By Mike Rowe
Monday, July 21, 2014.
The recently-concluded
2014 football World Cup in Brazil has been hailed as a success in terms of
entertainment but the game faces increasing scrutiny in terms of allegations of
racism and corruption. Here in the UK, the national press have recently
reported on incidents of racism committed by spectators, such as fans blacking
upwhen
their team face an African opponent. Problems of crime and disorder have often
been associated with football, primarily in terms of the apparently challenging
and unacceptable behaviour of fans. However, just as criminologists often argue
that crimes committed by the powerful tend to be overlooked relative to crimes
committed by the powerless so too it seems that crimes committed by fans have
been the focus, rather than those carried out by those in the boardroom. Are
efforts to kick racism out of football failing when it comes to discrimination
committed higher up within the institutional structure? This argument is
explored in a new essay I co-wrote with Jon Garland from the University of
Surrey.
During our research we
explored two decades of anti-racism in British football and examined the emergence
of grassroots campaigns to tackle racism in the game. The chapter notes that
the agenda and initiatives developed in the early 1990s including the Newcastle-based education
campaign Show Racism the Red Card
have come a long way. Peripheral groups
and marginal issues of concern have come to form a major agenda in football in
the 21st Century. The FA sponsors an annual Respect campaign
designed to highlight the fact that racism is not acceptable in the game.
Despite being cleared in
Westminster Magistrates Court, an FA hearing upheld that John Terry had used
racist abuse against Anton Ferdinand and fined him £220,000 in 2012. In the
aftermath of that ruling, the England manager resigned and was briefly replaced
by Stuart Pearce. A sign of how much the anti-racism agenda has developed might
be that, in contrast to the Terry affair, no comment was made regarding Pearce’s
appointment in relation to the admission
he made in his 2001 autobiography that he had racially abused Paul Ince when
they had been opponents.
There have also been
major developments in terms of the criminalisation of racism within stadia.
Legislation and ground regulations prohibit racist abuse. While these are
under-enforced (as are all laws), stewards and police do intervene and fans are
prosecuted and banned. Although around half of football supporters have
witnessed racist abuse inside grounds, according to a recent survey, this was a
decline from a survey in the 1990s which found that 67 per cent had witnessed
such abuse.
All of these developments
are welcome but they represent something of a hollow victory since they have
been driven primarily by a commercial imperative to rebrand the game. Sponsors,
spectators and subscribers to satellite TV would be deterred from investing in
a game tarnished by hooliganism and racism. It might be argued that the motive
matters less than the outcome and that efforts to tackle racism are welcomed
regardless. However, the ant-racist agenda needs to be developed to tackle the
profound institutional dimensions of the problem. There continue to be hardly
any black managers and few players of South Asian descent. Only a very small
proportion of administrators within the British game are of a minority ethnic
background. Anti-racism in football has come a long way in the last two decades
but until the structural problems of the game are addressed these victories
ring hollow.
Mike Rowe is a professor of criminology at Northumbria University, UK.
Read more:
Garland, J. and Rowe, M.
(2014) The
Hollow Victory of Anti-Racism in English Football, in Hopkins, M. and
Treadwell, J. (Eds) Football Hooliganism, Fan
Behaviour and Crime: Contemporary Issues, London: Palgrave,
pp.92-105.
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