Abstract
Does (under-)performance of athletes from stigmatized racial groups influence the incidence of racial hate crimes? We consider the case of the English national football team during the 2020 European Football Championship and analyze whether the performance of black players during the final at Wembley affected the number of racial hate crimes committed in London. The three English players who missed their penalties in the final are all black English players. Combining insights from (displaced) frustration-aggression and scapegoat theory, we argue that the frustration of losing the final resulted in violence directed at racial minority group members in London. Our findings show that the lost final triggered a 30 percent increase in racial hate crimes in the weeks following the event. The immediate impact was larger in boroughs with higher pre-event levels of racial hate crimes, indicating a galvanizing instead of a mobilizing exacerbation of this trigger event.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 579-599 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Sociological Science |
| Volume | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 6 Aug 2024 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2024 The Author(s). This open-access article has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction, in any form, as long as the original author and source have been credited. cb
Keywords
- Euro 2020
- hate crimes
- intergroup relations
- prejudice
- scapegoat theory
