Racism In Football

Being a professional soccer player is challenging already, but being one in Europe playing for the most well known soccer franchises in the world is very difficult and demanding.

Being a professional soccer player is more like a career than a job because a job doesn’t require a full commitment and a career is more of a long term commitment. Millions of people around the world are watching these players battle for their franchises, and implying overwhelming pressure on them. With that in mind professional soccer players face challenges with long year round seasons, racist fans, and demanding performances. First, with a year round nonstop season, players suffer injuries and devastating loses. Starting off, once a season starts a player is given

Unequally, the career of a black or brown skin toned player in soccer is different than the rest. The mental challenge of being called racial words and have bananas thrown at a player because of their skin is immense. Some players can contain it and just move on, but some unleash it all on the fans. To demonstrate, in 2006 Carlos Kameni a black goalkeeper from Cameroon that played for Espanyol Football Club, witnessed his own home crowd showered him with racial slurs and bananas. When Kameni was asked how he felt about it he responded “when I see the bananas on the field, I think I’m human not an animal. But on one had I’m a respected player on the team and on the other I’m an animal.” In the article “Racism in soccer? Perception of challenges of black and with players by white referees, soccer players and fans” the authors used an experiment on three groups, the referee’s players and fans to see the aggressor and victim when it comes to white and black players. The result is “Participants were more likely to consider within-group challenges as fouls and were faster to consider challenges made by Black players as fouls. On the other hand, fouls made by White players were seen as more severe” (par 1). Wagner-egger Pascal et al, explain that people see that black players make more challenges but white players make the viscous tackles and fouls more often. Important to realize, the challenge of being hated by fans because the color of skin is a challenge not many can ignore and