Racism in Soccer? Perception of Challenges of Black and White Players by White Referees, Soccer Players, and Fans

This experiment investigated challenge evaluations in soccer and their relation to prejudice: more precisely, whether skin colour may influence judgments of soccer tackles. Three groups of participants (soccer players, referees, and soccer fans) were asked to evaluate challenges, featuring Black and White players as aggressors and victims in a mixed-design study. Results showed that participants made some differentiations between Black and White players in a challenge evaluation task. 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. There were no major differences between the participating groups, suggesting that the observed effects were independent of how good players were or whether the participants were referees or not.