Sterling and the Beautiful Game’s Race Problem
British football, apparently, has an issue with racism.
This startled declaration by some of Britain’s leading sports writers — including The Times’s Henry Winter and Matthew Syed — is on the one hand laudable. The swiftness which with the abuse aimed at Raheem Sterling by some Chelsea supporters has been condemned across British sporting and media culture is undeniable. The people involved, caught in pristine, HD-quality by BT Sport’s cameras, will likely face significant punishment. It is possible, therefore, to label the response a success and to move on from a job well done.
The glaring issue, however, is just how much those same shocked responses contain the problem as much as the solution. As was fiercely noted by (among others) Jonathan Liew, these same defences of Sterling approach the issue as if racism within modern British football and the British sporting press is a sudden, unexpected discovery. This shock — coupled with some toe-curling insistence that Sterling is especially undeserving of abuse as he is not ‘bling’ — exposes the naivety that plagues the modern game.
This issue long predates Sterling, whose role in bringing this issue into the mainstream consciousness deserves reverence and acclaim. His post, incidentally, is also another reminder of what it takes to get some people to actually take this issue seriously. For years, Sterling has been highlighting the dogmatically aggressive coverage he receives: seemingly it took somebody screaming into a camera for it to become convincing enough for some.
Seeing Sterling as an isolated crisis shows an arrogant disregard of the game’s history. Media attacks on his lifestyle, airline bookings, breakfast habits or choice of tattoo echo over a century of sporting history which continues to define just whom significant sections of the media and football-loving public see as deserving a place within the beautiful game.
From its beginnings within some of England’s most prestigious public schools, association football was a sport played in the spirit of white, ‘gentlemanly’ masculinity. This amateur ‘Corinthian’ model of the early game created an ideal of what kind of person should (or should not) play the game. This ideal, steeped in mid-Victorian ideas of proper ‘manly’ behaviour, excluded those who did not fit its restrictive and demonstrably Anglophone principles of conduct.
These ideals still dominates the modern game: British football culture loves tough tacklers; abhors those who dive; dislikes ‘fancy’ play; mocks colourful boots or extravagant haircuts. Implicitly, these create barriers as to what kinds of ‘outsiders’ are allowed a revered place at the British footballing table. This disproportionately excludes players of colour, who cannot help but struggle to fit into an idealised stereotype that draws on a history of which they were never a part. A player like Scott Parker can win the Football Writers’ Footballer of the Year in the same season he gets relegated; a player like Raheem Sterling can not.
Football’s complex racial history goes far beyond the players. British football’s late-Victorian development into the popular, urbanised sport we recognise today deepened the broader link between football and white masculinity. Clubs were founded by almost-exclusively white groups: churches, steelworkers, factory organisations. The people they drew to their new stadiums — those milling crowds captured by Lowry — were the same white, male, urban populations. Who got to watch was as restrictive as who got to play, and this broad homogenisation of football culture is one that has persisted throughout the sport’s history in this country. When people hark back to what the English game has lost, it is this world to which they partially yearn to return.
Examples of football’s racially-restrictive roots are littered throughout the game’s history. Wembley — the ‘home of football’ — was the ‘Empire’ stadium, founded to host a sporting event that asserted a (white) nation’s dominance over those it saw as inferior. The triumphant and all-white New Zealand rugby team of 1905 were seen as cultural equals; the achievements of touring African footballers meanwhile were put down to their alien biology. At the 1966 World Cup, as Daniel Storey notes, matchday programmes advertised minstrel shows.
The lingering power of football’s restrictive origins has also limited access on grounds of gender as well as race. Women’s place in pre-Great War football, for example, was primarily as calming spectators; a sooth brought in placate the rowdy men. Women’s football matches during the same period were largely derided: either they could not play well, or those that could play were abnormal. When the women’s game later proved a popular success the FA, citing women’s ‘unsuitability’, banned it: a decision only reversed in 1971.
The danger of ignoring this history — this inescapable footballing past of racial and gender-based hostility to those ‘outside’ of the accepted norms — is that we continue to see cases like Sterling as single aberrations. There are far from outliers; they are simply another step on a long, well-trodden path.
Moreover, this ignorance further distorts the all-too-recent history of racist football hooliganism. The ‘dark days’ of monkey-chants, far from an isolated era, form part of this longer history of British football. They should be seen, rather, as partially a response from a significant section of football culture which was reacting to wider societal changes which, among other things, were challenging ideas of who could both play and watch professional football. It is this challenge to football tradition that flickered in the eyes of those baying supporters, and seeps through the ink of the poisonous headlines.
The fact that, for many, this weekend’s abuse of a young black footballer was such a surprise says far too much about the ignorance of the place of bigotry in the fundamental fabric of the British game. Moreover, by saying that such behaviour risks ‘coming back’, we simply underline how, stupidly, we thought it had ever really gone away…
