Racial Bias in Fans and Officials: Evidence from the Italian Serie A

Abstract

Recent scholarship studying the impact of race-based prejudice has emphasized its rampant persistence throughout all aspects of modern society, including the world of sports. Prior research from American leagues has shown that even referees, trained officials intended to enact neutral judgements, are subject to bias against Black and dark-skinned players. To extend these studies and inform policies aimed at combating racial bias in public spaces more broadly, we report results from a unique dataset of over 6500 player-year observations from the Italian Serie A to examine whether these biases persist in European football. Our results show that darker-skinned players receive more foul calls and more cards than lighter-skinned players, controlling for a range of potential confounders and productivity-relevant mediators. By exploiting an absence of fans induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we also present preliminary evidence that fans may play a key role in inducing poor calls against darker-skinned players.

Is crowd support important in professional football’s home advantage? A systematic review based on covid-19 effect<b></b>

“…Among the theoretical works, three studies were unclassified since they did not include original data analysis (Gouveia & Pereira, 2021;Richlan et al, 2023;Webb, 2021). Overall, there were only 7 total studies (14.9%) that could not be classified by research phase and home advantage effect (Gouveia & Pereira, 2021;Jiang et al, 2021;Magistro & Wack, 2023;Richlan et al, 2023;Steinfeldt et al, 2022;Webb, 2021;Wilkesmann, 2022), highlighting that the vast majority of works clearly assessed impacts on home advantage. By integrating research phase and quantifying observed effects, Table 3 provides greater specificity regarding trends in findings than considering these dimensions individually.…”

Customer Discrimination and Ethnic Team Composition

“…This paper's approach is based on the assumption that individual customer preferences markedly changed after a series of events on New Year's Eve 2015-16 and are also reflected in subsequent voting behavior. More specifically, we assess whether rightwing or xenophobic attitudes of supporters influence the ethnic composition of teams in results in Magistro and Wack (2023) from elite Italian soccer support the notion that supporters may play a key role in inducing poor referee calls against players with darker skin color. Caselli et al (2023) exploit soccer games in Italy without the attendance of supporters during the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to show that racist pressure can harm minority groups and lower the overall quality of the game.…”