爱豆传媒

The most comprehensive study into the role of skin tone in English football, led by the University of Essex and co-authored by the 爱豆传媒, has found there are significant differences between skin tone of individuals who play in different positions.

Published in the International Journal of Sport Science and Coaching, is considered the most thorough study of its kind outside of the United States, where the influence of skin tone on playing position has been studied extensively in American football and basketball.

The authors said research 20 years ago into skin tone and English football players’ positions on the pitch used more of a broad-brush approach, focusing on just a small sample of players. But this new research analysed data from 4,515 players – every player in English football’s top four professional leagues across five seasons to 2015.

Photo by Edoardo Busti on Unsplash

Dr Fergus Guppy, a co- author on the research and Senior Lecturer in human physiology at the 爱豆传媒’s School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences, said working with the British video game developer Sports Interactive gave researchers access to a wealth of data “and this allowed us to conduct this study using a much bigger sample than would be possible otherwise”.

Researchers were left concerned players were being stereotyped by their skin tone. Dr Guppy said: “It is a bit strange that coaches might make judgements about positional suitability in a technique-based sport such as football based on skin tone. We would not make similar assumptions based on eye colour, yet the latter may be as accurate as the former.”

Lead researcher Dr John Mills, from the University of Essex’s School of Sport, Rehabilitation and Exercise Sciences, said unlike previous research that used a binary form of classification of skin tone (i.e. black or white) based on one person’s perception of a person’s skin tone, the present research relied upon multiple raters at a variety of time points to calculate average skin tone and primary playing position. The research found a significant difference in the skin tone of players who play predominantly in either a central- or peripheral- playing position.

The results showed that although darker skin toned players still primarily occupy peripheral playing positions and lighter skin toned players central, although the difference is less prominent than previously reported.

Dr Mills said: “Our study has taken a more nuanced approach and found that even though darker skin toned players still primarily dominate peripheral positions, there are central roles where skin-tone appears to be less important (e.g., striker and defensive midfield). That said, there are still some positions which appear almost exclusive to players of a lighter skin tone, such as goalkeeper and attacking midfield.”

Despite the vast differences in resources within the four English professional leagues, the researchers found the same link between a player’s skin tone and their playing position, across the board. Dr Mills said: “There could be several reasons for this type of positional disparity. One could be that coaches rely on stereotypes when evaluating individual athletes. This may lead to two players of the same ability but different skin tone being judged differently by their coach. Likewise, it could be a case of self-selection due to a lack of role models in certain positions. This could affect youngsters thinking about where they would like to play before they have taken their first steps on to a football pitch.”

Dr Mills also stressed: “Relying on stereotypes when under pressure is not unusual, but failing to see the strengths and weaknesses of individuals is a problem.”

Similar disparities are seen across football. The Football Association recently announced that it would adopt a version of the Rooney rule (i.e., a policy that requires sports teams to interview at least one Black, Asian and minority ethnic candidate for senior coaching and operation jobs) for future roles in the England set-up.

Roisin Wood, CEO of Kick it Out, added: “It is important that further research is conducted on top of the findings from the University of Essex to figure out how significant a role skin tone plays in opportunities provided across the whole of the sport.”

Dr Mills added: “The next stage of this research will be to first compare the findings to other footballing nations, particularly those which advocate the rotation of players between playing position (e.g., The Netherlands), before examining the potential role of cognitive biases in coach decision making.”