Prejudice in the People’s Game: A Content Analysis of Race/Ethnicity in Polish Televised Football

Abstract

This study explores how televised football in Poland serves as a site for the (re)construction of discourses surrounding race and ethnicity and to what extent this squares with previous studies on sport media conducted mainly in Western countries. In our analysis, we identify the discourses surrounding race and ethnicity that the commentators in televised football draw on and examine how they relate to hegemonic discourses and categorizations in wider Polish society. Our findings show that Polish football commentators draw on transnationally circulating racialized/ethnicized discourses on assumed superior physicality when talking about Black football players and on supposed negative psychological capabilities when talking about White Southern European football players. The findings also show that when talking about non-Polish players and head coaches, the commentators regularly rely on an us-versus-them frame that constructs foreign influences as a threat.

How do audiences of televised English football construct difference based on race/ethnicity?

“…3 It meant, for instance, that the interviewer tried to avoid predefining race/ethnicity in terms of predetermined categories in the questions he asked in the interviews. This squares with an inductive approach to research where a-priori concepts or definitions of race and ethnicity will not define the analysis (Boeije, 2010;Strauss & Corbin, 1990). This left much space for respondents to use their own conceptualizations and categorizations of race/ethnicity (Morning, 2009).…”

“…The first step in the analysis was open coding in which the raw data (the transcription of verbal commentary) was broken down into a great variety of different labels that we used to get a first overview of audience meanings of race/ethnicity based on televised football. The result of this open coding process was 'a list of different codes' (labels) (Boeije, 2010, p. 98;Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Subsequently, we grouped together those codes/labels that had more or less similar meanings to 'reduce the number of units which we have to work with' (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 65).…”

“…This axial coding process resulted in the construction of a limited number of dominant themes and subthemes. In the final selective coding step, the core themes and the wider narratives and discourses that underlie these themesand how these discourses relate to relations of powerwere further examined (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Throughout the analytic process, themes were compared to each other to explore their interrelations and we searched for evidence and counter evidence in the data.…”

Sport media and the cultural circulation of race/ethnicity: Moving from content analyses to production studies

“…In Spain, Aquino (2017) explored media representations of the Spanish Black football player Iñaki Williams, showing how a special emphasis was put on his physical skills, for example by referring to him as 'the bullet of Bilbao'. To a lesser extent, studies found that racial/ethnic biases were also reproduced about other racial/ethnic categories, such as South Asian football players being associated with physical weakness in the UK (Kilvington, 2012) and White Latin American and White Southern European football players being described negatively in cognitive terms in Polish and Dutch televised football ( Van Lienden & Van Sterkenburg., 2020;Van Sterkenburg et al, 2012), for example as being hot-tempered. It is worth noting the conflation between race/ethnicity and nationality, which take special importance in the European context.…”

“…This includes contexts where the Black-White dichotomy may not be the dominant modality through which racial/ethnic categories are understood. Some recent content analyses into discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in sport media moved beyond the Anglo-American focus (see : Ličen, 2015;Longas Luque & Van Sterkenburg, 2020;Van Lienden & Van Sterkenburg, 2020;Van Sterkenburg et al, 2012), and can be considered examples for future sport media production studies.…”