In the Jupiler Pro League, the Belgian equivalent of the Eredivisie, a player of color is significantly more likely to play in attack, and much less likely to be deployed as a defender or under the crossbar. He also clearly receives a red card more often than his white colleagues, is substituted more often and starts on the reserve bench more often. This is the conclusion of a recent study by KU Leuven into discrimination in Belgian professional football. Such patterns start as early as the juvenile categories, the researchers found. But where do they come from? And what do they mean?
“I would be careful not to immediately say that this has only to do with racism,” says Jeroen Schouder, professor of sports sociology at KU Leuven. He has been researching discrimination on the Belgian football fields for more than 25 years. Although he says himself: “I would rather call it stereotyping, anchored in the heads of trainers, referees and administrators.”
Schelaar and his team analyzed all players who were active in the Jupiler Pro League in the 2019-2020 season on the basis of public sources. There were 385, of whom 127 came from Africa. 216 had an EU background. “So a third has an African background,” says Schouder. “Compared to the normal population in Belgium, which is 1 to 2 percent, that is a clear over-representation. Football, next to martial arts and in the US basketball, is one of the few sports where you see that. Most other sports are predominantly or completely white. This means that football is a sport in which people of color should in principle be able to integrate well. It is by far the largest sport in the world, which is practiced by many people.” But that does not mean that everyone has equal opportunities. And is judged equally.
Black football players are used significantly less as goalkeepers in Belgium; 2.4 percent of all goalkeepers in the Jupiler Pro League have an African background, 13 percent come from the EU. Schelaar also saw that pattern in the defense; more than 21 percent is African, almost 39 percent European. In the front regions, the opposite is true, and even more clearly; more than 47 percent of the attackers are African, 20 percent come from the EU. According to Schouder, exactly the same patterns can be discerned in youth teams. “And what you learn at a young age, you carry out later in life. These patterns have a strong impact on the socialization of this problem.”
Stereotypes
Explanations are less clear-cut, says Schelder. One quickly zooms in on the physiological advantages that black athletes would have over white athletes. “They are then seen as stronger and faster. That is why they would be deployed more often in the attack, for example. That stereotype, by the way, might as well live with parents of color who want their child to be put on the offensive. However, such a relationship has never been conclusively established in research. Such a study would also be politically very sensitive.” But it can, he says, subconsciously play a role in a trainer’s choices when composing his team.
Schelaar sees a difference in what he calls “executive and coordinating positions on the field”; something that also became clear in American football recently when it happened in the Super Bowl for the first time in history that two black quarterbacks started the game. “We see white people popping up more often in positions where leadership aspects are important; in goal, in defense. And black players are the performers in that regard. The finishers. That in itself is a remarkable and also a bad pattern. It’s in the mindset of the people who are in charge.” And they are often white.
In the 1990s, similar research was done in Belgian football and basketball based on interviews with players and trainers. The result was roughly the same. Schelaar: “So this is a system that has existed for a long time and that can have harmful consequences in the rest of society. You actually say, unconsciously or not; blacks should not be given coordinating tasks. You can see that in the small number of trainers of color in the Jupiler Pro League.” Last season there were still three of the eighteen; Karim Belhocine (Kortrijk), Vincent Kompany (Anderlecht) and Mbaye Leye (Zulte Waregem). But after Leye’s dismissal two weeks ago, there are no more trainers of color active at the highest level of Belgian professional football.
You see it – just like in other countries – in the boardroom, says Schouder. “We’re talking about a sport with a long history, where black people excel, but they just can’t make it to the board. In our super-diverse society, we should think about that more often. Because whether black people in football are consciously or unconsciously discriminated against; it is a problem.”
Red cards
In that light, the number of red cards black players get compared to white players is illustrative. By not only tallying the number of red cards, but also comparing them to the number of playing minutes and position on the field, Schelaar discovered that a black professional football player in the Jupiler Pro League has a 5 percent higher chance of being sent off with a red card. sent than his white co- or opponent. “Here too I want to be careful. Because arbitrators don’t have it easy. But we clearly see that the one with the whistle in hand is by far the most often a white man. This is about the beliefs of those responsible. How do they decide? The unconscious comes into play. Colonial history too. I don’t think this number can be traced back to the football game alone.”
The results of this research into discrimination on and around the football field, among other things, prompted the Belgian football association KBVB and the Jupiler Pro League to launch a new awareness campaign three weeks ago, two years after an initial offensive against racism, sexism and homophobia. A first campaign already led to more than five hundred reports of discrimination being made on all Belgian football fields in 2022; a doubling of the previous year. Almost 90 percent of those reports had to do with racism. It also became clear that one in three youth football players had to deal with discrimination that year. Reason for the RBFA to press the alarm button again.
“I am not the one who has to say that something has to change in the head of a trainer,” says Jeroen Schouder. “But we can use this research to try to address a problem, to break through the pattern thinking that could be a cause of racism. Discrimination is a contemporary problem. Europe is struggling with migration. And here you have a link to a sport that many people do. And where you could start a change.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of March 29, 2023