‘White digital footballers can’t jump’: (re)constructions of race in FIFA 20

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the quantitative datasets of Electronic Arts’ FIFA 20 top 100 players and their qualitative descriptors, the paper addresses the following: (1) How do ideas of race manifest and influence digital worlds? (2) How do digital football simulations (games) disrupt or reproduce racialised stereotypes and logics found within football in the social world? (3) How does playing football video games contribute to users’ understandings of race and sport. This paper, the first in-depth study of its kind, provides new empirical insights into the presence of the ‘natural athlete’ discourse within the operative datasets that underpin White and Black digital player performances in FIFA 20. We conclude that FIFA 20 is a site for a potent experiential socialisation in racialised myths, where gamers come to know race and the racialized other in sport through feeling the racialized differences of the procedurally generated natural athlete quite literally through their controllers. 

Introduction

Scholarly work on the relationship between ‘race’ and football¹ in Britain approaches its fifth decade.² Nearly half a century of work has produced a relatively wide interrogation of the sporting experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens within the nation’s most played sport. Early work, for example, focused on the emergence of Black soccer professionals and their experiences of overt racial abuse from fans within stadia.³ Also, to the racial sporting stereotypes held by many White coaches and their consequences for the on-pitch positions that Black players were stacked into.⁴ King later outlined a process of cultural White-masking that Black players often undertook to navigate the White working-class hegemonies that shaped life in soccer changing rooms.⁵

By the end of the 1980s, Black exclusions in the non-professional format of the game were being traced by academics such as Westwood⁶ and Williams.⁷ Their attention focused on the informal anti-Black, Asian and Minority ethnic barriers that blocked local Black and South Asian talent from accessing local White clubs in the British East Midlands. Both illustrated how minority ethnic football clubs were often a response to these closures. They also shone light on the ways in which these spaces often provided political and cultural resistance functions for their membership, doubling up as platforms which fostered cultural identity formation and maintenance, and for facilitating cross-community ‘fusions’.⁸

The last twenty years have seen scholars such as Bradbury,⁹ Campbell¹⁰ and Burdsey¹¹ examine the off-field closures now faced by ageing and retiring Black ex-football professionals in their attempts to access boardrooms and dugouts as committee members or coaches, respectively. The new century also witnessed this canon of work explore more conceptual questions around football as a performance of racialized boundary work,¹² for exploring class fractures and heterogeneity within minority ethnic communities,¹³ and for the communication of increasingly byzantine and dual-heritage minority ethnic identities.¹⁴ These works have utilized ‘Black’ theoretical frames, such as Post-Colonialism,¹⁵ Colour Blind Racism,¹⁶ Whiteness,¹⁷ Critical Race Theory¹⁸ and Intersectionality,¹⁹ to make sense of what we might describe as these more complex questions of sport, according to Holt.²⁰ Or utilized football in England as a lens through which we can see these concepts in action.

Despite this relatively impressive catalogue, little scholarly attention has been given to the ways in which race, racism and racial inequality are manifest within football-related industries, such as football media. What work has taken place has illustrated the ways in which raced bodies are imagined and talked about differently in relation to their racial, biracial and national identities.²¹ The repetition of racialized stereotypes through mediated (re)presentations of race in football and sport more widely has a profound impact on the ways in which predominantly, but not exclusively, White audiences recognize and understand themselves and the racialized other. Even less attention has been given to examining the relationship between race, football and digital spaces, including the increasingly mainstream pursuit of playing football-related video games. Put simply, as a prominent example of how sport finds itself migrating into spheres of digital media and culture, the football video gaming space represents an underexplored ‘social world’ within the sociology of sport and race.

One outcome of limited examinations of race and sports-related video games is that we currently know very little with regard to rather routine questions, such as: In what ways do race and racialized ideas manifest and influence digital worlds? In what ways do digital football simulations (games) disrupt or reproduce the racialized stereotypes and logics found within football in the social world? In what ways does playing football video games contribute to users’ understandings of race and sport, and in social life more broadly. Against this, the study here, of Electronic Arts’ (EA) FIFA 20, seeks to open discussion on these final points.

FIFA 20

Published by EA under its EA Sports label, FIFA 20 is the second most recent instalment of the long-running and hugely successful football video game franchise (at the time of writing). First published as FIFA International Soccer in 1993, the franchise has since sold over 260 million copies across 29 iterations, making it the highest selling sports franchise of all time and the fifth highest selling video game franchise more broadly. FIFA 20ʹs producers aim to make it a realistic simulation of professional football. As such, gamers can play as any club across all major football leagues across the world and as their favourite male players. A combination of state-of-the-art graphics and individual attributes that are coded to ‘match’ the abilities of real-world players enable users to simulate playing as, and against, their soccer idols in digital environments.

FIFA 20ʹs popularity and popular accolade as the closest thing to playing real men's football (without physically playing) were clearly evidenced recently during the shutdown of the Premier League in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 in England. A FIFA 20 league was quickly established, with fixtures between current football professionals, playing as their respective English Premier League clubs. Matches were televised on SkySports as a way to provide a footballing fix for their viewers.

Another significant driver of FIFA’s success lies in its ‘crossover’ appeal beyond self-professed gamers to a substantial cohort of predominantly male football fans who would otherwise ‘have little further interest in the medium’.²² Its popularity in terms of financial clout was also evidenced by the fact that in 2018 it sold over 816,985 physical copies in its debut week in the UK. We argue that the combination of FIFA 20ʹs popularity and its attempt to replicate the men's format of the professional game and the sporting attributes of real players make FIFA 20 an ideal case-study for an examination of race, football and video gaming.

The ‘natural athlete’ and professional football in England

The concept of the natural athlete is drawn from the pseudo (race)-sciences that emerged and developed during the enlightenment through to the middle of the 20th century.²³ These evolutionary ideas demarcated human beings along axes of skin colour. These markers were also claimed to signify inherent and meaningful physiological and intellectual differences.²⁴ According to this logic, Black races were the least evolved of races – as close to animals as they were to humans. Consequently, they were seen to be both cognitively and morally limited when compared to White races, but compensated with hyperphysicality – they were alleged to be stronger, quicker and more supple than the average White person. By the same token, White races were believed to be the most intellectually evolved of races, who possessed superior character, but were comparatively less physically endowed as their Black peers.²⁵ By the early 1900s, these ideas laid the foundations for particular racialized sporting myths, such as White athletes inherently possessed character, grit and determination, and were suited to cognitive tasks, such as technical mastery of skills, and on-pitch leadership. Conversely, Black players were believed to naturally lack grit, but were naturally superior to White players in relation to ‘brute’ force and power, and in their ability to run faster and jump further. Black bodies were naturally athletic but cognitively challenged, as ex-Crystal Palace Football Club, Chairman, Ron Noades explained: ‘in multi-racial teams, black players provide ‘a lot of skill and flair’ and that White players ‘balance things up and give the team some brains’.²⁶

The presence of the natural athlete discourse has been traced in football. Maguire highlighted how this thinking, embraced by White football coaches in the 1980s, resulted in Black players being stacked into positions suited to their natural physical endowment.²⁷ Conversely, positions that required cognition and leadership were reserved for White players. Similarly, Bradbury has illustrated how perceptions of Black footballers as not suited to leadership by professional club gatekeepers, have contributed to the inability of Black ex-soccer professionals being afforded opportunities to transition into coaching.²⁸ Research into soccer commentary has echoed these racial dichotomies, showing both quantitatively and quantitively a blanket (re)presentations of mediated Black and White footballers almost exclusively in relation to their perceived physicality and intellect, respectively.²⁹ The extent to which the natural athlete discourse shapes the (re)presentations, data and gameplay of football as a video gaming space, thus far, remain unexplored questions for sociologists of football and sport more widely.

Video games and race

Scholars interested in video games as a cultural practice have engaged more with the theme of race than have academics of race and sport engaged with video gaming. However, this body of literature remains less expansive when compared to studies on gaming in relation to other social cleavages, such as gender and sexuality.³⁰ Research on race and video gaming has thus far tended to fall into two main categories. The first, and less prominent, is the quantitative content-analytical stream. In early related work, Brand et al. surveyed the ‘textual landscape’ of 130 popular video games, concluding that most characters were ‘either of [W]hite European background or so vague as to be unclear’.³¹ Dill et al. produced similar findings, with 68% of characters being White, 15% Latino and 8% Black.³² Williams et al.’s ‘virtual census’ represents the first large-scale effort to chart video game ‘representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population’.³³ Echoing a similar and longstanding disconnect between televisual representations and the actual demographics of the audience to which this legacy media purports to cater, the authors found ‘a systematic over-representation of males, [W]hite and adults and a systematic under-representation of females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly’.³⁴ Wohn’s study of ‘casual games’ – a category encompassing the sorts of ‘pick up and play’ puzzle, strategy and social networking games most prevalent on mobile devices – uncovered an even starker whitewashing, with only 8% of in-game characters representative of non-White racial/ethnic identities.³⁵

The second, more prominent stream of related research is qualitative. Dickerman et al. identify a racial stereotyping process in video games that evolved from earlier depictions of non-White characters in more obviously ‘derogatory and unflattering ways’ to more recent examples which more subtly ‘employ racial stereotypes by limiting the roles and representations’ of raced characters.³⁶ They point to games such as the popular Grand Theft Auto franchise to example how Black digital characters are often cast exclusively in relation to urban crime settings. In support of Salter and Blodgett’s understanding of whiteness as the ‘default identity’ in gaming culture,³⁷ Dietrich’s wide-ranging study of over 80 computer role-playing games (RPGs) – in which players are able to personalize the appearance of their character or ‘avatar’ – found that ‘the vast majority of games … do not allow for the creation of avatars with a non-[W]hite racial appearance’.³⁸ Daniels and LaLone’s reading of urban crime franchises Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row reaffirms Dickerman et al. thesis. They assert that both games offer ‘a primarily [W]hite interpretation of African American culture for [W]hite people to play’.³⁹ Leonard’s conclusion, some five years prior, is apt. He surmises that while video games ‘represent a genre in which characters of colour exist as actors (protagonists) rather than victims or aesthetic scenery’,⁴⁰ their appeal ultimately reflects ‘the dialectical flickering of racial insult and racial envy’.⁴¹

Racial differences, datasets, coding and ‘procedural rhetoric’

Informed by existing research on race and video games, our study is focused on the raw numerical data of FIFA 20ʹs ‘player attributes’. Lying at the very foundation of play, this socially constructed⁴² statistical framework is integral to everything in the game: from the differing abilities of the virtual footballers and how this, in turn, shapes player perceptions and preferences; to the more aesthetic/representational aspects of the footballers’ behaviours and performances on the virtual field. In making sense of the significance of player attributes in FIFA 20, here we draw on the work of Ian Bogost and, specifically, his concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’. For Bogost, video games’ systems, structures and even fundamental codebases are as potentially rich in ideological content as their narrative and aesthetic-representational dimensions – they ‘stand as symbolic structures of a higher order than natural language’.⁴³ The act of coding a video game, and of designing the structural framework within which its interactive narrative will play out, is the first and most fundamental act of meaning-making: ‘Software is composed of algorithms that model the way things behave … one authors code that enforces rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself’.⁴⁴

Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric in video games links to a wider investigation of the socially constructed nature of datasets and algorithmic processes, and how these computational forms reproduce racial framings (and other forms of discrimination/inequality). To quote Benjamin in Race After Technology:

Computer systems are part of the larger matrix of systemic racism. Just as legal codes grant the allure of objectivity – “justice is (colour)blind” goes the fiction – there is enormous mystique around computer codes, which hides the human biases involved in technical design.⁴⁵

For Benjamin, racial framings represent one of the fundamental social/cultural biases which insidiously embed themselves in datasets and computational systems. Gesturing to the infamous state and local laws in America that mandated racial segregation between 1876 and 1965, she refers to these processes, and the outcomes they elicit, as ‘the New Jim Code’.⁴⁶ Echoing Benjamin, Noble describes the very same digital phenomena as ‘technological redlining’, analogous to the implicitly discriminatory procedures through which institutions deny financial access to loans, and other goods and services on the basis of various social factors, including race.⁴⁷

Methodology

Following the methodological approaches adopted by Bogost, Benjamin, Noble and Nakamura,⁴⁸ our inquiry into racial framings in FIFA 20 rests on an analysis of the game’s top 100 player attribute datasets (excluding the 12 featured goalkeepers whose performances are measured according to a different set of attributes). As numerical representations of real-world male footballers’ differing competencies – which, in turn, inform every aspect of their respective avatars’ performances on the virtual field – this complex and multi-layered dataset of player attributes is not socially/culturally neutral. Rather, like all technical systems they are a product of a ‘the cultural norms and practices of programmers’, according to Benjamin.⁴⁹ Organized within the three General Categories of Difference (GCD) of Physical, Mental and Technical, FIFA 20ʹs player attributes are then split into two levels. The first, broader set of (non-goalkeeping) attributes are Pace, Shooting, Passing, Dribbling, Defending and Physical (separate from the broader physical categorization above) which we refer to collectively as Sporting Characteristics (SC). Within each of these six aggregate attributes is a larger and more specific set of sub-attributes which we refer to as Specific Sporting Competencies (SSC) and which together form the operative foundation of gameplay. See below the full list of SSCs and how they relate to both the six aggregate attributes and three overarching categorizations:

1. Pace: ‘Acceleration’ (Physical), ‘Sprint Speed’ (Physical)

2. Shooting: ‘Finishing’ (Technical), ‘Long Shots’ (Technical), ‘Penalties’ (Technical), ‘Positioning’ (Mental), ‘Shot Power’ (Technical), ‘Volleys’ (Technical)

3. Passing: ‘Crossing’ (Technical), ‘Curve’ (Technical), ‘Free Kick’ (Technical), ‘Long Passing’ (Technical), ‘Short Passing’ (Technical), ‘Vision’ (Mental)

4. Dribbling: ‘Agility’ (Physical), ‘Balance’ (Physical), ‘Ball Control’ (Technical), ‘Composure’ (Mental), ‘Dribbling’ (Technical), ‘Reactions’ (Physical)

5. Defending: ‘Heading’ (Technical), ‘Interceptions’ (Mental), ‘Marking’ (Technical), ‘Sliding Tackle’ (Technical), ‘Standing Tackle’ (Technical)

6. Physical: ‘Aggression’ (Mental), ‘Jumping’ (Physical), ‘Stamina’ (Physical), ‘Strength’ (Physical)

Numerical data was manually extracted on 13/6/2020 from futbin.com, a player statistics repository for EA’s full catalogue of FIFA titles. The dataset of FIFA 20ʹs top 100 players is comprised of 3080 discrete data points, with 528 attribute data points (5 per player) across the 88 outfield players and 2552 (29 per player) for their more specific sub-attributes. Following a process of determining racial categories for each digital player through cross-referencing with the biographies of their real-world counterparts, the means for the SCs and SSCs were calculated for the full group of 88 players, the 58 players categorized as White and the 26 players categorized as Black. Means were then also calculated with each player grouping for the overarching Physical, Mental and Technical categories to which individual sub-attributes align. The resultant dataset is thus a multilevel one, soliciting quantitative analysis of data across and between the means for each player group in the three broader categories, in the five aggregate attributes and in the 29 specific sub-attributes.

Qualitative data was generated through a discourse analysis of the FIFA 20 Player Attributes descriptions sourced from fifauteam.com, which the popular guide and news website bases ‘on the information provided by Electronic Arts to their own data reviewers’.⁵⁰

Quantitative data has been criticized by race and race and sports scholars for its inability to fully account for, or adequately capture, the experience of race (in sport).⁵¹ Race is seen to frequently exist beyond these measurements. Against these race-based methodological limitations, the qualitative data provided an important source for methodological triangulation. It also enabled us to identify when race was an underlying or explanatory factor for causal relationships within quantitative data or to identify when competencies, which were categorized as pertaining to certain attributes, such as Mental, were in fact a reference to physical-based attributes and vice versa. The importance of identifying these inaccuracies in the processes that video game producers use to categorize data, for studies focused on locating the presence of race within procedural data, is discussed below. As such, our analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data enabled the construction of a more critical and more rounded narrative than would have been produced via an analysis of either data set alone.

Findings

The Black digital players in our sample scored more highly across all three GCDs (Physical, Technical and Mental) when compared to White digital players (see Table 1). At the surface level, the (out)performance of Black digital bodies compared to White across all thee GCDs arguably pointed to an absence of typical race framing and logic within FIFA 20 (although, even at this level, the largest gap in performance was in relation to the physical differences between the two sets of digital bodies).

Table 1. General Categories of Differences.

Group	PHYS	TECH	MENTAL
Average
Black	78.77404	72.2524	75.71538
White	74.84017	72.11746	74.62759

Data from the SCs, however, presented a more complex spread of data, and importantly, pointed to the presence of race framing within FIFA 20ʹs statistical foundation that was not as visible at the level of GCDs (see Table 2). For example, Black digital bodies scored more highly than White in relation to Defending, Pace, Dribbling and Physicality. The latter four SCs are typically associated with physiological sporting dispositions, according to other studies on race framing.⁵² Conversely, White digital players scored more highly in Passing and Shooting. These are attributes that, within the White sporting imagination, are tied to intelligence and technical competence.⁵³

Table 2. Sporting Characteristics.

Group	PAC (pace)	SHO (Shooting)	PAS (Passing)	DRI (Dribbling)	DEF (Defending)	PHY (Physicality)
Average	74.43182	71.92045	77.48864	80.61364	65.15909	74.61364
Black	78.34615	71.15385	76.73077	80.84615	68.26923	77.5
White	71.87931	72.18966	77.84483	80.5	64.43103	73.5

Data at this level indicate an alignment between the framing of Black and White digital bodies with the racialized framings applied to Black and White athletes in the lived social world. These relationships, however, become even more embroidered at the level of SSCs. Again, these are the ‘baseline’ set of numbers on which all aspects of virtual play in FIFA 20 (including the broader GCD and SC statistics) are ultimately built.

An overall tally of the SCs shows that White digital players outperform Black digital players 10:6 in competencies designated as Technical (see Table 3). Black digital players outperform White across all eight SSCs designated as Physical. Interestingly, they also outperformed White players in the category of Mental (3:2) – a category which historically has been a space for White reverence in sport and race discourse. Here, however, this category included competencies such as Aggression and Shot Power. These were qualitatively described as relating to the ‘amount of power a player can put into a shot’ and as determining ‘the player’s power’, respectively.⁵⁴

Table 3. Relationship between GCDs and SSCs.

General Categories of Difference (GCDs)	Physical	Technical	Mental
Specific Sporting Competencies (SSC)	Acceleration	Ball Control*	Aggression
	Sprint speed	Dribbling	Vision*
	Jump	Crossing*	Composure*
	Stamina	Free Kicks*	Interception
	Strength	Short Pass*	Shot Power
	Agility	Long Pass*
	Balance	Curve (Pass)*
	Reactions	Heading Accuracy
		Awareness/Marking
		Standing Tackle
		Sliding Tackle
		Shooting/Finishing*
		Shooting/Positioning
		Shooting/ Long Shots*
		Shooting/Volleys*
		Shooting/Penalties*

* = Competencies where White digital players scored more highly than Black Digital Players.

The above descriptions indicated that while each competency may have been categorized by the developers as pertaining to mental capacities, they are both, in fact, references to physiological competencies. Described in this way, and in light of the pattern of Black digital dominance in physical activities, it was perhaps no surprise that Black digital bodies won out here too. This illustrates the problematic nature of taking at face value the GCDs employed by the game’s developers and the importance of triangulating numerical values with their corresponding qualitative descriptions in order to attain a more wholistic, critical and accurate picture.

Similar racialized patterns were also manifest within the quantitative and qualitative data relating to each sub-category and related competencies, respectively. Black digital players scored more highly than White in relation to Pace, Physicality and Defending and scored more highly than White players across all of the 11 competencies that constituted these three 3 sub-sections.

In most cases, these competencies were again orientated around physicality. For example, Pace consisted of two sporting competencies: Acceleration and Sprint Speed. These were designated as Physical-based competencies and described as ‘the time needed to reach [a player’s] maximum speed, no matter what that is’ and the measurement for 'how fast the player runs while at top speed’.⁵⁵ Black digital players scored more highly within each category. Put simply, the data here suggested that, on average, Black digital players were faster than White digital players, and they could reach top speed more quickly (see Table 4).

Table 4. Pace.

Group	P – ACC Acceleration	P – SS Sprint Speed
Average	74.30682	74.51136
Black	77.26923	79.15385
White	72.2069	71.63793

Similarly, Physicality (Table 5) included Jumping, which was described as follows: ‘The higher the value is, the higher the player can jump.’⁵⁶ How high digital footballers could jump represented the second-largest percentage difference between Black and White athletes (9.8%) across all competencies (only Sprint Speed had a higher difference in favour of Black digital bodies 10.5%). Strength dictated ‘how [the digital player] cope[s] with any physical battles.⁵⁷ Stamina was ‘the rate at which a digital player will tire during a game’. Aggression was categorized as a Mental-based competency. However, qualitatively it was reference to the power a player possessed.⁵⁸

Table 5. Physicality.

Group	PH – JU (Jump)	PH – STA (Stamina)	PH – STR (Strength)	PH – AG (Aggression)
Average	72.875	79.69318	73.28409	72.10227
Black	78.19231	81.84615	76.69231	74.03846
White	71.24138	78.56897	72	71.5

Black digital players scored more highly than White digital players across all Defending competencies (Table 6). Interestingly, none of the competencies here were categorized as Physical. However, the two competencies pertaining to tackling were where the widest percentage differences existed between Black and White digital players. Echoing the other competencies discussed, both were categorized as Technical, but their descriptive narratives were almost entirely centred on the digital player’s strength and power. For example, tackling was described as the ‘ability to win the ball without causing a free kick by using his body strength’.⁵⁹

Table 6. Defending.

Group	DEF – INT Interception	DEF – HA Heading Accuracy	DEF – AW Awareness/Marking	DEF – ST Standing Tackle	DEF – SL Sliding Tackle
Average	65.34091	71.28409	65.056,818	64.59091	60.43182
Black	68.84615	72.73077	66.807692	68.34615	66.19231
White	64.34483	71.06897	65.017,241	63.58621	58.58621

Likewise, in the Dribbling SC (Table 7), Black digital players continued to score more highly in relation to Physical-based competencies (Agility, Balance and Reactions). Black digital players also exceeded White players on average in relation to Dribbling (competency). This competency was assigned as Technical and described as ‘the player’s ability to carry the ball and past an opponent’.⁶⁰ Importantly, while dribbling was ostensibly designated a Technical competency, its qualitative description unequivocally stated that it bore no relationship to cerebral aptitudes: ‘Dribbling has no connection [our italics] with the ball receiving factor whatsoever, that only has to do with ball control’.⁶¹ Here, the ability of the digital body to move with the ball is separated from the ability to master the ball – what we might describe as ball control – which is a learned skill.

Table 7. Dribbling.

Group	DR – AG Agility	DR – BA Balance	DR – RE Reactions	DR – BC Ball Control	DR – DR Dribbling	DR – COM Composure
Average	76.09091	72.72727	85.80682	83.76136	79.26136	85.1363636
Black	76.69231	74.26923	86.07692	83.03846	80.07692	84.6153,846
White	75.44828	72.22414	85.60345	84.06897	78.93103	85.3965517

Conversely, Ball Control and Composure were described as requiring a combination of character, calmness and cerebral qualities, and were where White digital players within this category exceeded Black digital performance.

Four of the five sub-categories for Shooting (Finishing, Long Shots, Penalties and Volleys) were designated Technical. White digital players scored more highly on 75% of these Technique-based competencies. By contrast, Black digital players scored more highly in relation to Shot Power. While this was designated a mental competency, again it appeared to be more closely linked to physicality: ‘the amount of power a player can put into a shot … ’⁶² The difference in scores between Black and White digital players specifically in relation to Shot Power was so vast, when compared to the differences across all the other areas, that it skewed the overall average in favour of Black mastery in the broader shooting category (even though it was only here (and positioning) where Black players exceeded White digital performance) (see Table 8).

Table 8. Shooting.

Group	SH – PO	SH – FIN	SH – SP	SH – LS	SH – V	SH – PEN
Average	74.42045	69.69318	78.09091	72.02273	67.97727	68.14773
Black	74.61538	68.23077	79.11538	70.57692	67.19231	67.96154
White	74.18966	70.17241	77.84483	72.39655	68.25862	68.48276

Passing consisted of six technical-based competencies (Table 9). This was the only SC where the allocated category directly correlated with all 6 SSC qualitative descriptors, which were all discursively and explicitly centred on technique. Here, White digital players scored more highly than Black digital across all six competencies.

Table 9. Passing.

Group	PAS – VI (Vision)	PAS – CR (Crossing)	PAS – FK (Free Kicks)	PAS – SP (Short Pass)	PAS – LP (Long Pass)	PAS – C (Curve)
Average	77.36364	71.90909	66.93182	82.73864	77.32955	73.56818
Black	76.46154	71.34615	64.53846	82.46154	76.38462	71.03846
White	77.7069	72.2931	67.98276	82.91379	77.74138	74.53448

Discussion

Racial inequalities have been found to penetrate all areas of social life in the UK and are deeply embedded within the cultures and systems which shape all organizations and institutions in White Western democracies.⁶³ They have also been found to shape sport, including professional and local football in Britain.⁶⁴ Our work extends understandings of race (and sport) within late-modern Britain, by providing empirical data which illustrates how race is also a structuring and determining factor within the digital sporting worlds that British (and global) gaming communities engage and interact. Specifically, our work shines light on the complex, and often subtle, ways in which the operative datasets that underpin all forms of digital media represent what Benjamin would describe as ‘an exercise in worldbuilding’.⁶⁵ Moreover, we illustrate how worldbuilding in this sense includes a normative process through which programmers (sub)consciously project their own world views, fantasies and (mis)understandings of race and sport.

The presence of racial inequalities was not always obvious at all levels of data. For example, at the broadest level of organization (into General Categories of Difference: Physical, Technical and Mental), data hinted at a potential ‘absence’ of the kinds of racial frames present in off-line sporting environs. However, from an analysis of quantitative data at the more fundamental and operative level of competencies and their accompanying qualitative descriptors, a powerful picture emerged that illustrated the ways in which White and Black digital player performances in the FIFA 20 game aligned with the natural athlete discourse.

Findings clearly highlighted how within FIFA 20, Strength, Aggression, Speed, Jumping and Dribbling were competencies where divergences between White and Black digital players’ scores were most prevalent. It also illustrated how these physical-orientated attributes chiefly accounted for differences between the scores that Black and White digital players were allocated in relation to competencies which developers dubiously categorized as Technical and Mental (rather than Physical) proficiencies.

FIFA 20 developers do not exist in social vacuums. As sports enthusiasts, they undoubtedly have been subjected to, and subscribe to, many of the racialized sporting discourses that shape White sporting imaginaries in the social world. As a cross-Atlantic UK-US cultural product, FIFA 20 aspires to feel ‘like real football’.⁶⁶ It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the game draws upon, reproduces and operationalizes fantasies of raced bodies in sport in the dataset that drives algorithms for performance. For example, the ability to run (with the ball) and to jump, are racial tropes that have long histories in the White working-class sporting imaginations in both countries.

The ability of Black footballers to naturally dribble (in what is seen as a particular stylized way) is/has been a particularly prevalent racialized fantasy in White British football folklore. It is informed by long-held myths around Black bodies as able to perform in ways which defy conventional logic (that is to go beyond the supposed limits of White physiology). As such, Black movement on the football pitch (as well as movement on the dancefloor or within the bedroom) has historically been mythologized and explained as the result of an inherent Black ability to contort in either exotic, magical or superhuman ways that defy the laws of physics and mystify White sporting audiences. The ability to ‘magically’ run with the ball as a boundary (work) between White and Black players is one of the earliest and most persistent distinctions between Black and White footballers, since the emergence of Black-British talent in the post-war period.⁶⁷ For example, in 1972 the Football Review celebrated the influx of Black British talent to the English game by explaining: [C]oloured players are bringing their own colourful characteristics to the [English] game … bring[ing] special skills to the game.⁶⁸ These ideas have also shaped Black-British understandings of sporting self. At a local Black football club in Leicester, for example, club members explained that to be Black, a footballer and to play for Rangers, ‘[a] dribbler you’ve got to be … it’s the way we are …, they reasoned’.⁶⁹

Similarly, differences between White and Black digital players in the game drew on Black ability to jump higher and further both naturally and inherently when compared to White athletes. This trope has a long history within the politics of race and sport in the US. The natural athlete myth was a popular and widely endorsed causal explanation for African American dominance in sports, such as basketball and long jump, as well as providing an underlying rationale for the stacking of African American athletes into certain on pitch positions in sports, such as American Football, during the second half of the 20th century. Black people’s allegedly less evolved and more animalistic bodies were argued to put them at sporting advantage, physically. Such views were illustrated in ‘University of Southern California Track Coach, Dean Cromwell’s explanation for the success of African American athletes such as Jesse Owens. In 1941, he wrote: ‘It was not long ago that his (African Americans) ability to sprint and jump was a life-and-death matter to him in the jungle’.⁷⁰

The seemingly unchallenged and everyday acceptance of these kinds of raced-based causal laws within more recent popular thinking and lexicon in the US was perhaps best exampled in the title of popular 1992 Hollywood movie ‘White Men Can’t Jump’. The premise of the movie was that White Basketball player, Billy Hoyle (played by Woody Harrelson), could play basketball as well as his African American teammate, Sidney Deane (Wesley Snipes) in every way, except that he was unable to successfully ‘jump’ and dunk the ball – as well as a Black man. It is perhaps unsurprising that scholars, such as Leonard, have illustrated how these taken for granted ideas of African American performance in Basketball have been replicated in US Basketball video games, such as NBA Street:

Jumping as high as the sun, knocking their competitors through concrete walls, and making unfathomable moves on the court, sports games reveal both innate black athleticism and their superhuman strength, endurance, hyper-masculinity, speed, and jumping ability. The few white players who do appear in NBA Street have nowhere near the athleticism or the muscles of the black players. The white player’s dominance comes from their ability to shoot, which comes from hard work and long hours on the court, not good genes.⁷¹

It is apparent that the digital soccer players here have been coded and constructed to replicate and reproduce these myths around Black and White-sporting bodies to such an extent that, even in the digital world of FIFA 20, White footballers still ‘can’t jump’ (as high as Black digital players).

Srauy and Cheney-Lippold argue that the FIFA video game franchise contributes to a general social discourse of the racial other as aggressive, powerful and dangerous.⁷² Our work extends this idea, by illustrating that the framing of Black digital bodies appears to align more specifically with racialized discourses pertaining to sport. Sport is often a microcosm of social life and as such mirrors and reproduces the racialized logics, which are present within social worlds. It is also a specific sub-cultural space which produces its own very particular and specific discourses of race and difference. According to Campbell, race framings in sport are often more insidious and covert than those that exist in the social world.⁷³ In some instances, for example, discriminations in relation to Black bodies and performances in sport are even seen to be complimentary: ‘Praising Black players in this way acts as a form of double talk. On the one hand, it celebrates Black talent, while simultaneously offering an idea of Black sporting success as nothing more than the natural result of Black physiology’. These ideas in sport contribute to the wider constructions of Black people as naturally violent and dangerous.⁷⁴ In this way, the contribution of this video game to the broader social construction of Black men as a singular and violent Black monolith is not simple, but a subtle and complex process of indirect identity framing and building.

Video games as spaces for seeing, representing and ‘knowing’ race

The study has provided new empirical insights into how the competencies which shaped raced digital bodies in FIFA 20 directly aligned with racialized causal laws that shape sporting environs in the social world. Existing football research has illustrated some of the ways in which race is represented and mediated in the digital world. Here, ideas often conform to wider racialized stereotypes. Our data both rehearse these insights and extend them. Indeed, at the game’s most fundamental and structural level of individual player attributes, differences between racial digital players clearly aligned with racial logics, and causal laws were apparent.

This was significant, as this level informs the algorithms that determine how digital players move, how their AIs will behave and the resultant experience of the gamers playing them. Pertinently, these pre-coded competencies directly influence the type of interaction that takes place between the gamer and their digital players (as well as their interaction with the digital environment more broadly). According to the descriptors, for example, the higher the digital player’s score for Interception, the higher the digital player’s ‘ability to read the game … [However, this feature] applies more to AI controlled team-mates rather than the [digital] player … selected’.⁷⁵

Black and White digital players excelled in different competencies. For example, we have seen how Black players outperform White digital players in relation to Balance. This influenced ‘how responsive the [digital] player … feels [our italics]’.⁷⁶ The descriptor continued: ‘If [the digital player] has high stats for agility and balance then [they will] move fluidly and [the gamer will] be able to get in or out of tight spots’.⁷⁷ They also exceeded in relation to Agility, which was described as ‘how agile the player is while moving or turning … how fast and graceful a player is … and agility also affects dribbling ability’.⁷⁸ Dribbling was ‘the player’s ability to carry the ball and past an opponent’. They also outperformed White digital players in relation to tackling, which was the ‘ability to win the ball without causing a free kick by using his body strength’.⁷⁹

White digital players dominated in areas, such as Free Kick Accuracy, Composure and Ball Control. In turn these were qualitatively described as ‘the higher the value (for Free Kick Accuracy) the better the accuracy of a [digital player’s] direct free kick on goal…’ The description concludes by advising the gamer to ideally, ‘pick a free-kick taker who has a good score for free kick accuracy and curve’. Composure relates to ‘[t]he chances of the player making an error when he shoots, passes and crosses’; While Ball Control was described as the ‘ability of a player to control the ball as he receives it.’.⁸⁰⁸¹

All this has a potentially profound influence on who – or which raced digital players – gamers’ associate with certain sporting attributes and tasks. From here, the game invites associations between certain raced digital players and certain attributes, which align with wider raced fantasies. Put simply, gamers become more likely to associate and pick certain raced digital players for certain sporting objectives, tasks and outcomes. In this regard, playing FIFA 20 is race in action.

Van Sterkenburg illustrated how mediated images of Black, Asian and minority ethnic athletes, especially through the medium of television, have a powerful influence on the creation and understandings of race and on how people understand themselves and others as racialized beings in contemporary Western societies.⁸² The data here suggests that sports video games, such as FIFA 20, also (re)present mediated images and digital characters of race, which rehearse natural athlete discourse. Additionally, through a multi-sensory and interactive immersion, gamers also feel these myths through playing the game. This is what Darley refers to as an ‘entry into the image’.⁸³ Indeed, central to understanding the uniqueness of video games as a media, is the ‘crucial importance of the experiential and somatic in players’ experiences … of games’ (Swalwell and Wilson 2015, 7).⁸⁴

FIFA 20 provides an experience which takes place through the ways in which each chosen digital player moves, how the gamer is able to control them (and the limits to what they can make them do), and how the different raced digital players react to other digital players within the game. We thus conclude that FIFA 20 is a site for a potent experiential socialization in racialized myths, whereby the gamers come to know race, not only through the usual channels of representation and discourse, but also through feeling the racialized differences of the procedurally generated natural athlete – and quite literally through their controllers.

The Black natural athlete as a concept is well established in sports sociology. As such, this theoretical frame should not be novel for sport and race interested scholars. What is ground-breaking here is that our findings uncover its presence at the very statistical foundations of FIFA 20, thereby acting as an insidious form of racialized procedural rhetoric in the highly popular sports gaming franchise. This has important implications not only for how FIFA’s large and global community of players ‘see’ race in action but also for how they come to know race. The latter takes place through a much more visceral and kinaesthetic interactive process. Our work offers a prime digital-cultural example which adds to scholarly understanding of the myriad, subtle and complex ways that racial ideas of difference manifest and become learned, understood and comprehended in 21st century Britain.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The terms ‘football’ and ‘soccer’ will be used interchangeably through this article.

2. Dart, ‘Commentary: the first 20 years of Soccer & Society’.

3. Cashmore, Black Sportsmen.

4. Maguire, ‘Race and Position Assignment in English Soccer’.

5. King ‘Play The White Man’.

6. Westwood, ‘Racism, Black Masculinity and the Politics of Space’.

7. Williams ‘Rangers is a Black Club’.

8. Bradbury ‘From Racial Exclusions to New Inclusions’.

9. Bradbury, Ethnic Minorities and coaching in elite level football in England.

10. Campbell, Education training, retirement and career transition for ex-professional footballers.

11. Burdsey Racism and English Football.

12. Campbell ‘“That black boy’s a different class”’.

13. Ibid.

14. Carrington, Race, Sport and Politics.

15. Ratna ‘“Who are ya?”.

16. Cleland and Cashmore, ‘Fans, Racism and British Football in the Twenty-First Century’.

17. Bradbury, ‘Institutional racism, whiteness and the under-representation of minorities in leadership positions in football in Europe’.

18. Lawrence and Davis, ‘Fans for diversity?’.

19. Ratna, ‘Intersectional Plays of Identity’.

20. Holt, ‘Sport and the British – 21 years on’.

21. Campbell and Bebb, ‘“He Is Like a Gazelle (When He Runs)”’.

22. Parkin, ‘Fifa: the video game that changed football’.

23. Hobberman, Darwin’s Athletes.

24. Stone, Breeding superman.

25. Campbell and Bebb, ‘“He Is Like a Gazelle (When He Runs)”’.

26. Cited in Campbell, Football, Community and Ethnicity, 10.

27. Maguire, ‘Race and Position Assignment in English Soccer’.

28. Bradbury, Ethnic Minorities and coaching in elite level football in England.

29. McCarthy et al, ‘Constructing Images and Interpreting Realities’.

30. See for example, Shaw, ‘On not becoming gamers’; Salter and Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media; Salter, ‘From geek masculinity to Gamergate’; Maloney et al. Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming.

31. Brand et al. ‘The diverse worlds of computer games’.

32. Dill et al., ‘Violence, sex, and age in popular video games’.

33. Williams et al., ‘The virtual census’.

34. Ibid., 815.

35. Wohn, ‘Gender and Race Representations in Casual Games’.

36. Dickerman et al., ‘Big Breasts and Bad Guys’.

37. Salter and Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media.

38. Dietrich, ‘Avatars of Whiteness’, 82.

39. Daniels and LaLone, ‘Racism in Video Gaming’.

40. Leonard, ‘“Live in your world, play in ours”’.

41. Lott cited in Ibid.

42. Murphy, ‘FIFA player ratings explained’. According to Murphy, this ‘complicated’ process for determining FIFA games’ player attributes involves ‘a team of 25 EA Producers and 400 outside data contributors… This team is responsible for ensuring all player data is up to date, while a community of over 6,000 FIFA Data Reviewers or Talent Scouts from all over the world are constantly providing suggestions and alterations to the database.’

43. Bogost, Persuasive Games, 108.

44. Ibid., 4.

45. Benjamin, Race After Technology.

46. Ibid.

47. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.

48. Nakamura, Cybertypes.

49. Benjamin, Race After Technology.

50. FIFAUTEAM. https://fifauteam.com/fifa-20-attributes-guide/.

51. See for example, Gunaratnam, Researching ‘Race’ and Ethnicity; and Campbell, ‘A (“black”) historian using sociology to write a history of “black” sport’.

52. See, for example, McCarthy et al., ‘Constructing Images and Interpreting Realities’.

53. Van Sterkenburg, ‘National bonding and meanings given to race and ethnicity’.

54. https://www.fifauteam.com/fifa-20-attributes-guide/.

55. https://www.fifauteam.com/fifa-20-attributes-guide/.

56. Ibid.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid.

63. See, for example, Meer, Key Concepts in Race.

64. Hylton, ‘Race’ and Sport.

65. Benjamin, Race After Technology.

66. https://www.ginx.tv/en/fifa/fifa-20-gameplay-real-football-again.

67. See Campbell, Football, Community and Ethnicity.

68. Cited in Ibid., 95.

69. Williams, ‘Rangers is a Black Club’, 75–76.

70. Cited Campbell ‘Racism in football’.

71. Leonard, ‘“Live in your world, play in ours”’.

72. Srauy and Cheney-Lippold, ‘Realism in FIFA?’.

73. Campbell, ‘Racism in football’.

74. Srauy and Cheney-Lippold, ‘Realism in FIFA?’.

75. https://www.fifauteam.com/fifa-20-attributes-guide/.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid.

78. Ibid.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

81. Ibid.

82. Van Sterkenburg, ‘National bonding and meanings given to race and ethnicity’.

83. Darley, Visual Digital Culture, 164.

84. Swalwell and Wilson, The Pleasures of Computer Gaming, 7.