Bad Sports Metaphors

Racism, soccer, and the limits of interpretation

BY CHRIS HU

Click to see full size
Illustrations by Chris Hu
Half black jersey

RACE-RELATED INCIDENTS ARE NOT uncommon in European soccer, but the past year has been a particularly ugly one for black players. First, in April 2004, the British soccer commentator and pundit Ron Atkinson was forced out of his television and newspaper jobs for referring to a black player, in what he thought was an off-air remark, as a “fucking lazy thick n-----. ” In October, Luis Aragonés, the Spanish national team’s coach, called another black player a “black shit”—which he later excused by stating that this was merely a motivational technique designed to inspire one of his own players, who he called “a gypsy.” (Last Thursday, March 3, Aragonés was finally fined a paltry €3,000 by the Spanish Football Federation for his comments.)

The following month, Spain hosted England in a ‘friendly,’ or exhibition, match at Madrid’s Estadio Bernabéu, the home stadium of Real Madrid. Days prior to the meeting, Aragonés had refused to apologize for the “black shit” remark, and racist chanting from the crowd had marred the previous night’s match between the two countries’ youth teams. This raised the stakes for what would have otherwise been a relatively meaningless friendly.

While the Spanish team dominated the English on the field, eventually winning 1-0, the spectators in the Bernabéu hurled abuse at each of the five black players fielded by England. Making gorilla postures and shouting monkey-like “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” chants each time one of them touched the ball, they appeared to single out the darkest-skinned players for the worst treatment. As one commentator covering the match put it, while the soccer itself was dreadfully boring, the behavior of the crowd was “toe-curling.”

Toe-curling indeed, even if one is merely watching it on television or following online commentary. But what, as American observers of these events are we to make of them? Crowd abuse at sporting events in the United States is often vitriolic, but it never approaches these depths: the chanting in Madrid, at least at first, has to seem inscrutably, inexplicably barbarous to us. But the desire to interpret is impossible to repress. European soccer, and particularly matches between national teams, appears ripe for the picking—what could be more overloaded with meaning than a contest between the 11 chosen representatives of two nation-states, in an era in which modern conceptions of national identity are under siege from the transnational flows of people, products, and capital?

Historicize, Always Historicize

Click to see full size
Person with Newspaper

The racist chanting in Madrid unleashed a torrent of recrimination from the British press—some of it more measured than others. But in condemning this foreign racism, too many commentators (and tabloid headline writers) implicitly assume two things: first, that the chanting must be read as direct proof of widespread Spanish racism, and second, that since English players were the targets of racist attacks, the nation as a whole can exalt in its enlightenment and tolerance.

This understanding of the Spanish crowd’s racial remarks obscures the deeper racism endemic to British soccer and to its society generally. It also relies on the notion that chanting at a soccer match is directly indicative of larger societal problems. Thanks to vigorous anti-racism campaigns, there has been real progress in reducing overt racism in British soccer. Fifteen years ago, black players were subjected to not only chanting but also disgusting outbreaks of banana-throwing from the crow. But still, it’s impossible to determine the connection between these changes and larger patterns of structural racism. To cite but one statistic from within the sport, while roughly one-quarter of the players in the English Premiership are black or mixed-race, none of the 20 current Premiership coaches are black.

Martin Jacques has written in the Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper, that “football has become the public crucible of European racism... . In racial terms, football brings Europe face to face with the worst outrages of its own history.” In its own limited way, this is a persuasive argument. Sporting events are one of the only venues in which people can safely, anonymously express the repressed racial anxieties that are absent from polite political discourse, and such behavior can thus inform our understanding of social problems in a uniquely visceral manner.

Furthermore, the prevalence of black players in both European club teams and the national squads of European countries as disparate as Portugal and Sweden can be read as the story of post-war decolonization and immigration abridged. When, in the opening match of the 2002 World Cup, Senegal beat France 1-0, the irony lay not only in the fact that an ex-colony had defeated its former imperial master. Nearly all of the Senegalese players—lured away from poverty by high wages and linguistic affinity—were employed by French club teams at the time, the French team itself was seen as a cross-section of a newly multiracial France, featuring players of Algerian, West African, and Eastern European descent. In this sense, the national soccer team as crude substitute for national polity seems to provide us with a glimpse into the vagaries of late capitalism and, by extension, its racial politics.

Yellow, Red, And Race Cards

This kind of thinking conditions the responses to racism carried out by national soccer governing bodies. Just over a month ago, England played a friendly match against the Netherlands, intended to keep both nations’ teams sharp for upcoming World Cup qualifiers. It was England’s first match since the shameful night in Madrid, and both nations’ soccer authorities wanted to make a symbolic anti-racist statement.

The match itself was a dismal 0-0 draw, but it is notable for the uniforms worn by both sides. The English players—including several of those who had been racially abused in Madrid—wore red shirts emblazoned with the slogan “No to Racism.” The Dutch, almost absurdly literalizing the anti-racism effort, wore half-black, half-white jerseys.

The problem with this standpoint—that soccer, as mass cultural phenomenon, can be read as a reliable gauge of European race relations, and that anti-racism efforts such as the uniforms worn in the England-Holland friendly are a sufficient response—is, in the final analysis, a matter of interpretation. Soccer in Europe is fertile terrain for interpretation, and if its occasional reminders of actually existing racism can spur governments and anti-racist activists to action, so much the better.

But what’s tricky about European soccer is that its representative pretenses—that a team of players and a crowd full of fans is the nation, region, or city they play or cheer for—fools us into reading the soccer match as a complete picture of society rather than a partial, albeit important, one. Anti-black racist incidents in European soccer can tell us something about the continuing marginalization of blacks in Western Europe, though one should be careful not to confuse causes and effects. But they reveal next to nothing—except by conspicuous absence—about the position of Asian and Arab minorities in these societies.

Taking last month’s England-Holland friendly as an example, both national teams, as well as domestic leagues in each country, have consistently featured black players for the past 15 to 20 years, and their treatment has served as the crudest of barometers of at least overt racism. But while there are an estimated 1.5 million Muslims in the United Kingdom, there is only one Muslim Briton, or even Briton of Asian descent, playing in the Premiership, and the proportion is only slightly higher in the Netherlands, where most of its roughly 3 million foreign-born residents of a total population of 16 million are Muslims from Morocco and Turkey.

Particularly in the Netherlands, where immigration is overall more recent and proportionally more significant than in England, this represents an acute challenge to national identity and the shrinking welfare state. And the fundamentalist minority of these new immigrant groups represents a particularly difficult threat to liberal multiculturalism. Dressing one’s players in black and white is an admirable move, as long as it’s only the symbolic extension of a larger, more comprehensive effort to address the marginalization of blacks in soccer and in society as a whole. But this is only a response to what has hitherto been the dominant challenge of adapting national identity: black immigrants from the former empire. Outside the stadium, and outside the interpretive efforts of soccer fans and commentators, there is an emergent knot of problems and racisms—of which the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the resultant reprisals against innocent Dutch Muslims may only be the beginning.

Chris Hu B’06 is off-white

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com