Referees in Italy’s top football league give more yellow and red cards to Black and darker-skinned players than to their light-skinned teammates, research shows.
Officials in Serie A awarded an average of 20% more fouls per season against darker-skinned players from 2009 to 2019, with 11% more yellow cards and 16% more red cards.
But during the Covid-19 pandemic, when matches were played in empty stadiums, there was no bias in the way referees treated players. This demonstrates that authorities should prioritise banning fans responsible for racist incidents, the researchers say.
Many Italian clubs have large numbers of far-right supporters; players, including Romelu Lukaku, Kalidou Koulibaly and Mario Balotelli, have regularly been racially abused. This season, Serie A authorities have launched investigations into racist chanting by Lazio and Napoli fans.
The researchers, Beatrice Magistro and Morgan Wack, said they plan to examine other European leagues.
Vinícius Júnior, the Real Madrid winger from Brazil, has been targeted five times this season in Spain’s La Liga, while Birmingham City goalkeeper Neil Etheridge was racially abused last month during an FA Cup game against Blackburn. Last season, 183 incidents were reported to the anti-discrimination body Kick It Out in English professional football.
Magistro and Wack studied data on every Serie A match between 2009 and 2021 for their paper in the journal Sociology, published by the British Sociological Association.They analysed data from FootyStats, WhoScored and FBref on tackles, fouls and cards against skin- tone data from the Football Manager video game. Developed by British company Sports Interactive, the game is used by professional clubs to scout players and is licensed to reproduce images of footballers, graphically representing them using one of 20 skin-tone categories.
Magistro, from the University of Toronto, said most European countries collect very little data on race, which makes it “really hard to test” the level of racism in football. “A lot of studies have relied on very imperfect categorisations like country of origin, or putting all Europeans as white and South Americans as non-white, which is problematic,” she said.
Since players may be more likely to commit fouls depending on the position they play, how many minutes they are on the pitch, the number of tackles they make and the country where they grew up playing football, the researchers used a regression analysis to strip out these factors.
It showed that lighter-skinned players were judged to have fouled an average of 21 times over a season compared with 25 for darker-skinned players, who got an average 3.9 yellow cards and 0.22 red cards per season compared with 3.5 yellows and 0.19 reds per lighter-skinned player.
The finding was “disturbing”, Magistro said, but: “We were thinking it’s possible it’s not entirely the referee – it’s possible maybe the noise they hear from the stands.” Referees make about 200 to 250 decisions about fouls each game – roughly every 22 seconds.
The researchers had no data on home and away games so looked instead at the 2020-21 season, when fans were not allowed in stadiums as a precaution against Covid. “We found the effect disappeared,” Magistro said. “Since it is only one year, we don’t want to say for sure that all the racism comes from fans.
“We also found darker-skinned players are less likely to play aggressively. People had said: ‘Maybe some of these players come from different leagues where they play more aggressively’. We tested for that and they actually play less aggressively, possibly knowing they’re more likely to receive sanctions.”
Wack, who is from the University of Washington in Seattle, said that their findings challenged the idea that “rogue referees” were to blame. “If it is this kind of fan-driven bias that ... pressures them into making decisions, that has different implications,” he said.
Magistro and Wack said that it was highly probable bias had affected the results of games and salary negotiations for players, and said that Uefa should consider broadening its “three-step procedure” on racist chants from the stands and introducing officials who are responsible for monitoring crowds for racial harassment. Italy’s office against racial discrimination, Unar, has set up national observatory against discrimination in sport that reported for the first time in October last year. It said 211 cases had been detected in amateur and professional sport, and its recommendations included training football referees to recognise discrimination.
Magistro said similar research on the US National Basketball Association by researchers at the Brookings Institute, the Washington-based thinktank, offered hope of change.
“They found the exact same thing,” she said. “Once they publicised that, they retested the same thing a few years later and they found that the effect disappeared. Making it public somehow contributed to the process becoming more fair. So maybe the referees will realise that.”
