Table of Contents
The pattern is not assembled.
A player is named. Abuse is reported. A response is issued. An investigation is launched. Then the article ends. Like a list of road closures in a local paper, each entry stands alone. Like isolated events.
Sports journalism’s style of reporting racial abuse is actually propping up the system of racial abuse affecting Black football players.
On the 17th February 2026, in the Stadium of Light in Lisbon, a Brazilian player of African descent playing for a Spanish club, symbolically the Spanish monarchy’s club from the early 1900s, is racially abused by a White Argentinian player.[1] A French player of African descent who also plays for the Spanish club hears the insult and loses his composure defending the Brazilian.[2] Over the last four years, the Brazilian player has had eighteen formal legal complaints filed against racist behaviour targeting him.[3] The French player himself has been the subject of many high profile racial abuse incidents on the football pitch.[4] The manager of the Portuguese club and the Argentinian player deny that anything untoward was said and then blame the entire conflict on the way that the Brazilian had celebrated.[5]
So let me paint this picture. Spain, the birthplace of the modern conceptualisation, legislature, and expansion of racism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,[6] over the last few years has been denying that its football league is racist amidst a storm of racist abuse being reported on the pitch by one of the world’s greatest players. The league’s chairman and other managers and players deny the wider problem, stating that the player is provoking confrontation by the way he celebrates.[7] They deny that anything has happened. This player is Black. His effigy has been hung and burnt by football fans in front of his home stadium.[8] He has been called a monkey on the pitch and on television shows.[9] And yet, not until 2024, considering the appalling, long and heart-dropping list of racial abuse collected on Wikipedia in Spain since the 1990s, was there ever a conviction in Spain for such abuse.[10] Nobody knows how many Black players play in Spain as no racial demographic data has ever been collected officially. The few independent studies that exist classify race by researchers looking at photographs and assigning race based on their opinion. The league has only started collecting racial abuse data that happens online. They still do not collect data on what happens on the pitch, or in the stadiums.[11] Next door, Portugal, its role in birthing the transatlantic slave trade inextricable from that of its neighbour,[12] has been grappling with the consequences of using anti-Black rhetoric to justify not only the trade in which it was the largest carrier of enslaved Africans in history,[13] but also hanging onto its colonies longer than almost any other European nation.[14] Latent but apparent, anti-Black violence is unchecked.
What Spain has managed to count is this.
In 2019, El País analysed 34,200 official referee match reports spanning seventeen seasons of Spanish professional football. They found 68 matches recording racist incidents.[15] Mainstream eyes may present these figures as evidence that racism is not that bad in Spanish football. Most Black people would recognise them as reflecting the few brave souls who had the energy and frustration that day to fight that battle. Since 2022, eighteen formal legal complaints have been filed against racist behaviour targeting this one player alone, and as he himself has said, the actual number of incidents is far greater: “It wasn’t the first time, or the second, or the third.”[16] Eighteen times that he couldn’t not say it anymore. That’s not to say there have not been more instances. And this is just one player. Those 2019 statistics look less and less like a true estimation of reality.
What Portugal has managed to count is just as paltry.
Every month there is at least one incident of racist abuse in the professional game reported in the media. Unless the abuse is so scandalous and so high profile that it forces its way into the dominant narrative, the articles never provide context. Which context? The number of racial abuse incidents in the professional and amateur game reported every season. Neither do they report that whilst some federations publish partial official figures, Europe still lacks a consistent public federation-by-federation record of racist-abuse complaints and upheld outcomes.[17] That silence is telling. Neither the EU nor UEFA require the collection of these statistics.[18] Even where partial statistics exist, newspapers do not use them to contextualise the player within a systemic pattern of racial abuse. For the sceptical reader, or the reader short on time, this player may appear as an unlucky man who keeps stumbling into misunderstandings. The frankly useless reports are in fact also dangerous.
When a Black body succeeds, visibly, joyfully, defiantly, something is activated in those who believe, consciously or not, that such success requires permission. The celebration is not the provocation. The existence of the Black body is. What the racist language reaches for, the slurs, the monkey chants, the effigy, is not a response to what happened on the pitch. It is a reminder. You should know your place. Since you appear to have forgotten it, let us remind you. The celebration becomes the excuse. The reminder was always coming.
When the Portuguese club’s manager pointed to the celebration, the media reported it.[19] Not as an explanation to be questioned, but as a fact to be included. The denial sits in the article alongside the allegation, weighted equally, as if the two are simply competing accounts of a neutral event. The reader is left to decide.
But the reader has no tools to decide with. They have not been told that this explanation, the celebration as provocation, has been offered before. By other clubs. About other Black players. In other countries.[20] They have not been told that eighteen formal complaints have been filed against racist behaviour targeting this player since 2022. They have not been told that Spain recorded 68 incidents of racial abuse across 34,200 matches during seventeen seasons, that Portugal has recorded equally as little, and that this is considered a meaningful dataset. They have not been told that no consistent European record of racist-abuse complaints exists, because nobody is required to keep one. And that nobody seems to want one.
What they have been told is that a player was abused, that it is being investigated, and that the other side has a different account.
The article ends.
Like a list of road closures in a local paper, each entry stands alone.
The system is not hidden. It is simply not drawn.
Dr HAFEAT Abbam
References
[1] Al Jazeera, 18 February 2026. Mourinho and Benfica under fire after Real Madrid’s Vinícius alleges racism. aljazeera.com
[2] ESPN, 18 February 2026. Vinícius Jr. racism claim investigated by UEFA. espn.com
[3] Al Jazeera, 18 February 2026. Vinícius Júnior has had 18 legal complaints filed against racist behaviour targeting him since 2022. aljazeera.com
[4] Sky Sports, 19 February 2026. Explained: Vinícius Júnior’s history of battling racism. skysports.com
[5] Sky Sports, 19 February 2026. The manager said: “When you score a goal like that, you celebrate in a respectful way” and confirmed he believed the celebration had incited the reaction. skysports.com
[6] Slavery and Remembrance, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Iberian ports outfitted 97 percent of European-based slave voyages up to the mid-seventeenth century. slaveryandremembrance.org
[7] Time, 22 May 2023. LaLiga president Javier Tebas criticised Vinícius Júnior’s response to the Valencia abuse on social media. time.com
[8] CNN, 28 August 2024. An effigy of the player wearing his shirt was hung from a bridge near Real Madrid’s training ground in January 2023. Four members of Atlético’s ultras were arrested. cnn.com
[9] ESPN, 21 May 2024. Racist slurs were caught on camera during matches at Osasuna, Mallorca, Real Valladolid, Barcelona and Valencia. espn.com
[10] Associated Press / NBC News, June 2024. Three Valencia fans were handed eight-month prison sentences, the first conviction for racism-related cases in professional football in Spain. nbcnews.com
[11] ESPN, 21 May 2024. LaLiga had filed nine separate reports with government authorities regarding racist incidents before the Valencia conviction. espn.com
[12] Slavery and Remembrance, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. slaveryandremembrance.org
[13] SlaveVoyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Emory University. slavevoyages.org. More than 5.8 million enslaved Africans were transported in ships sailing under Portuguese and later Brazilian flags, the largest national share of the transatlantic slave trade.
[14] Portugal retained its African colonies, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, until 1975 following the Carnation Revolution, later than almost any other European colonial power. Sources: BBC History; Encyclopædia Britannica.
[15] El País, 20 December 2019, Daniele Grasso and Borja Andrino.
[16] ESPN, 21 May 2024. The player posted on social media after the Valencia match: “It wasn’t the first time, or the second, or the third. Racism is normal in La Liga.” espn.com
[17] Cross-European research finding: whilst some federations publish partial figures, no consistent public federation-by-federation record of racist-abuse complaints and upheld outcomes exists across Europe.
[18] Article 165 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union limits EU power over sport to supporting and coordinating Member State action. Neither the EU’s Racial Equality Directive nor UEFA regulations require Member States or federations to collect and publish race-specific complaints data.
[19] Sky Sports, 19 February 2026. The manager’s post-match comments were widely reported without interrogation of the logic that a celebration could constitute provocation for racist abuse. skysports.com
[20] Bundesliga.com, 20 February 2026. Bayern Munich manager Vincent Kompany noted the pattern explicitly: “It’s happened to Samuel Eto’o. It’s happened to Mario Balotelli so many times. So it was their celebration as well?” bundesliga.com
© Dr Tawia Abbam, 2026. All rights reserved. thetawia.com
