Identities Journal Blog
  • Home
  • About Identities
  • Blog Articles
  • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • COVID-19 Symposium
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About Identities
  • Blog Articles
  • COVID-19 Blog Series
    • Call for COVID-19 Commentaries
  • COVID-19 Symposium
  • Contact

COVID-19, BAME communities and local football: can local BAME football win against COVID-19?

16/9/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
On 26 May 2020, professional football in England resumed after a three-month shutdown in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK. The disproportionately high COVID-19-related mortality rates among Britain’s black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities prompted some debate among football professionals, journalists and academics as to the potential higher risk ‘project restart’ posed for black professional footballers compared to their white peers (Minhas et al, 2020). Nonetheless, the launch commenced, and fears were alleviated (initially at least) by the implementation of a robust test, track and trace system and by clubs operating extraordinarily high levels of surveillance and control over their players’ daily activities.

On 12 September, the Football Association in England (FA) ‘restarted’ the non-professional format of the game. By comparison, there has been much less public scrutiny of this roll-out, and especially in relation to broader questions around public health. Or to the potential of local football to contribute to the disproportionately high COVID-19 mortality rates among Britain’s minority ethnic communities.

The absence of debate is quite remarkable given that, according to the FA, there are currently over 3,000 non-professional women’s, men’s, youth and mini-soccer football clubs that play on a ‘Saturday’ across England, compared to just 92 professional clubs. This is also surprising given the long history and relationship between local football and Britain’s BAME communities.
Thus far, much of the guidance for clubs operating below the professional level, has focused on safety around the activity of playing. A recent study by the Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbalbond, for example, found that because the majority of contact during a match fell below the 30-second threshold for transmission, outdoor-football is deemed to be remarkably safe for players (Consultancy.co.uk). Undoubtedly influenced by this kind of logic, on 19 August, the FA published its ‘COVID-19 Guidance on Re-Starting Outdoor Competitive Grassroots Football’.

Much of the focus has been on protective measures during and before matches. For example, while contact between competing players during games is permitted, contact for goal-celebrations are not. Likewise, social distancing measures of at least one-metre-plus should be observed by coaches, substitutes and spectators. Where possible, players should walk or cycle to matches. Epidemiologist, Patricia Bruijning asserts that ‘carpooling’ should be removed as an option for getting players to and from matches. Enforcing the majority of these provisions is the responsibility of club officials.

Most local football clubs and organisations operate on the labour of a limited number of dedicated volunteers who often double, triple and quadruple-up on club roles and matchday duties. This reality makes regulating and enforcing the safety measures proffered by the FA extremely difficult. For example, at a recent preseason match I attended, some nine levels below the professional leagues, the home team’s ageing club secretary and designated COVID-19 officer, was simultaneously administrating the match-officials and players, staffing entry into the ground as well as staffing the tea-bar.

All this undoubtedly limited his ability to notice – and stop - the substitutes and coaches of both teams huddling together in their respective dugouts, for the duration of the first-half of the match. So far, there is little evidence to indicate that such safety measures are being strictly and evenly adhered to across this format of the game.

Of course, the failure to follow guidelines fully by club officials, players, coaches, and spectators has to be seen within the context of football as a prized counter-hegemonic space within the local sporting imagination. Local football has a long history of being resistant to policy, which is often seen as the overreach of the State into the private affairs of clubs and how they operate. Resistance to top down policing, in this context, is also undoubtedly bound-up within the politics of youth and masculinity.

Overly simplistic and narrow guidelines on car-use provide us with a useful example of the ways in which these provisions often fail to fully account for the social and economic inequalities that exist between players from different raced and ethnic backgrounds, or for the host of clubs which are connected to specific BAME communities.

Unlike the professional game, non-professional football in England includes organisations and clubs that are symbolically, culturally, demographically, and often quite literally situated within specific minority-ethnic and faith communities across the country. These include clubs such as Highfield Rangers, Leicester Nirvana, Nottingham Cavaliers, IQRA and Guru Arjan Dev Khalsa Sports Club. While clubs seldom operate quota systems, they usually consist of young players from particular BAME communities. For example, London Tigers consists of predominantly local South Asian Bangladeshi volunteers and players.

Race and ethnicity in the UK is a proxy for various social and economic inequalities (that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic). A recent report by the Runnymeade Trust found that all BAME groups had significantly higher poverty rates than British white. Furthermore, Pakistani, black Caribbean and black African households respectively averaged around 55% (£127,000), 70% (£89,000) and 90% (£30,000) less savings than white-British households (£282,000).

In this context, car ownership for parents and young people from these communities is uncommon. For clubs that are predominantly populated with young people from these communities carpooling is not a choice but a necessity. The bi-weekly task of getting squads to away pitches across cities and counties without quite literally packing the few available cars full of players, would mean they would not be able to take part in sporting competitions.
 
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there also appears little consideration within ‘project restart’ to the potential of local football to double-up as a conduit for the transmission of COVID-19 directly into the BAME communities that they serve.

Preliminary evidence has indicated that ethnicity is also a proxy for certain structural and health-related conditions of social life, which leave black and south Asian communities in the UK prone to higher than average COVID-19-related mortality rates. For example, BAME communities have higher rates of hypertension and diabetes, which increase the risk of individuals developing complications if infected. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, black males are 4.2 times more likely to die from COVID-19 when compared to white men and women (Minhas et al, 2020).

The relatively low-level risk of transmission when playing outdoors, combined with the generally young age and healthy physical condition of most people that play regular football, suggests that BAME footballers may not be at an especially high risk of possessing the underlying conditions that lead to mortality from coronavirus.

This also means that they are more likely to develop only relatively mild symptoms if infected. The recent infections of high profile professional footballers such as Manchester City’s Riyad Mahrez and Aymeric Laporte, alongside the quarantine of 300 people that attended a recent charity football match at Burnside Working Men’s Football Club in County Durham, clearly demonstrates that neither BAME (or white) footballers, or those directly or indirectly connected to local clubs, are not immune to the virus. And herein lies the problem for the football authorities.

Local football as a cultural activity is not confined to the 22 players. Nor does it take place in social or spatial vacuums. BAME players and clubs are directly plugged into the very families, households and communities where the impact of COVID-19 is much more lethal, and whom require the most protection. For example, Punjab FC in Gravesend and the Community Relations Football Club in Rugby often operate out of their local Gurdwara and Caribbean Centre respectively, which bring them directly into contact with the communities they serve. And it is in these spaces where an outbreak effecting hundreds of people, like that experienced in the North East, could have the most devasting consequences.

Data have shown us that the relationship between coronavirus and Britain’s BAME communities is complex. A combination of structural, cultural and social inequalities has contributed to the disparity in mortality rates experienced by people of colour in the UK. My own research has detailed the important resistance, integrative and transformative functions of local football for BAME individuals and communities since their arrival in significant numbers over half a century ago (Campbell 2019).

Undoubtedly, restarting local football will provide some social, psychological and health related benefits. However, unless careful consideration is given here, local football might also provide another channel through which coronavirus directly reaches our most vulnerable communities and further widen the health related disparities and inequalities that the current pandemic has exposed and exacerbated between Britain’s white and BAME communities. 
 
References: 
Campbell, P. I. 2019. 'That black boy's a different class': a historical sociology of the black middle-classes, boundary-work and local football in the British East-Midlands c.1970−2010. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2019.1590028
 
Consultancy.co.uk. 17 June 2020. Research suggests football can be played safely during Covid-19.  

Minhas, J. S., Martin, C. A., Campbell, P. I & Pareek, M. 16 August 2020. Project Restart and COVID-19 – how do we reduce risk for ethnic minority athletes? British Journal Of Sports Medicine Blog.  

Blog post by Paul Ian Campbell, University of Leicester, UK

Picture

​
​Read further in 
Identities:


​‘That black boy’s different class!’: a historical sociology of the black middle-classes, boundary-work and local football in the British East-Midlands c.1970−2010

​‘Is it because I’m black?’: personal reflections on Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

Inhabiting the diasporic habitus: on Stuart Hall's Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

The stigma of being Black in Britain

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Blog Collection

    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019

    Blog Categories

    All
    Academic Freedom
    Activism
    Adolescents
    Adoption
    Affective Solidarity
    Affirmative Action
    African-American
    African Caribbean Self Help Organisation (ACSHO)
    African Diaspora
    AKP
    Aleviness
    Alternative Epistemologies
    Alternative Futures
    Anarchists Against The Wall
    Anthropology
    Antiblackness
    Anti-racism
    Apartheid
    Archives
    Armenians
    Arts
    Aspirations
    Assimilation
    Asylum Seekers
    Australia
    BAME
    Becoming
    Belonging
    Biographical Trajectories
    Biologisation
    Black
    Black Geographies
    Blackness
    Body
    Bosnia-Herzegovina
    Boundary Work
    Boxing
    Brazil
    British Muslims
    Bushfalling
    Cameroon
    Canada
    Capital
    Capitalism
    Caregiver
    Categories
    Causal Stories
    Central Americans
    Chernobyl
    Children
    Children Of Immigrants
    China
    Chinatown
    Chinese Community
    Chinese Immigrants
    Chinese-Indonesian Women
    Citizenship
    Class
    CLR James
    Cognitive Justice
    Colombia
    Colonial
    Colonialism
    Commemoration
    Competitive
    Conflict
    Containment
    Context
    Cosmologies
    Cosmopolitanism
    Counter-mapping
    COVID-19
    Creole
    Critical Race Theory
    Cross-border Marriage
    Cross-national Comparison
    Cultural Geography
    Cultural Policy
    Cultural Scripts
    Cultural Studies
    Cultural Toolkit
    Culture Of Migration
    Curfew
    Decolonial Solidarity
    Decolonisation
    Denial
    Denmark
    Deportation
    Diaspora
    Digital
    Disaster
    Discourse
    Discourse Analysis
    Discrimination
    Displacement
    Diversity
    Divorce
    Domari
    Domestic Violence
    East Jerusalem
    Eating
    Educational Mobility
    Elite Students
    Emotion
    Employment
    Epistemology
    Ethnic Boundaries
    Ethnic Classification
    Ethnic Identity
    Ethnicity
    Ethnicity And The City
    Ethnicization
    Ethnic Labelling
    Ethnic Minority
    Ethnic Niche
    Ethnic Websites
    Ethnoracial
    Ethnoracial Identity
    Europe
    European Capital Of Culture
    Exile
    Expatriates
    Experiential Knowledge
    Expert Role
    Explicit Normativity
    Exploitation
    Expropriation
    Faith Identities
    Family
    Fandom
    Far Right
    Favela
    Filipina
    Filipino
    Filipinos
    Flanders
    Food
    Football
    Fractal Logic
    France
    Fundamental British Values
    Gender
    Global Neo-colonialism
    ‘gün’ Groups
    Gypsy
    Handsworth Epistemologies
    Hauntology
    Hegemony
    Henri Lefebvre
    Higher Education
    Historical Enquiry
    Hmong
    Hong Kong
    Hospitality
    Humanism
    Humanitarianism
    Human Rights
    Hybridity
    Identification
    Identity
    Ideology
    Imaginaries
    Immigrants
    Immigration
    Immobility
    Impact
    Imperialism
    Implicit Normativity
    Inclusion
    Incorporation
    India Israel Relations
    India-Israel Relations
    Indigenous
    Indonesian Women
    Institutions
    Integration
    Intercultural Communication
    Interdisciplinary
    Interest Convergence
    Intermarriage
    Intermarriages
    International Marriage
    Intersectionality
    Interviews
    Intimate Citizenship
    Invisible Boundaries
    Ireland
    Islam
    Islamophobia
    Italy
    Japan
    Jewishness
    Joint Struggle
    Journeys
    Justice
    Kashmir
    Kinning
    Kinship
    Knowledge
    Knowledge Production
    Korea
    Labour Agency
    Labour Market
    Labour Migration
    Language
    Laowai
    Latin America
    Latinos
    Law
    Legal Discourse
    Liberalism
    Local Identity
    Los Angeles
    Mapuche
    Mariana Islands
    Marriage
    Marriage Migration
    Marseille
    Marxism
    Masculinity
    Media
    Mental Health Services
    Microaggression
    Micronesia
    Middle Class
    Migrant Entrepreneurs
    Migrant Farm Workers
    Migrants
    Migrant Women
    Migrant Workers
    Migration
    Migration Research
    Military Occupation
    Mixed-ethnicity
    Moralities
    Motherhood
    Movement
    Multicultural
    Multiculturalism
    Multiethnic
    Muslim
    Narrative
    Narratives
    Nation
    National Identity
    Nation In Danger
    Nation-state
    Neighbourhood Arts
    Neoliberalism
    Neonationalism
    NGOs
    Nicaragua
    Nigeria
    Nigerian Identities
    Non-governmental Organisations
    Normativity
    Northern Mariana Islands
    Norway
    Nostalgia
    Occidentalism
    Okinawa
    Orientalism
    Othering
    Palestine
    Palestine Israel
    Palestine-Israel
    Parenting
    Peace
    Performativity
    Place
    Place Branding
    Place-making
    Poetry
    Poland
    Policy
    Policy Analysis
    Political Subjectivity
    Politics
    Popular Culture
    Populism
    Post-apartheid
    Postcolonial
    Postcolonial Theory
    Post-war
    Power
    Precarious Status
    Protests
    Public Inquiries
    Public Sociology
    Race
    Race-relations
    Racial Capitalism
    Racial Identity
    Racialisation
    Racialization
    Racial Schemas
    Racism
    Reconciliation
    Refugees
    Religion
    Remittances
    Representations
    Research
    Research Communication
    Research-policy Nexus
    Riace
    Rights Claims
    Role Identity
    Russian Women
    Science Studies
    Scientific Misconduct
    Second-generation
    Securitization
    Self-identification
    Self-victimisation
    Settler Colonialism
    Shame
    Silence
    Singapore
    Sixth Pan-African Congress
    Social Contact
    Social Exclusion
    Social Identity
    Social Relations
    Social Space
    Solidarity
    South Africa
    Sports
    State
    State Power
    State Racism
    Stereotyping
    Stigma
    Stuart Hall
    Student-worker
    Subjectivity
    Sunniness
    Sweden
    Sydney
    Syrian Refugees
    Temporality
    Third Sector
    Third Sector Organisations
    Threat Perception
    Transculturalism
    Transnationalism
    Transnational Racialization
    Travel
    Turkey
    Turks
    Uprising
    Urban Ethnography
    Urban Multiculturalism
    Urban Space
    Vanley Burke
    Victimhood
    Vulnerability
    Walking
    West Bank Separation Wall
    White Nationalism
    Whiteness
    White Sociology
    Women
    Words
    Worker Exit
    Working Class
    Youth

Explore Identities at tandfonline.com/GIDE