Instigators and Victims of Racism Abuse in Football: Are the Same, Different, or What?

Introduction

Football has a vital role in creating a peaceful and inclusive society as it has the unique privilege of bringing together millions of people, regardless of their sex, color, gender, age, nationality or religion. Speaking about racism in football, many researchers argue that the sport has a vital role in creating a peaceful and inclusive society as it offers the unique opportunity to bring together millions of people, regardless of their sex, color, gender, age, nationality or religion (Back et al., 2001; Bradbury, 2011; Hylton, 2009; Ruddock, 2005). However, nowadays there is a growing consensus that the problem of racism is particularly widespread in society, in general. For example, almost during every match we witness situations that see certain players or fans of a team as targets of racist insults. Up to date the academic discourse on measuring the construct of instigators within the mainstream football literature has been sparse, and there are relatively few empirical studies (Long et al., 2000; Holland, 1996; Chu et al., 2014). Therefore, the objectives of this research are the following:

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  To develop a parsimonious model that conceptualizes instigators and victims of racism, abuse in football; and

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  To analyze its efficacy with the use of multicriteria decision-aid analysis.

In doing so, the next parts analyze the current state of the art, literature review that served in identifying all the potential elements that affect and influence the appearance of racism incident, while the forthcoming part includes the methodology used together with the data analysis, and the final part provides the concluding remarks and recommendations to relevant decision-makers.