationships with female players. The selection of minority ethnic players in the full England sides is a fundamental area where men’s and women’s football are far apart

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(Ratna 2017). Aluko draws poignant connections between her experi­ ences of racism, the actions of the management and the make-up of the current England women’s team, which remains resoundingly white: There are lots of national teams that are very white, not just Eng­ land, and I’d hate to say we should be picked because we’re black or mixed race. But are we all bad characters? Are we all terrible players? That’s the question I think people need to be asking because a pattern is emerging here, as clear as day, and my belief is that it’s a culture. (cited in Taylor 2017b) She adds that: To be honest, it’s obvious. I’m not the person who’s going to say somebody should be picked just because of the colour of their skin. But in a country like England, which is so multicultural, there are either not enough people of colour playing the women’s game, or they’re not getting picked. I don’t like it. I prefer to see a team that reflects society a lot more. Since I left the team, it has got worse. (cited in Brown 2019) Similarly, reflecting on being overlooked for the England squad, Drew Spence stated in 2020, ‘To not be given that chance makes me ques­ tion: “Is it because of what happened?”. I think it is because of what happened, if I’m totally honest’ (cited in Wrack 2020). This exclusion of women of colour is routinely glossed over. Lucy Buckerfield (2019) of British Future states that, ‘The women’s game, embodied in the Lionesses, projects an image of an inclusive English identity that we can all get behind’. She adds that, ‘At the heart of the growth of the women’s game is a sense of inclusivity – that the game is for everyone, of any gender, whoever you are, whatever you look like’. The 2019 World Cup, about which Buckerfield was commenting, actually suggested differently. Nikita Parris and Demi Stokes were the only players of colour in the squad. Nothing had changed by the She Believes Cup tournament in 2020. Individual black bodies are used in this example to stand for and claim wider inclusions, in the team and the nation, deflecting the requirement to admit and explain the white­ ness of either. Moreover, the failure to interrogate the squad demo­ graphic illustrates how a certain white normativity undergirds how the category of woman is understood. It shows that the construction of the

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nation’s femininity is regulated through the concomitant reproduction of whiteness and the repudiation of the racialised female Other.

Blackness, belonging and bordering: the demonisation of Raheem Sterling After being racially abused at Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge while playing for Manchester City at the back end of 2018, Raheem Sterling famously spoke out on Instagram about the extent of racism in English football stadia (discussed in Chapter 2). This was, he argued, a symp­ tom of the prejudices cultivated every day by the tabloid press. In for­ ging this correlation, Sterling made it abundantly clear that footballers’ encounters with racism exceed their 90-minute exertions on the pitch; it impinges on all aspects of their lives. As Stanley Thangaraj (2017a) argues, ‘sport participation and stardom do not provide reprieve from larger societal, racist violence’. This was something Sterling knew all too well, having been attacked in a racially aggravated street assault by a convicted football hooligan in 2017. Racism, George Mosse (1995: 164) reminds us, is ‘a scavenger ideology’. Racist discourses cobble together varied, often contra­ dictory, threads and present them as a seemingly ‘coherent’ narrative. Sterling is constantly vilified in tabloid newspapers for his cultural tastes, personal expenditure and lifestyle. This criticism encompasses perceptions of gratuitous and vulgar consumption, such as his owner­ ship of luxurious cars, fashion choices and purchase of a new house for his mother. He was also moralistically chided for acting outside of normative hetero-Christian values after fathering a child out of mar­ riage as a younger man. Paradoxically, his seemingly thrifty acts of shopping in high street stores or using budget companies, including Primark clothing, Greggs bakery and EasyJet airline provide the basis for rebuke as well. Few of Sterling’s off-field actions escape criticism, no matter how trivial, like having a dirty car (‘too lazy to wash it’) or appearing tired in public (‘must have been out partying’). He is var­ iously too profligate and too frugal. Sterling is presented as both ideal and flawed citizen, concurrently reinforcing and lacking the work ethic or betterment agenda that is central to the racial neoliberalism of late modernity (Valluvan 2019). Either way he is seen to lack refinement. As Ben Carrington (2010: 162) remarks: This is a situation in which the contemporary black athlete is granted public visibility and personal economic wealth, but under tenuous conditions of corporate patronage that can be revoked at a

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moment’s notice for any transgression beyond the confines of a permissible blackness predicated upon narrowly defined bourgeois norms and acceptable modes of behaviour. While the social activities and stylistic qualities of all black footballers are subject to scrutiny and frequently reduced to racial stereotypes – for example, Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp’s statement that he ori­ ginally dismissed signing Senegalese star Sadio Mané because ‘he looked like a rapper’ (cited in Rathborn 2020) – the vilification of Sterling takes place on another, largely ad hominem, level. His beha­ viour is portrayed as the result of incorrigible character defects. In one especially perverse assessment, former footballer Dave Kitson even suggested that Sterling was the cause of his plight, by making himself a target for abuse (de Menezes 2018). Some media frames are even more insidious. Underlain by what Valluvan and James (2018) describe as ‘textbook anti-Black racism’, Sterling is ‘constructed as the perennially suspicious, on-the-edge-of­ gangsterism young black man of tabloid demonology’ (Goldblatt 2019: 344). For instance, The Sun newspaper published an image of Sterling alongside a story about a semi-professional footballer, with whom Sterling had no connection, whom it accused of being a drug dealer (Ross 2018). The tattoo of an M16 rifle on Sterling’s leg, which became newsworthy before the World Cup in 2018, led to great public and press consternation as well (McEnnis 2018). Dismissing Sterling’s own explanation of what he chose to do with his own body and why – a tribute to his father who was killed by a gun – the tabloids were quick to decide authoritatively that it condoned gun violence. The tattooed athletic body of Sterling became instantaneously representative of blackness in toto, demanded to speak about and on behalf of it. The histrionics around Sterling’s skin and what it symbolises are yet another iteration of the cultural ‘policing’ of what sport stars of colour look like and what they wear (Carrington 1998; Leonard 2012; Moran 2000), and more broadly the criminalisation – actual and figurative – of doing almost anything ‘while black’. In contrast to his extremely successful playing career at club level, Sterling’s international performances for England are shrouded in cri­ ticism from supporters. Performance ratings awarded by users of the BBC website during the 2018 World Cup consistently placed him below his teammates. Before the semi-final against Croatia, Sterling averaged a score of 4.8 out of 10 (BBC Sport 2018). Even allowing for individual subjectivity and opinion in judging game play, these ratings were totally out of kilter with his endeavours. I avoid watching England

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men’s matches on the television in pubs if I can help it. On the few occasions I have done so, viewers’ comments about Sterling have been routinely negative. More often than not, he is the first player picked out for condemnation and/or abuse. Sterling paid all the costs for the funeral of Crystal Palace youth player Damary Dawkins who died of leukaemia, aged 13, in 2019. After scoring for England against the Czech Republic shortly after Dawkins’ death, Sterling raised his jersey to reveal an image of the young man on his undershirt (Press Association 2019b). Soon after­ wards he bought 550 tickets for Manchester City’s FA Cup semi-final match to give to pupils at his old school in London, in the same bor­ ough as Wembley Stadium (Wilson 2019). Such gestures are acknowl­ edged by the media, but have little effect on the overall discourse. They only serve to underscore the industry’s hypocritical anti-blackness in simultaneously lambasting the quotidian, often trifling, traits outlined above. Living and acting outside the white racial framing of black masculinity does not always change the slant or tenor of dominant portrayals. Any concessions towards more benign representation are provisional and transitory. The discursive deprecation of Sterling is symptomatic of the systema­ tic surveillance, criminalisation and illegalisation of black bodies by the private and public institutions of the racial state (Brown 2015; de Nor­ onha 2019; Yancy 2017). Stanley Thangaraj (2017a) observes that: The very body that is the spectacle and site of hero worship for many, also becomes indistinguishable in the larger social realm of the ‘dangerous’ black male. The athletic black body is not far removed, or removed at all, from the mainstream, institutionalized stereotypes of the dangerous, criminal black body. These forms of control operate through, for example, the targeting of police stop-and-search powers on young black men, and the suppres­ sion of grime and drill music cultures (Fatsis 2019). They permeate the seemingly insignificant spaces of everyday urban life too, as evident in the 2019 government announcement that it was targeting its anti-knife crime initiative in takeaway chicken shops (Busby 2019). It perhaps goes without saying that the control and critique of Sterling’s (and others’) black body differs markedly from the leniency and forgiving afforded to the choices and behaviours of those ‘playing while white’ (Leonard 2017). Sterling’s media representation and popular reception reveal more than just how he is viewed and de/valued as an individual. They speak

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to dominant anxieties about blackness and perceived threats to white­ ness, and how they coalesce in attempts to uphold the racial composi­ tion of the nation, too. Nira Yuval-Davis (2011) helpfully distinguishes between the related concepts of belonging and the politics of belonging. The former is about an affective connection that generates the feeling of being ‘at home’. The latter encompasses ‘specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are themselves being constructed in these projects in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries’ (ibid.: 10). This concerns which commu­ nities are included in, or excluded from, the nation, how they are categorised, and the (racialised) power dynamics that dictate these processes. Sterling symbolises how the nation relies on ‘exceptional’ black sporting icons to then racialise, stigmatise and dispute the belonging of other working-class communities of colour (Burdsey 2016). Crucially, in this instance, Sterling is not juxtaposed against the perceived faults of those racialised Others; he is constructed as emble­ matic of them. Intersectional thinking is once again beneficial here to tease out the nuances of Sterling’s circumstances, namely a consideration of the relationship between race, nation, citizenship and Empire. Not only is Sterling black, but he was born outside the UK, in the former British colony of Jamaica. Britain’s imperial history inexorably moulds the components and enunciations of contemporary British citizenship (ElEnany 2020). In turn, the immigration administration that puts this into practice ‘shapes and produces racial meanings and racist practices in the present’ (de Noronha 2019: 2414). The belonging of black bodies within the nation, even those whose ‘right’ to that space is apparently unequivocal through legal citizenship, can be undermined or overturned by the discriminatory, racist political regime of the ‘hostile environment’. As Oliver Belcher et al. (2015) note, ‘borders are epistemological and material sites with the power to shape sub­ jectivities, differentiate and produce categories of “citizen” and “migrant,” and trace inclusive and exclusive fields of possibilities, as well as limits’. Bordering becomes a practice, and borders become attached to communities and individual subjects (Keenan 2019; YuvalDavis et al. 2019), rendering them Other, alien and out of place. Sterling’s background and identity mean that his place in the popu­ lar national imagination will always be inherently fragile and con­ tingent. The post-colonial Jamaican male body has long been the figure of fascination and fear in the white British psyche. Erstwhile Caribbean migrants, who are now established British residents, con­ tinue to be dehumanised by the biopolitical machinery of the racial

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state, which labels them illegal and criminal. After the Windrush Scandal, in February 2020 the government deported 17 adult convicted offenders to Jamaica (with several others removed from the flight amid legal challenge), despite the fact that many of them had come to the UK as children, and thus lacked familiarity with, and social/kinship networks on, the island (BBC News 2020). I do not, of course, propose an equivalence to Sterling’s situation simply on the basis of shared colonial histories and British Caribbean identities. He has not been forcibly removed from the national territory or had his citizenship revoked. However, I do argue that the scenarios are related. Bound­ aries around citizenship involve non-literal and discursive practices and representations as well. The denigration of his personality reflects and reinforces the notion of ‘good character’, which has been a criterion in immigration-citizenship legislation for over half century (Kapoor and Narcowicz 2019). Criticism of his expenditure and lifestyle embodies how ‘the notion of the unjustly enriched migrant has long been at the heart of British immigration policy’ (El-Enany 2020: 1). In short, what Sterling endures is a symptom of broader social and political processes of racial bordering and categorisation that seek to preserve the nation – and the place of sport within it – as a white entity. The landscape of British and English sport has provided the context, implicitly or explicitly, for the bordering practices of the racial state for some time. In 1990, Conservative MP Norman Tebbit argued that British passport holders who had migrated from the Indian sub­ continent or Caribbean should demonstrate their national loyalty by supporting England, rather than ancestral nations, in cricketing con­ tests. Four years later, writing in the influential Wisden Cricket Monthly, journalist Robert Henderson extended such rhetoric to min­ ority ethnic players, especially those born overseas. Henderson argued that they did not try as hard as their white teammates when playing for England and even gained pleasure from the team’s defeats (Marqusee 1998). In 2011, columnists from the right-of-centre Daily Mail news­ paper launched a campaign against the so-called ‘Plastic Brits’ (Burd­ sey 2016; Poulton and Maguire 2012). These athletes – including a significant proportion of black women, such as Yamilé Aldama, Shana Cox, Tiffany Porter and Shara Proctor – were regarded by the paper as sporting mercenaries. Most of them had British citizenship, residency rights and/or British parents. Yet the fact that they had been born and/ or lived overseas, and competed previously for other nations, was seen to differentiate them from ‘real’ Brits. Echoing the deprecating ‘scrounger’ rhetoric around so-called economic migrants employed by the paper and in popular discourse, these athletes were framed as

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taking advantage of the broad selection criteria available to National Olympic Committees purely for sporting success and financial gain. This debate highlights how the work of British whiteness draws on a sense of superiority and imperial history that makes occupying two national contexts, other than for the purposes of colonialism and imperialism, dangerous and un-British. It reinscribes how national identity is so closely tied to territoriality, with those not ‘originally from here’ – especially communities of colour – always struggling to affirm their right to belong. As other post-colonial European nations highlight, in times of social uncertainty and conflict, footballers deemed to represent the pro­ claimed unassimilated – indeed unassimilable – community are singled out for racist attacks. Their provisional and transient belonging as ‘one of us’ can be withdrawn at a moment’s notice, following a misplaced shot, a failed save or a rash tackle. During the 2018 men’s World Cup, Sweden midfielder Jimmy Durmaz conceded a free-kick against Ger­ many that led to an injury-time German equaliser. Born in Sweden to Assyrian parents, Durmaz received racist abuse and threats to his family on social media. His teammates and coaches responded with a written statement condemning these invectives, and finishing with a clear riposte: ‘fuck racism’ (Christenson 2018a). One of Durmaz’s opponents that day, Mesut Özil – German-born of Turkish parentage – quit the German national team after their group stage exit. Özil cited racism and a lack of respect after he was criticised for his perfor­ mances, as well as widespread disapproval of his meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdog˘ an before the tournament (along with fellow Germany teammate Ilkay Gündog˘ an and the German-born Cenk Tosun who represents Turkey). Özil spoke about discrimination from within the German Football Federation too: ‘In the eyes of [German FA president Reinhard] Grindel and his supporters I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose’ (cited in Reuters 2018; see Jackson 2004). Tellingly, as Eniola Aluko also found to her cost, Özil received no support from white allies in the squad. Teammate Toni Kroos described his claims as ‘nonsense’, and Manuel Neuer, Thomas Müller and manager Joachim Löw also disputed the existence of racism (Christenson 2018b; see Gehring 2016 for a broader discussion on the German context). Sterling is subjected to a pernicious frame of hegemonic racialised representation that scavenges callously on different aspects of black culture and wilfully misrepresents them in name of white supremacy. His is clearly cognisant of this. As Joseph-Salisbury (2019: 1757) notes, ‘in white supremacist contexts, to know how one is distorted by the

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white gaze is of fundamental, perhaps even fatal, importance’. Sterling is aware of his agency to respond and resist, both as an individual and as an esteemed spokesperson for a generation of black footballers. Not long ago the thought of Sterling taking on the mantle of leader and activist seemed very remote. It is a role and status that, it is now apparent, he has adapted to with aplomb. English football is a better place for it.

4

Playing by different rules?

Interruption of play Whenever I reach the end of a long writing project and contemplate pulling the various threads together to make some final remarks, I prefer to spend periods of time away from my notes and drafts, books and papers, and computer. The subject matter I write about, grounded in popular culture and everyday leisure practices, means that I like to get back ‘out there’, re-engaging my sociological imagination in the spaces and communities with which I am familiar. As spring approa­ ched in 2020, I speculated how my weekly afternoons and evenings at the football might tidy up and refine my thinking on the issues I address here. Yet after 8 March I did not see any more live football before I finished this book. The coronavirus placed a ghastly grip on the world and football was put on hold indefinitely. Far more pressing concerns took over and what happens on the field of play (if not what the game provides for communities and local businesses) no longer seemed very important. However, as I discuss in the next-but-one section, a further momen­ tous global phenomenon emerged in the early summer of 2020 which was to show that, away from the stadium, the social significance of football and footballers did not diminish. In relation to race and racism, it grew even more. As mass Black Lives Matter demonstrations took place across the world – in response to the killing of African Americans Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, David McAtee and George Floyd by police officers and members of the US National Guard – in the UK famous figures from the entertainment and sport industries spoke out and stood up alongside protesters from all walks of life. In a historically unprecedented development, several black professional footballers joined the action, calling for racial jus­ tice outside their sport, and beyond as well as within their own

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countries. Having brought to public attention the systemic racism that characterises their participation in professional football, their message was now directed towards calling out white supremacy and antiblackness in all social spheres, on a global scale. In connecting their playing careers to the racism they and others experience in all aspects of their personal lives, these players stepped onto a new public plat­ form and, in doing so, gained access to a much wider audience.

Dismantling the paradox of the returning constant In the course of this book I have demonstrated that reports of racism’s departure from English professional football were greatly exaggerated. To be more frank, they were completely wrong. The paradox of the returning constant – how I conceptualise the popular fallacy of racism as transient rather than permanent – has been shown up for its shortcomings. Racism was here as well as there, now as well as then, all along. The three Rs that characterised popular explanations of its indubitable presence by the end of the second decade of this century – return, rise and re-emergence – have been revealed as the product not just of experiential naivety, but of ideo­ logical and discursive positions that deny racism’s fixity and traction. As a historically rooted, structural and systemic phenomenon, racism in football is relentless. Football does not simply reproduce societal racism; it plays its own part in generating racial meanings too. It is found on and in pitches, locker rooms, management offices, board­ rooms and press boxes, as well as stadium terraces, pubs and social media. It exists in men’s and women’s football, within clubs, the national set-up and international competition. It can even dictate the occupational culture of an organisation, multiplying across a range of spaces and taking hold over several years. Racism is expressed in ever-present forms of overt and ‘dog whistle’ racist rhetoric. It can also be found in frames of representation and modes of discussion that, while apparently well-meaning and/or ostensibly progressive, are essentially ill-informed, contradictory and counterproductive. Throughout Racism and English Football: For Club and Country I have challenged orthodoxies, posed questions and essentially attemp­ ted to reconfigure how we understand and oppose racism in the domestic game. I have not proposed practical solutions, but I end this book by raising possibilities. In doing so, I expand the analytical scale utilised thus far to look outside and inside international and national contexts. I consider, very briefly, the potential of transnational ontolo­ gies, networks and mobilities in rethinking anti-racism in football, and

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the role of local grassroots playing cultures in re/producing an embo­ died everyday multiculture.

A transnational anti-racism for football The nation-state is frequently deployed by academics and other com­ mentators as the principal interpretive frame for understanding ideas of diaspora, identity and citizenship in football. The selection of play­ ers with migrant heritage for national teams is regarded as the apo­ theosis of these social dynamics. The line-ups of, say, Algeria, Australia or Switzerland become cultural repositories through which we are persuaded to comprehend how diasporas are embodied and performed in and through sport. The very essence and organisation of interna­ tional football – despite its relatively dynamic and inclusive eligibility rules – reaffirm the hegemony of the nation-state itself. Within the rules of football, once a player has turned out for a country at senior level, outside of exceptional circumstances they are bound to it for the rest of their playing days. Any sense of off-field affiliation to another coun­ try – which maybe a birthplace or source of family heritage – or insinuations of ‘divided loyalties’ are quickly and forcefully circum­ scribed by politicians and the media (see Chapter 3). An analytical reliance on the nation-state and the national team is a type of metho­ dological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) that obscures important social, cultural and political entanglements that occur on alternative spatial scales (Carter 2011). These include footballers’ worldviews, mobilities, solidarities and other personal engagements which can be expansive and truly global in nature. Transnational – and transhistorical – ontologies, positionalities and networks are fundamental to the power and potential of contemporary black sports activism (Burdsey 2019). Supranational modes of being and doing influence how many footballers of colour politicise their blackness and engage in anti-racism. They purvey a Black Atlantic personal politics that sits outside the confines of ethnic and national idiosyncrasies. They call for a version of anti-racism that is not restricted to country-specific constitutions and jurisdictions (Gilroy 1993b). Paul Pogba was born in Paris to Guinean parents and plays for Manchester United. He used social media to share a photograph of paintings of his father and Martin Luther King Jr (Akhalbey 2019). Lagos-born Eniola Aluko, who grew up in Birmingham, ended her playing career in Turin. She donates part of the proceeds from her memoir to charities in Rwanda (Aluko 2019b). Londoner Ryan Ber­ trand wore a pair of specially commissioned ‘I have a dream’ boots in

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honour of Dr King while playing for Southampton and spoke of how he was inspired by the historical achievements of African American athlete Jesse Owens (Hytner 2020). Rosa Parks, Huey Newton, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley all feature in the Black History montage tattooed on Watford player Andre Gray’s back (BBC 1Xtra 2020). During the Covid-19 pandemic, Antonio Rüdiger of Chelsea funded nurses’ meals for three months at the Berlin hospital in which he was born, and he committed to providing thousands of face masks to market-traders in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where his mother comes from (Chelsea FC 2020). Globally situated notions of blackness are drawn from other cultural spaces and histories into the particular milieu and power dynamics of English football, allowing black footbal­ lers to make sense of their experiences and align in critical mass against racism and other social injustices (Burdsey and Gorman 2015). Reci­ procally, these players take on significant symbolic roles within their wider communities of colour, as powerful transnational cultural resour­ ces, in the face of white supremacy (Mwaniki 2017). These globally expansive and politically conscious standpoints were illuminated powerfully in June 2020, as several black professional footballers spoke out against racial injustice as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Andre Gray stated that ‘So the marches over here are not just for the police brutality in America – it’s for England, as well. And Paris and all over the world. It’s because of the systematic racism that is everywhere’ (cited in Sky Sports 2020). Both Nedum Onuoha, a British player for Real Salt Lake, and the US international DeAndre Yedlin who plays for Newcastle United, admitted that they felt unsafe and fearful as young black men in the United States, espe­ cially during interactions with police officers (Reuters 2020; L. Taylor 2020). Patrick van Aanholt, Anita Asante and Rinsola Babajide (among others) all spoke out in support of Black Lives Matter (Meade 2020; Telegraph 2020), while Tyrone Mings attended a protest in Bir­ mingham wearing a ‘Won’t Be Silenced’ facemask and posted after­ wards on Instagram that the ‘energy and power’ of the demonstration was ‘like nothing I’ve felt before’ (cited in Maher 2020). Media pundit and Derby County coach Liam Rosenior wrote an open letter to Donald Trump in The Guardian newspaper, denouncing the US pre­ sident’s ‘open hatred, indifference and disregard towards a people sub­ jugated by physical, economic, mental and emotional abuse for more than 400 years’ (Rosenior 2020). Lucia Trimbur (2019: 262) proposes that ‘The dual actions of gen­ erating dissent and creating possibility [in sport] provide hope in a moment of intolerant politics and are crucial in a moment of otherwise

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despairing social conditions, when the temptation to give up and retreat can be strong’. Black Atlantic properties and possibilities are instructive in thinking about and implementing a popular anti-racist praxis for football unconfined by national boundaries, narrowlydefined identities or individual sporting associations. This would be an anti-racism characterised by solidarity and sharing, the kind of inter­ national socialism that is fundamental to challenging racism as a global phenomenon (Aouragh 2019). Sporting voices do not simply provide words for us to interrogate as the objects of our scholarly cri­ tique. They represent organic knowledge we can learn from. With their transnational and transhistorical outlook, footballers of colour have established a path for popular cultural anti-discriminatory politics. This is a route that sociologists of sport would do well to follow.

Saturday’s kids: the possibilities of everyday multiculture in local football It is early on a Saturday morning at the beginning of June 2019. I turn off the M25 London orbital motorway at its most northerly point and head towards Enfield. I defer to my car’s satnav, following directions along suburban dual carriageways. I turn onto a rural-looking lane and eventually find Hotspur Way. Soon I arrive at the training centre for Tottenham Hotspur. This newly built complex is very impressive, com­ prising a number of shiny buildings, with surrounding grass and artificial pitches as far as the eye can see. I park up and enter the reception area of the main building. I spot my nephew’s team, all kitted out in their smart black Nike tracksuits, with the club badge and their initials on their chests. My nephew is sitting next to a teammate, a boy with Polish parents. They are discussing their friendly rivalry as Everton and Liver­ pool supporters. I recognise most of the other players and greet them individually. They are excited about their participation in today’s tour­ nament. I then check in with the coaches who are accompanying the boys, the under-9s, today. This team is the epitome of multicultural London, drawn from several parts of the north and east of the city: boys with heritage from Africa, the Caribbean, Cyprus, Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent. The rest of the local teams here today, and their families and coaches, are no different. Two weeks on. I am giving a talk at a conference on discourses of race and immigration. My paper addresses the significance of English football. I articulate my critique of the perceived social impact of the England 2018 men’s World Cup squad (see Chapter 3). The final slide of my presentation is simply an uncaptioned photograph of my

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nephew’s team. I conclude by contemplating that, if football can play a part in creating a positive racial future, then perhaps it will be achieved through comparable groups of girls and boys rather than elite national teams. I propose to the audience that this team offers an embodied cultural resistance to the racist structures of Brexit. Their composition, friendship and teamwork refute a political process that threatens to prevent families with similar histories and nationalities from making the UK their home. As always, I reflect on my paper as I travel home on the train that evening. Colleagues I spoke to afterwards were cap­ tivated by the photo. They liked the idea of this youthful multiethnic team. No one asked which player was my nephew. I did not mention it either. I realise that it simply was not important and did not warrant discussion. In the part of modern multicultural Britain where this team play, it could have been any one of them. My nephew’s team and the ones they play against each week are indicative of the related phenomena of ‘conviviality’ and ‘everyday multiculture’ theorised by leading British race scholars. According to Paul Gilroy (2004: xi) conviviality is ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban centres and in postcolonial cities elsewhere’. Similarly, nuanced readings of everyday multiculture define it as ‘a new kind of lived multicultural politics that is not just about opposing racism but establishing tools through which people from disparate biographies can live together in a city riven by social divisions and damage’ (Back and Sinha 2018: 25); and ‘the highly casual, nigh banal, interactive practices that emerge in spaces characterised by ethnic and other diversities, practices that undemonstratively cultivate dispositions less prone to nationalisms and other forms of overtly communitarian claim-making on space, culture and politics’ (Valluvan 2019: 25). Cri­ tically, this scenario ‘does not describe the absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance’ but rather ‘a different setting for their empty, interpersonal rituals which… have started to mean different things in the absence of any strong belief in absolute or integral races’ (Gilroy 2004: xi; see also Back and Sinha 2018; Rogaly 2020; Valluvan 2016). Conflict and conviviality can be found close together, and so Anoop Nayak (2017: 291) reminds us to look and listen out for ‘some of the scratchiness and bumpiness that lie in the grooves of many encounters with difference’. I recognise that considering the potential of a group of young foot­ ballers alongside a critique of the significance of some adult profes­ sional ones may be deemed inconsistent by some readers. It might be regarded as reifying the innocence of youth and putting too much faith

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in the world of tomorrow. I temper my claims in relation to space and effect. My nephew’s football team play in sight of what was once the Olympic Stadium (it is now West Ham United’s London Stadium), in a borough whose multiculture was a central feature of the London 2012 Games bid. These boys’ mixture of ethnic backgrounds and their habitual cross-cultural social interactions are not widely replicated outside of the capital and other metropolitan centres. Indeed, they do not necessarily exist in all communities and social practices within them. Thus I do not suggest this team speaks for England as a whole; rather, I underscore its bounded, localised significance. Moreover, I argue that these local, urban youth football cultures cannot displace or deter the power, politics and practices of the racial state. They operate alongside and in spite of them. Watching this team play, I know their futures inside and outside football will be challenging. They will soon find out that their identities allow some of them certain privileges and facilitate their progression through football, while others will encounter abuse and exclusion. These boys know they are from different racial backgrounds. What this signifies will not be transcended in their lifetimes. However, at this stage of their lives, and in this place, it can still be momentarily eclipsed by what else takes priority on a Saturday morning. Football is an imperfect social sphere; but to see this team play, train, and hug and pile onto to each other in a heap of small sweaty bodies to celebrate a goal suggests that these fleeting physical interactions on muddy pitches might just generate some happy outcomes too. I watch football – from Premier League stadia to the parks of east London – because I like it. I write about it because I feel obliged to use my professional position to critique its inequities and exclusions. In both senses, football is an activity that I continue to put faith in because I hope that, one day, it might be better.

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Index

Abbott, D. 78 Abraham, T. 9, 70 activism 2, 25, 28–29, 99 Agergaard, S. 80–81 Ahmad, A. 10 Ahmed, S.: complaints against racism 12, 84, 87; conceptualising racism 15; diversity ideology 37–38; non-performativity of anti-racism 26, whiteness 16 allies 31, 88, 95 Aluko, E.: anti-racism 58; background 81; black women and England team 88–89; complaint against racism 84–85; connections between Brexit and racism 78; discrimination from England coaches 82–83; discrimination from Mark Sampson 12, 33, 64, 81–82; lack of solidarity in Eng­ land squad 88, 95; media role 47; racism 87; social significance 82; stereotyping of black women 39, 48, 81–84; transnational ontology 99; undermining of her experience 86–87 anti-blackness 2, 71, 83, 91–92 anti-racism: critiques from black players 27–31, 33; in diversity ideology 36–38; establishment and development in football 3, 25; as transnational practice 4, 99–101; ineffective implementation 4, 25–26, 32; inter-racial solidarities 31–32; involvement of supporters

16–19, 49–50, 52–53; lack of embeddedness in equity and inclu­ sion policies 36–38; monitoring of racism 8; personal politics of author 16–20; plans of action 8, 28, 30–32; problematic relationship with professional game 26–27; response to Black Lives Matter 99–101; role of black players 28–32, 99–101; social media 57–58 anti-racism match suspension protocol 5, 31, 53, 73 Asante, A. 88, 100 Aubameyang, P-E. 6, 50 Back, L.: anti-racism in football 5, 25; everyday multiculture 1, 102; racism in football 2, 49; sociological imagination 19–20; stereotypes of black players 41 Bailey, M. 75 Balotelli, M. 4 Barkley, R. 72 Barnes, J. 6, 14, 17, 66 Beardsley, P. 12 Bell, D. 85–86 Bhambra, G.K. 6, 75 Black Collective of Media in Sport (BCOMS) 55–56 Black Lives Matter 21, 97, 100 blackness: denigration of 39–43, 71, 83–84, 90–93; fetishisation of 71; global reference point for anti- racism 29, 99–101; impact on

128

Index

recruitment policies 43–44; and neoliberalism 39; and space 70, 84; stereotyping of players 40–42, 83–84, 90–93 Bonilla-Silva, E. 36 borders, bordering 20, 74, 85, 90, 93–94 Bradley, G.M. 75 Brexit: football as resistance to 64, 67, 78, 102; and national identity 67, 74; and racism 6, 13, 20, 64, 73–74 British Asian players: approaches to recruitment 60–61; exclusion from professional football 26, 59, 62, 70; marginalisation from equity and diversity policies 35; racism towards 50, 60; stereotypes 59–60; see also Bringing Opportunities to Communities, British Asian supporters British Asian supporters 50–52, 56, 68, 70; see also British Asian players British Future 69, 89 Bringing Opportunities to Commu­ nities 60–61 Bulgaria v England match 2019 (racism at) 29, 32, 53, 73 Butler, D. 9, 83 Cameron, D. 75 Carrington, B.: black athletes 29, 39–40, 43, 71, 90–91; political nature of sport 5, 14; race and media 55; race and nation 63, 65, 67, 74; relationship between racism and sport 14 Casilla, K. 27, 12 Chelsea FC: John Terry racism charge 12, 27–28; players’ experi­ ences of racism 5, 13, 24, 30, 50, 54, 90; player activism 100; racist abuse of black youth team players 24; women’s team 46, 88 Christian, M. 71 citizenship: and borders 93–94; and colonialism 93; and football elig­ ibility rules 99; racialised nature of

63, 73, 77, 79–80, 95; withdrawal of 63–64 Clarke, G. 85 coaches, coaching: exclusion of black men 59, 61–62; exclusion of black women 35, 46; inclusion in anti­ discrimination plans 8; inclusion in Football Association equity and inclusion strategy (In Pursuit of Progress) 34–36; Peter Beardsley racism charge 12; racism in Eng­ land Women’s setup 82–83; racist abuse of youth team players at Chelsea FC 24; Rooney Rule 28 Collins, P.H. 40 Collymore, S. 54, 58 colonialism: British Empire 69; influ­ ence on contemporary British citi­ zenship/immigration regime 93–95; influence on modern football 39, 41, 77–80; and race science 43; stereotypes of blackness and sexuality 41 conviviality 102; see also Gilroy, P. Critical Race Theory 85 Davies, M. 6, 8 Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) 49; see also Football Lads Alliance deportation 63–64, 75 diversity ideology 33, 36–38, 71, 87 Douglas, D. 39, 82–83 Durmaz, J. 95 El-Enany, N. 67, 72–73, 93–94 England supporters: British Asians 51; connection with team 64; national identity 67–69, 94; racism by 65, 68, 72, 91; Tebbit Test 94; Three Lions (Lightning Seeds song) 74–75 England national team (men’s): ethnic composition 64–71, 77, 101, 103; Football Association minority ethnic coaching targets 34–35; and national identity 69–70; player responses to racism 32; racism towards players 3, 29, 53, 66, 68,

Index

129

73, 91; resistance to Brexit 64, 67, 78, 102 England national team (women’s): Eniola Aluko experiences of racism 81–90; ethnic composition 46, 88–90; Football Association response to Aluko complaint 84–87; Mark Sampson racism charge 12, 82–83; racism in coach­ ing set-up 83–84; representation in popular culture 47; response to match v Cameroon in 2019 World Cup 41–42; whiteness 88–90 English Football League Code of Practice 36 #Enough campaign 58 Equality Act 2010 34, 85 equity and inclusion initiatives 33–37, 60 Everton FC: anti-racism 15–18; play­ ers 40–41; racism 6, 15–17; sup­ porters 51–52; When Skies are Grey fanzine 17–18, 49; see also Goodison Park everyday multiculture: role of football 1, 65, 67, 101–103 Evra, P. 27–28, 85

Forestieri, F. 12 Fortier, A-M. 69–70 France, French football 78–80

Feagin, J. 16, 29 Fédération Internationale de Foot­ ball Association (FIFA) 30–31, 55 Ferdinand, A. 27–28, 85 Ferdinand, R. 27, 70 Football Against Racism Europe (FARE) 4 Football Association (FA): charging of players and coaches for racism 12–13, 27, 43; equity and inclusion strategy (In Pursuit of Progress) 33–38, 46; response to Aluko complaint 84–87; responsibility for anti-racism 53; strategy for increasing British Asian participa­ tion (Bringing Opportunities to Communities) 60–61 Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) 49; also Democratic Football Lads Alliance Football Lads and Lasses Against Fascism (FLALAF) 49

immigration: relationship to football 1, 14, 23, 64, 66, 78–80, 95; and identity 74; impact on racialisation 93–94; restrictions on 74–78; see also “Hostile Environment”, Windrush Scandal imperialism; see colonialism In Pursuit of Progress: critique of content and discourse 33–38, 60; implications for women’s football 46; see also Football Association (FA) intersectionality: absence from equity and inclusion strategies 35, 45–46; sociological approach 10, 45, 47–48, 93; underpinning stereotypes 39, 83 Italy, Italian football 4, 18, 30, 41, 55, 81

Gayle, H. 31 Gilroy, P.: conviviality 99, 102; empire 6; race and nation 66, 69, 74; theorising anti-racism 26; the­ orising racism 14, 49 Glenn, M. 84–85 Goodison Park 6, 17–19; see also Everton FC governance 30, 36, 48, 61, 84–85 Gray, A. 100 Grenfell Tower tragedy 6, 75 Guardiola, P. 42 Guesmi, H. 79–80 Hall, S. 1, 43, 66 Hector, R. 45, 48, 86 Hennessey, W. 13 Hill, D. 17 “Hostile Environment”: effects on football 6, 14, 64; outcomes and implications for Britain’s racial minorities 72–78, 93 Hylton, K. 3, 16, 26

Johnson, B. 8–9 Johnson, P. 57 Jones, H. 75–76

130

Index

Jones, S. 45 Joseph, R. 39, 45, 48, 71 Joseph-Salisbury, R. 71–72, 95 Kean, M. 4, 18–19, 41, 52 Kerr, S. 46 Kick It Out 8, 25, 27, 32–33, 50, 60 King, C. 44, 62, 87 Kmita, M. 47 Kmita, R. 47 Kompany, V. 30 Leko, J. 12, 27 Lentin, A. 3, 9, 12, 17 Lukaku, R. 4, 27, 30, 40, 55 Mann, L. 55; see also Black Collec­ tive on Media in Sport Mayorga-Gallo, S. 37–38 Mbappé, K. 79–80 media: involvement of black women 47; reproducing racism 7, 39–40, 53–55, 64, 66, 90–92; reform 55–56; role in constructing dis­ course on racism in football 2–4, 13–15; social media 7, 28–29, 31, 45, 57–58, 95, 99; supporter led 56 Mendy, B. 42 Mings, T. 73, 100 misogynoir 84 mixed-race 65, 70–72 Ms Banks 47 multiculture, see everyday multiculture multiculturalism 75 Nadim, N. 80–81 Najeib, S. 52 Nakamba, M. 40 nation, nationalism: citizenship and immigration 73–77, 94–95; Den­ mark 80; France 78–80; gendered 80–81; Germany 95; racialised 46; 65–72; Sweden 95 Nayak, A. 39, 102 Neville, G. 78 Neville, P. 41 Newton, K. 12, 84–85 No Room for Racism campaign 32

Olow, F. 46 Olympic Games (London 2012) 69–70 Onuoha, N. 100 Operation Vaken 76 Ouseley, Lord 32 Özil, M. 95 Palmer, L.A. 84 paradox of the returning constant 7, 98 Parekh Report 66 Parris, N. 69, 89 “Plastic Brits” affair 94 Pogba, P. 40, 58, 99 post-race, post-racial: denial of racism in English football 3–5, 11, 20, 26, 87; embodiment in Eng­ land men’s team 64–65, 71–72; as political discourse 76, 78 Premier League Equality Standard 36 Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) 27–28, 57–58, 85 racial backstage 16 racial displacement 3, 9, 49 racial microaggressions 82 racial passing 72 racialisation: of black players 38–44, 54, 62, 65; gender 47–48, 80, 82–84, 88; immigration 76; media 56; nation 63, 67–68, 70, 72, 84, 93, 95; nostalgia 74; positionality 6, 9, 29, 85, 90; power dynamics and structures 15, 17, 24, 38, 93, 95; relations in stadia 52 Randhawa, K. 15, 22, 26–27, 61 Rapinoe, M. 31 Rashford, M. 27, 58, 65 Ratna, A.: critique of denial of racism in women’s game 45; race and gender intersections in foot­ ball 10, 47–48, 59, 81–82, 89 Ray, V. 24, 88 Regis, C. 65–66 Reddy, M. 21, 46 Rogaly, B. 102 Rooney Rule 28 Rose, D. 9, 65

Index Rosenior, L. 100 Rüdiger, A. 30, 33, 100 rules of racial standing 85–86 Saha, A. 56, 70 Saini, A. 43 Sampson, M.: attempts to exonerate actions 87–88; charge of racism towards Eniola Aluko 12, 81; disciplinary case 85–86; racial microaggressions 82–84; support within England squad 88 Sancho, J. 9, 70 Scott, A. 9, 47, 81 sexuality 10, 39–41, 48 Show Racism the Red Card 25, 50 Silva, B. 42 Sky Sports 7, 41, 47, 51, 86 sociological imagination 19–20, 97 Sordell, M. 9 Southall, N. 17 Southgate, G. 67, 73, 78 Spence, D. 39, 48, 83–84, 88–89 Sterling, R.: anti-racism manifesto 30–31; anti-racist spokesperson 96; calling out racism 7, 53–54, 56, 58; defence of Bernardo Silva 42; demonization of 90–96; England squad 64–65, 69 Stereotypes: black male players ste­ reotyping of players 40–42, 83–84, 90–93; black female players 39, 48, 81–84; British Asian players 59–60 Stokes, D. 89 Suárez, L. 27–28 Taylor, D. 21, 84 Tebbit Test 94 Terry, J. 12, 27–28; see also Chelsea FC Thangaraj, S. 31, 63, 71–72, 78, 90, 92 Three Lions (Lightning Seeds song) 74–75; see also England supporters Titley, G. 9, 12, 15, 39 Trimbur, L. 2, 28, 100 Twitter 8, 17, 33, 57–58

131

Union of European Football Associa­ tions (UEFA) 30, 35, 46, 53, 65, 73 Valluvan, S.: anti-blackness 91; everyday multiculture 102; poli­ tical retreat from multiculturalism 75; race and nation 63, 66, 72; race and neoliberalism 90; remnants of Empire 69 Vegedream 80 Yedlin, D. 100 Yuval-Davis, N. 63, 74, 93 walk-offs 30–31 When Skies are Grey fanzine 17–18, 49; see also Everton FC white privilege 16, 72, 103 white supremacy: anti-blackness 95, 98; nation 81; racial displacement 15; racial stereotypes 40–41; resis­ tance by black players 29, 62, 100 whiteness: academics 16; diversity ideology 37–38; in football struc­ tures 29, 38, 59, 62; media 55–56; nation 40, 64, 66, 69–70, 82, 84, 87–90, 93. 95; positionality 16; resistance by black players 29; women’s football 45, 88–90 Williams, G. 24 Windrush Generation see Windrush Scandal Windrush Scandal 21, 64, 76–77 Women’s Super League (WSL) 10, 23, 25, 44, 46, 53 World Cup (men’s, 2018): England squad 64–65; 67–73; French parti­ cipation and pre-2018 success 78–90; German squad 95; reports of racism beforehand 3; repre­ sentation of minority ethnic media employees 55; supporter ratings of England players 91–92; Swedish squad 95 World Cup (women’s, 2019) 41, 44, 47, 89 Wright, I. 29, 70