Introduction

Karl Planck wrote in 1898 an essay on football, Fusslümmelei, which reflected his perceived ugliness of the game.¹ The physical education professor from Germany despised the game and its English origins. He even drew a parallel between the half-starved workers that played the game in England as pastime and the animal-like movement that the game required to characterize football as an ‘English disease’. According to Planck, football stripped humans of their dignity and likened them to a distant relative, apes. Today, the game’s officials are concerned with the rise of extreme-right groups and ethnocentric attitudes, just as racial discrimination has largely contributed to delinquency in both society and football matches. Racism has become a considerable force that has caused serious disturbances during football matches in Europe, just as certain clubs seem to attract an inherently racist support, even though the number of non-white football players has increased dramatically. This special issue addresses football-related online racism and brings to light several disturbing incidents that have scarred football, not to mention the extent to which they have undermined the integrity of the popular game. Evidently, the COVID-19 pandemic forced football fans the world over to abstain from attending football matches, yet racism from football did not eclipse for it became more prevalent on online platforms. Football studies have been relatively slow to explore the digitalization of football as a social and cultural phenomenon. There is a need for football studies’ scholarship to move towards developing new conceptual vehicles through which to understand the hyper-digital moment. This edited collection is proposing to do this by bringing a focus on racism(s) in the digital age and how they are played out in and through football cultures online.

The England team that took the knee to protest racial injustice and inequality moments before the EURO 2020 Final kicked off at Wembley Stadium was a celebration of multiculturalism since seven players of the starting 11 claimed ancestry overseas. Yet Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka, and Jadon Sancho missing their penalty kicks triggered floods of racist abuse on social media platforms. Twitter claimed that some 99% of the accounts that were suspended during the EURO 2020 were identifiable, and therefore not entirely anonymous, just as most of the racist abuse originated perhaps unsurprisingly from accounts based in the United Kingdom. Even though Facebook and Instagram, too, claimed to have removed comments and/or accounts directing racist abuse to the three England players, facilitating hatred online was not exclusive to individuals exploiting the anonymity available on social media platforms. A post on the seven News Australia Facebook page, soon after deleted, read ‘Three Black players failed in the penalty shootout which England lost 3–2 against Italy’.

We end this opening chapter in a slightly different way than academic convention might dictate. Instead of summarizing the above and the contributions made to this special edition by the papers that constitute it, we wish to echo and follow TALS/ANZALS/CALS/LARASA/LSA/AEME who issued a Joint Charge Statement on 15 June 2020 to leisure scholars around the world, in the wake of ‘what some may call anti-Black repression in the United States’.² They note the charge statement is not simply a statement; it is also a charge. They explain:

Caring, we suppose, is nice. Pledging to do better is quaint. Performing acts of care is kind. But changing the ways in which the world functions is a (in)surmountable task that must be undertaken.

We, therefore, position this special issue as a partial response to this charge. That is, not only is it bringing together eminent scholars working at the nexus of ‘race’, racism and digital football studies to present original papers on the topic, we advance it as call to action, which invites sport, leisure and football studies scholars, more broadly, to read and reflect much more closely on their own scholarship and whether it is actively challenging racialized injustices, ignoring or, at worst, perpetuating them. ‘Race’ and racism are not simply something to do with people of colour. We are all raced and we are all implicated in racism and its broader societal effects every day. We cannot be, and therefore we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves and do better.

What has become clear of late is that many institutions inside and outside of football and higher education have, some awkwardly and clumsily, taken on this responsibility and some have even shifted to a discourse familiar to critical race, race critical, cultural studies and critical sociological theorists who have been using terms such as ‘white supremacy’, ‘genocide’ and ‘white privilege’ for decades. This, we are optimistic, marks a significant rhetorical and conceptual shift in the way that liberal institutions, society at large and football are talking about and understanding ‘race’ and racism. That is not to say that we are naïve enough to think that this linguistic turn places us on the cusp of some post-race utopia; however, if we accept that language remains a key driver in shaping perceptions about the worlds we inhibit, it does mark a new dawn in the fight for equality. If only one that poses new challenges. The digital realm will be and already is one of its new battlegrounds that not only is changing racialized perceptions but also helping form new ones.

As much as these changing times are and were embodied by the England men’s national team taking a knee before every Euro 2020 match they played in – which is by no means an act without its own issues, as we outline above – the boos that accompanied them come as stark reminder that as much as the discourse on ‘race’ and racism is shifting in liberal circles and popular culture so too will forms of racism(s). Across the West, traditional national and societal fault lines have been shifting for some time and cultural and identity politics are increasingly taking centre stage in political and popular debates. Football cannot avoid being the premier medium for many through which these major fault lines, which are often tied irrevocably to a nation’s racialized histories, become visible to the masses; thus, football studies and digital football studies scholars must be ready not only to critically explore the racialized aspects of football but also ensure ‘expression of, engagement with, and disruptions in power and oppression are a standard feature of any academic gathering’.³ We end therefore by calling upon football studies and the emerging field of digital football studies to recognize itself as something much more than a corpus of literature; it must see itself as a movement or an enterprise that considers actively the racialized effects and implications of everything it does – including but not limited to authorship, scholarship, keynote invitations, writing collectives, Ph.D. supervision, funding bids, conference organization, and the functioning of formal and informal networks of scholars – so it might become an active driver for a better digital and analogue world.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. It was also published as a book. For an edition of the book, see Planck, Fusslümmelei.

2. TALS, ANZALS, CALS, LARASA, LSA, AEME, 2020, ‘Joint Charge Statement’, http://leisurestudies.org/news/chargestatement.

3. Ibid.