Constructing Racial/Ethnic Difference in and Through Dutch Televised Soccer Commentary

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to expand on current research about ways in which race and ethnicity are socially constructed through popular media culture. In this article we explore to what extent broadcast commentary of televised soccer in the Netherlands reproduces and challenges hegemonic discourses about race/ethnicity and is congruent with findings of similar research in other contexts. We used a layered approach toward race/ethnicity instead of the frequently used Black/White dichotomy in research on sports commentary. Our findings suggest that current Dutch soccer commentary displays a number of dominant racialized/ethnicized themes that at times resonate with colonial discourses, are in part congruent with racialized/ethnicized sport media representations found in other contexts and also challenge popular Dutch discourses about ethnicity. We place these findings in a broader historical and internationally comparative perspective.

Keywords

cultural studies media race/ethnicity soccer

In 2007, an article in a national Dutch newspaper with the title Suriprofs in Oranje [Suriprofs in Orange] stated that “a new generation of young players of Surinamese descent” has presented itself in “the already multiracial soccer team of Young Orange”¹ during the last European Championships Soccer under 21 (Dekker & Oudshoorn, 2007, p. 1). One year earlier, another Dutch quality newspaper pointed out that “the number of Dutch soccer players of Moroccan descent has doubled during the last five years.” The newspaper then quoted Mohammed Sinouh, brother of professional player Sinouh who explained that their combination of Moroccan technical and Dutch tactical skills makes them ideal soccer players (Van Driel, 2006). These quotations illustrate the great and increasing variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds that is visible in Dutch professional male soccer. The quotations also show that sports journalists use a variety of racial/ethnic categorizations in their writings and ascribe certain qualities to these categorizations, for example, “players of Moroccan descent” who “combine Moroccan technical and Dutch tactical skills.” This suggests that ideas about race and ethnicity are not just constructed by institutions as education, family and paid labor but also by sport and the media. According to Carrington (2001/2002), the role that the sport media play in the representations of racial and ethnic groups has increased significantly in many countries worldwide during the last decades.

Although the sport media often celebrate the athletic performances of sport stars, critical sport media scholars have shown that mass mediated sport at times also portrays racial or ethnic minority athletes in stereotypical ways, thereby reinforcing and confirming centuries-old racial/ethnic stereotypes and hierarchies (e.g., Bruce, 2004; Hylton, 2009). Sport media scholar Bruce (2004) has suggested that sport commentators on television in particular tend to draw on racial/ethnic stereotypes when they describe performances of the athletes. Because they often work under high pressure, they may routinely and often unconsciously draw on and (re)produce widely circulating racialized/ethnicized discourses and categorizations in their construction of meaningful narratives for the television viewer. Sport media scholars who have examined racial/ethnic representations in televised sports commentary generally have focused on the U.S. and (to a lesser extent) the U.K. context and found that sport commentators emphasized the physicality of the Black male athlete (e.g., Billings & Eastman, 2002; McCarthy, Jones, & Potrac 2003). This emphasis on physicality may strengthen popular beliefs that construct Black people as naturally talented in sport. Such media representations of Black athletes are congruent with the more general perception in populist Western thought as well as in amateur and professional sports that Black people are “naturally” more athletic than White people (Maguire, 1991; Morning, 2009). White athletes, on the other hand, have tended to be represented more often in terms of intellect, perseverance and hard work than Black athletes are (Billings & Eastman, 2002; McCarthy & Jones, 1997). These messages tend to suggest and (re)produce a mind-body dualism in which Black athletes are explicitly associated with superb bodies and implicitly with poor cognitive skills and unstable minds (Carrington, 2001/2002).

Such content analyses of large volumes of sports commentary have, therefore, contributed significantly to understandings of racial/ethnic biases in sport media coverage. Nevertheless, they also raise some important theoretical and methodological problems. Most importantly, the prevailing categorizations scholars have used to define race and ethnicity in these studies may restrict their analytical power. A survey of content analyses that examined large volumes of sports commentary showed that these studies tended to predefine race/ethnicity in dichotomous categories, usually a Black-White categorization (Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw, 2010). The use of such a dichotomous categorization in research may, however, not apply to other contexts than the United States or United Kingdom. In addition, such a dichotomous mapping of race may obscure relevant and more nuanced racial/ethnic distinctions that go beyond what can be captured in a Black-White mapping (Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw, 2010). Although this critique of equating race with “Black” and “White” is not new in itself (e.g., Birrell, 1989), this critique has not been implemented in content analyses that examined how athletes of various racial/ethnic origins are represented in and through large volumes of sports commentary. In addition, many researchers who examined large volumes of sports commentary used a predefined taxonomy to identify the dominant themes in the commentary (e.g., Denham, Billings, & Halone, 2002; McCarthy et al., 2003).We argue, however, that dominant themes in sports commentary should not be abstracted from a predefined taxonomy but discovered in every new study since they are (re)constructed in relation to the specific temporal and local context in which the commentary is located.

For these reasons, the purpose of our study was to further investigate racialized/ethnicized sport media discourses in large volumes of sports commentary but to do that in a more nuanced and contextualized way than previous studies have done. First of all, we approach race/ethnicity in our study as a complexly layered and contextualized social construct and not as a predefined dichotomous variable. Second, we apply insights from grounded theory to discover the themes that were present in the commentary about the players instead of drawing on a predefined taxonomy. These two extensions of earlier scholarship may help to further develop scholarly understandings of racial/ethnic stereotyping in and through the sports media.

Theoretical Framework

Following a cultural studies perspective, we consider sport and the media as part of popular culture and sites where discourses about race and ethnicity are continuously (re)constructed. Stuart Hall (1997, p. 6), one of the leading scholars in the field of cultural studies, defines discourse as “ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic.” Discourses about race and ethnicity not only “prefer” certain ways of talking or writing about a topic like race/ethnicity but also exclude other ways of talking and writing about it. Discourses thereby construct race/ethnicity, define and produce it. Although several scholars have differentiated between race and ethnicity by associating race with biological differences based on phenotypical characteristics like skin color and associating ethnicity with cultural differences (e.g., Hylton, 2009; Jackson & Garner, 1998), we argue that the constructs are at the same time often interrelated and conflated in everyday discourse (Brubaker et al., 2004; Essed & Trienekens, 2008; Hall, 2000). Hall (2000) has argued that the “biological referent is never wholly absent from discourses of ethnicity” (p. 223) and vice versa. This conflation is evident in the Dutch context, for instance, where having a “non-White” skin color has become an important marker to be perceived as belonging to an ethnic minority group in everyday Dutch discourse and to be considered culturally different in absolute terms than the (White) ethnic majority group (Costera Meijer & De Bruin, 2003).

As several scholars have shown, sport commentators help to construct and reinforce dominant meanings given to race/ethnicity (e.g., Denham et al., 2002; McCarthy et al., 2003). Sport commentators tend to incorporate hegemonic cultural assumptions and discourses about race/ethnicity in their commentary that are played out in narratives and seemingly trivial statements about athletes (Hardin et al., 2009). But within the seemingly innocent sports commentary and analyses an implicit hierarchy of racial/ ethnic categories or groups might be articulated. Müller, Van Zoonen, and De Roode (2007) have argued that sport commentators engage in processes of racialization or ethnization. Racialization/ethnization refers here to unobtrusive, routine, subconscious and everyday practices of racial/ethnic categorizing and stereotyping through which everyday racism can become normalized.

A cultural studies perspective suggests that the stereotypes and categories used in such processes of racialization/ethnization reflect inequalities of power in which powerful groups in society have most power to categorize, position and “define” the less powerful ones (Hall, 1996). However, the specific dynamics and discursive consequences of these power relations are never stable but always temporally and locally situated (Andrews, 2002; Jackson, 1998). This means that the study of representations of race/ethnicity in sports commentary should always locate the search for racial/ethnic meanings and categorizations in the larger framework of power relations and in the social and historical context under study from which the representations emerged.²

The Dutch Context

Popular Dutch Discourse

In this study, we were particularly interested in racial/ethnic categories and racialized/ethnicized meanings used in Dutch soccer commentary. The usage of race and ethnicity in popular Dutch discourse can be considered illustrative of the complexly layered and contextualized use of race and ethnicity in everyday discourse in many other Western societies. Dutch scholars Costera Meijer and De Bruin (2003) and Essed and Trienekens (2008) have argued that Dutch people prefer to speak of “ethnicity” instead of “race” to avoid being perceived as racist. This preference has led Essed (1991) to argue that racism often takes the form of “ethnicism” in the Dutch context while in reality discrimination based on skin color has not disappeared at all (Captain & Ghorashi, 2001). The tendency to speak of ethnic and cultural distinctions between a variety of social groups in everyday or political discourse instead of (only) referring to “race” or to (biologically informed) Black-White differences has also been documented for other Western multiethnic societies like Belgium, Finland, or Germany but also the United States and the United Kingdom (e.g., Alexander, 2002; Bonilla Silva, 2004; Carrington & McDonald, 2001; Rastas, 2005; Schuster, 1999).

The everyday discourse about race/ethnicity in The Netherlands is framed, first of all, in terms of the uniquely Dutch categories of allochtonen and autochtonen. The term “autochtoon” can be loosely translated as indigenous and “allochtoon” as foreigner. But since these terms are contextualized in the Dutch discourse about race and ethnicity, a precise translation into English is not possible. In everyday Dutch discourse, the term “allochtonen” is usually applied collectively to name the groups defined as the four largest (non-White) ethnic minority groups in The Netherlands in governmental and everyday discourse: the “Turkish,” “Surinamese,” “Moroccan,” and “Antillean”³ ethnic groups. Many individuals belonging to these ethnic groups were born in The Netherlands and have Dutch citizenship (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 2010). The (White) Dutch-ethnic majority group, on the other hand, is usually labeled “autochtoon.”

In addition to the broad “allochtoon”-“autochtoon” categorization, Dutch discourses about race/ethnicity are also framed in terms of a more nuanced and layered categorization that distinguishes between (instead of groups together) the largest ethnic groups in The Netherlands: the Dutch-ethnic majority group and the previously mentioned four largest ethnic minority groups. The presence of the Surinamese and Dutch-Antillean ethnic minorities reflects the Dutch colonial past and the process of decolonization.⁴ The Turkish and Moroccan immigrants came to The Netherlands as economic labor migrants during the 1960s and 1970s.

Both the “allochtoon”-“autochtoon” categorization and the classification that distinguishes among the largest ethnic groups revolve around hierarchical positions of power and are situated in a dominant and White, “autochthonous” perspective. The social group of (White) men and women categorized as “autochtonen” in everyday discourse occupies a privileged position while young (non-White) individuals categorized as “allochtoon” are often represented as the outsider (Wekker, 1998). Young (non-White) males who are categorized as “Moroccans” in particular are relatively frequently associated with criminality. In addition, the perceived lack of cultural integration of immigrants of Moroccan and Turkish descent is often framed as a religious issue. These ethnic groups are often placed together under the umbrella label of “Muslims” and are frequently represented as culturally deviant and a threat to the “Dutch way of life” (D’Haenens & Bink, 2007; Essed & Trienekens, 2008). Such conflation of race/ethnicity and religion has also been documented for other European countries such as the United Kingdom and Sweden (Alexander, 2002; Larsson, 2006). The race and ethnicity scholars Brah (1996) and Eriksen (2002) spoke in this regard of the ethnification/racialization of Islam. The everyday Dutch categories reflect the conflation of race/ethnicity with social dimensions such as religion, nationality and geography (also Essed & Trienekens, 2008).

Racial/Ethnic Diversity in Dutch Professional Soccer

Dutch professional (televised) soccer is also characterized by racial/ethnic diversity. By the mid 1990s, Dutch players with an ethnic minority background accounted for about 15% of the total amount of professional soccer players in the Netherlands and that percentage has remained more or less stable since then (Janssens, 2005; Van Bottenburg & Janssens, 2004). The majority of these players has Dutch citizenship and grew up in The Netherlands. The players labeled as “Surinamese” in everyday Dutch discourse have especially shaped Dutch soccer history to an important extent due to their numerical presence in club teams as well as the Dutch national team (Tan, 2000). Also the number of professional players of Moroccan origin increased from 0% in 1990 to 5% in 2003/2004 (Van Bottenburg, 2004). The number of foreign players in Dutch professional soccer that do not have Dutch citizenship has also increased considerably during the last 15 years, from 13% in the 1995/1996 season to 36% in the 2008/2009 season (Hack, 2008). This increase was mainly due to the Bosman legislation that scrapped the “nationality clause” in professional football (Janssens, 2005). The increased multiethnic character of Dutch professional soccer during the last decades combined with its continued popularity among many Dutch people confirms the role of Dutch televised soccer as a platform that helps to (re)construct everyday meanings given to race/ethnicity in The Netherlands. The popularity of men’s televised soccer in The Netherlands is evident from the fact that soccer broadcasts are usually among the five best watched programs on Dutch television every week (Stichting Kijk Onderzoek, 2009).

Method

Sample

To explore constructions and representations of race/ethnicity in Dutch televised soccer, we analyzed commentary in broadcasts from the television program RTL Voetbal [RTL Soccer]. This program was by far the most popular weekly Dutch sports program and one of the most popular weekly programs during the period in which we collected our data (September-December 2007). The program was broadcast every Sunday night between 19.00 and 20.30 and contained highlights of the nine matches played during that weekend. It attracted between 2 million and 2.6 million viewers on a weekly basis (Stichting Kijk Onderzoek, 2007), which is about 15% of the Dutch population. A detailed analysis of ten broadcasts comprising 2440 commentator comments indicated that the data were thematically saturated. Thematical saturation means here that there was consistency in the themes and racial/ethnic patterns we discovered in the commentary. In other words, the commentators used certain themes and racial/ethnic categorizations systematically throughout the broadcasts to construct racial/ethnic difference among (groups of) players. This indicated that the evidence started repeating itself and that it could be expected that no new themes or relevant data would emerge from further analysis of the commentary (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

The strength of content analysis of large volumes of sports commentary is that the numbers it brings to the surface can be extremely revealing and cannot be easily dismissed as “just anecdotic evidence” (Bruce, 2004; Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw, 2010). In addition, content analyses of large volumes of commentary typically include representations of White athletes and, thus, acknowledge that we are all racially/ethnically positioned (Hall, 1996; Wekker, 2002).

The Commentators

The verbal descriptors used by play-by-play commentators, the presenter and the expert analyst in the studio were included in our analysis. Each match in a program was covered by a different play-by-play commentator and introduced by the presenter of the program or a “voice over.” An expert analyst conducted the postmatch evaluations based on questions asked by the presenter. Since our focus was on the discourses contained in the commentary as a whole, we did not engage in a comparative analysis of the individual commentators. The soccer commentators and expert analyst were all of European Dutch origin while the presenter of the program was of Surinamese origin. The commentary under analysis can, thus, be considered primarily as originating from a White (male) European Dutch perspective.

Discovering Themes

The analytical software program Atlas.ti was used to analyze the commentary. We applied a method that we have described earlier as “qualitative verbal categorical content analysis” (see Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw, 2010). The first step in the analysis consisted of a search for descriptors that were present in the commentary and that referred to individual players. We grouped together the codes that referred to the same phenomenon into more encompassing conceptual themes. Since previous content analyses demonstrated that sports commentary includes positive and negative descriptions of players that relate to the constructions of racial/ethnic difference (e.g., McCarthy et al., 2003; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005), we also coded whether the commentary statements represented the player in a positive or negative light. We used definitions of “positive” and negative’ where statements that presented a favorable impression of a player were coded as positive and statements that criticized an aspect of a player or presented the player in a negative light were coded as negative (Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005). A numerical count of the commentator comments determined the prominence of various themes (Mayring, 2000). Although we present some of the data numerically in terms of percentages in our results section to show differential treatment of (groups of) players by the commentators, our analysis was primarily qualitative. Specifically, we focused on those themes that emerged as dominant and the racial/ethnic patterns that were associated with them and that were used systematically throughout the broadcasts rather than on the verification of statistical significance in all the differences we found. We continuously compared our findings with (inter)national literature on the topic to see to what extent our results confirmed or differed from previous research. In order to ensure accuracy of interpretation of ambiguous comments, we analyzed the commentary statements together with the visual television images to which they referred. We discussed areas of uncertainty until agreement was reached.

After grouping together the codes that referred to the same phenomenon, we were left with four “umbrella themes”: (a) Cognitive/psychological skills of players, (b) Physical skills of players, (c) Technical skills of players, and (d) General evaluation of players. The first theme, the cognitive/psychological theme, included commentary about players their (a) intelligence or intelligent play, (b) game mentality (e.g., motivation, team orientation), (c) self control/cool headedness and (d) concentration. Examples of comments that fell under this theme were “remains very calm when confronted with the keeper” (coded positive) and “not creative” (coded negative). The second theme, the physicality theme, contained descriptors of physical strength and speed of players. Positive commentary that referred to physical skills of players included, for instance, “very quick.” A negative example included “not in a good physical condition.” The third theme consisted of comments about technical skills of players that pointed to a specific action of the player on the field such as “A perfect save” (positive) and “clumsy defense” (negative). The fourth theme consisted of specific evaluative comments such as “one of the most valuable players for his team” (positive) or “not very talented” (negative). The vast majority of comments (52%) were classified as “technical skills.” The physicality theme contained the fewest comments (n = 171) while the cognitive/psychological skills theme and the evaluative comments comprised respectively 483 (20%) and 469 (19%) comments.

Racial/Ethnic Patterns

After identifying the dominant themes in the commentary, we examined the data for differential racial/ethnic patterns to locate those themes that were used by the commentators to construct racial/ethnic difference among the players. Media scholars like Bruce (2004) and Hall (1995) have argued that sport commentators and people more generally often “speak through” the racial/ethnic ideologies and categorizations that dominate everyday discourse in the society they work and live in. In other words, even though sport commentators may not refer to race/ethnicity explicitly in their commentary, many taken-for-granted assumptions that reflect dominant racialized/ethnicized discourses and categorizations that circulate in society at large are embedded in sports commentary (Bruce, 2004). This means that we used the two popular ethnic classification practices used in Dutch everyday discourse to classify the data, the “allochtoon”-“autochtoon” categorization and a categorization based on the largest racial/ethnic groups in The Netherlands (“Dutch,” “Turkish,” “Surinamese,” “Moroccan,” and “Antillean”). We also used additional racial/ethnic categorizations based on categories that were used in previous Dutch sports media studies to code the commentary (Hermes, 2005; Knoppers & Elling,1999; Luijt & Elling, 2007) and our own knowledge as Dutch scholars of everyday categorization practices in The Netherlands. The additional categorizations were based on (a) religious affiliation, in particular the “ethnification of Islam” resulting in the categories of “Muslim” and “non-Muslim,”⁵ (b) country of origin, resulting in categories such as “Brazilian,” “Belgian,” “Dutch,” (c) wider geographical area of origin using labels that are common in Dutch everyday discourse (e.g., “Caribbean,” “Latin American,” “West European”), (d) skin color, resulting in the categories of “White” and “Black”⁶ and (e) a broader “allochtoon”-“autochtoon” categorization with a more inclusive definition of the social group of “allochtonen.” Included in this broader definition of “allochtonen” were (White) players of East European and South European descent and (non-White) players who are labeled as “African,” “Latin American,” “Asian,” “North African/Middle-Eastern” and “Caribbean” in everyday Dutch discourse. We also explored what commentators said about each individual player. This allowed us to explore if and how differential racial/ethnic patterns in the commentary reflected descriptions of individual players. The content analysis, thus, used various layers with sometimes overlapping racial/ethnic categorizations instead of a predefined dichotomous racial/ethnic categorization to classify the data.

In racially/ethnically categorizing the players we used information retrieved from the internet about their racial/ethnic background. We reflected critically on whether the racial/ethnic labels we used could be assumed to reflect dominant everyday categorization processes. The racial/ethnic categorizations that we used were all provisional and were used to guide the analysis. New racial/ethnic categorizations were allowed to emerge throughout the analysis if they seemed relevant in the soccer commentary under study, for instance if commentators repeatedly used certain racial/ethnic “labels” in their commentary other than the ones we described above. However, this appeared not to be the case.

Results

The technical skills theme was the dominant theme in the commentary (52% of all the comments). As such it was an important theme for the commentators to construct a narrative about the players. Our data show however that the commentators did not use this technical skills theme to construct racial/ethnic difference among (groups of) players in a systematic way. In our further presentation of the results we focus on those themes that the commentators did use to racially/ethnically differentiate among (groups of) players throughout the broadcasts. To conclude this results section we will attend to the emphasis that commentators placed on individual players during the post match analyses.

Theme: Physicality

Our results reveal that commentators used a physicality theme to construct racial/ethnic difference among (groups of) players. Specifically, the soccer commentators described players that we had classified as “Surinamese” more frequently in terms of physical/bodily qualities throughout the broadcasts we analyzed than we expected on the basis of their share in the overall commentary across the four main themes. Whereas 22% of all the commentator comments across the four main themes we identified in the commentary referred to players that we classified as “Surinamese,” almost half (46%) of all the comments about physicality of players pertained to “Surinamese” players. Frequent references were made, for instance, to the physical strength or the size of players, for example “Denneboom, with that strong body,” or “Zijler is a small man [.], therefore this is not a goal.” Commentators also made frequent references to the speed of the players of Surinamese origin, for example “the fast Eljerio Elia is his substitute.” The trend seems opposite with respect to players that we had classified as (White) “Dutch”; Whereas 61% of all the commentator comments (across the four main themes) referred to players we had classified as (White) “Dutch,” this percentage dropped to 43% in relation to comments that specifically referred to the physicality of these players.

Theme: Cognitive/Psychological Characteristics

The soccer commentators also used a psychological/cognitive theme to racially/ethnically differentiate between players. In general, the references to the cognitive/psychological qualities of players tended to be positive. However, the majority of references to the psychological/cognitive qualities of the players we classified as “Latin American” were negative in character (62%). Argentinean-born goal keeper Romero was described, for instance, as someone who did not follow the most important tactical rule in goal keeping: “Rule number one is: never come out of your goal if a defender of your own team is with the forward of the opposite team. Well, Romero unfortunately did that twice during the match.” Closer analysis in which we looked at country of origin of players revealed that the frequent negative comments about the cognitive/psychological characteristics of players that we classified as “Latin American” mainly applied to Argentinean and Uruguayan but not to Brazilian players. More specifically even, the majority of these remarks referred to two players: the 20-year-old Argentinean goalkeeper Romero (see, for example, the quote above) and the 20-year-old Uruguayan forward Suarez. A commentator explained, for instance, that Suarez is “an individual player” who “plays for his own individual success.” Such descriptions point to the perceived lack of game mentality or team orientation of this Uruguayan-born player who was frequently associated with being self centered and not having the game mentality of a team player. This singling out of individual players was a regular pattern in the commentary.

Individuality

Apart from the specific racialized/ethnicized themes we identified in the commentary, a more general defining characteristic of the commentary was the extensive evaluation of individual players in the studio by the “expert” and (to a lesser extent) the presenter of the program during the postmatch evaluations. In other words, the commentators emphasized the individual qualities of players instead of teamwork in the team sport soccer during the coverage. The following quotation that discusses the qualities of the Spanish player Gabri during a post match evaluation shows this tendency to highlight individual players and their qualities.

Presenter:

An easy victory for Ajax. Where lies the strength of this team?

Expert:

Well [. . .] their midfield was very strong today since Maduro and Gabri played very well. And Gabri really presented himself as the player who is about to take over Jaap Stam’s leading role in the team. This was particularly evident when the plays were set up to score the first goal. Look, Gabri fights to put himself back here, that shows his strength of character. But he then also has the technique and subtlety to serve his team well. [. . .] Here we see Ogararu [Gabri’s teammate] being defeated. Gabri then sprints for about 80 m and recaptures the ball. And that is a constantly recurring image, I even think that one of the reasons for Ajax’ relapse in the second half of the match was the fact that Gabri had to withdraw from the match with an injury [. . .]

(Postmatch evaluation of Ajax–Vitesse, November 25, 2007)

Discussion

In the remainder of this article we explore possible explanations and interpretations for our findings. We first place the theme of physicality and of cognitive/psychological characteristics that the commentators used to racially/ethnically differentiate among players in a broader historical and internationally comparative perspective. After that, we further discuss the emphasis commentators placed on individual players and their qualities. We conclude this section with discussing how the soccer commentary not only confirmed but also challenged dominant societal racialized/ethnicized discourses.

Theme of Physicality

Our results showed that the Dutch soccer commentators differentiated among groups of players along racial/ethnic lines by their frequent positive and negative references to the physicality of players that we classified as “Surinamese.” The use of the “physicality theme” is possibly drawn from a broader physicality discourse that can be traced back to the time of slavery and Dutch colonialism. Oostindie (1995), a scholar in the field of Dutch postcolonial relations, has argued that Dutch involvement in slave trade and plantation economies set into motion a set of mostly negative representations of African slaves working at Surinamese plantations. Stereotypes that circulated in both proslavery and antislavery writings at the time associated the slaves with savagery, animality, physical strength and energy, laziness, and sexual lasciviousness (see also Wekker, 2002). Schuster (1999) has shown how residues of these colonial stereotypes reappeared in representations of Surinamese people in Dutch governmental postwar discourses during the 1960s and 70s. Males classified as “Surinamese” in everyday Dutch discourse were “reduced to their body” (Schuster, 1999, p. 234), especially their sexual prowess. The relatively strong emphasis the soccer commentators in our study placed on the physicality of soccer players that we classified as “Surinamese” and the relatively little emphasis they placed on the physicality of “European Dutch” players may therefore be a continuation of such (post)colonial constructions.

Although this finding may seem to confirm those of North American and British scholars who found a predominant use of the physicality theme when commentators referred to Black athletes, our results show that the matter is more complex. Their skin color would place the players we classified as “Surinamese” in the category “Black” in studies that used a Black-White dichotomy of race. Our analysis, however, also indicates that such a physicality discourse did not apply to all (categories of) players in Dutch soccer commentary who would fall under the category “Black” in a racialized dichotomy. The group of players we classified as “African” were not differentiated on the basis of their physicality by the commentators even though they would fall under the category “Black” in the cited studies. A possible explanation is that The Netherlands did not have a centuries-long colonial relationship with any African country represented in the data as it did with Surinam. Nederveen Pieterse (1995) has contended that stereotypes are the result of the political relationship between social groups and the effort by the powerful group to legitimate its (past or present) ruling. The frequent use of the physicality theme by commentators to describe the soccer players we classified as “Surinamese” may therefore have its origin in the nature of the historical relationship between The Netherlands and Surinam. Such constructions of colonial powers of the colonized may have been used to legitimate colonial ruling over Surinam. Vestiges of those centuries-old stereotypes may be embedded in contemporary Dutch soccer commentary. More research should be done, however, to explore these ideas more in depth. Such research should also pay attention to the complicating fact that many colonized slaves working at Surinamese plantations during the time of Dutch colonialism were of African origin and can be considered ancestors of many of the present-day “Surinamese” football players in Dutch professional football. The African origin of these players is generally not referred to in Dutch popular discourse since these players are usually labeled “Surinamese.” Possibly their African heritage is ignored or forgotten and instead the colonial heritage plays a more central role in Dutch popular discourse and/or in the ways commentators frame players of Surinamese origin. Our results however also require other research that explores the representations of the Dutch Antilles in Dutch sport coverage since the Dutch Antilles also share a colonial history with The Netherlands marked by slavery and colonial exploitation. However, the commentators did not draw on a physicality discourse in relation to (the relatively few) players we classified as “Antillean” as they did for the players with a Surinamese background. Possibly, despite their existence as a Dutch colony, the Dutch Antilles remained relatively invisible from the Dutch public imagination throughout history (Oostindie, 1995). Only very few Dutch writings about the Dutch Antilles have been produced that date from the time of slavery. This contrasts sharply with the quantity of literature about Surinam during colonialism (Oostindie, 1995). As slave holders in the Antilles had relatively little contact with the Netherlands (Oostindie, 1995), stereotypes about the “Antilles” and its population might not have reached the “European Dutch” population in The Netherlands to the extent that stereotypes about Surinam and Surinamese people have.

Theme of Cognitive/Psychological Characteristics

Besides the physicality theme, our results showed that the Dutch soccer commentators constructed racial/ethnic difference among players on the basis of cognitive/psychological characteristics. In our results section we contrasted the predominantly negative tone in relation to the cognitive/psychological characteristics of Latin American players with the predominantly positive, complimentary representations of other groups in the commentary. In addition, we indicated that these frequent negative comments in relation to Latin American players mainly referred to two players, Suarez and Romero. Although such ascribed characteristics seem to pertain to individual players and could be dismissed as an example of idiosyncratic comments, the negative treatment of these players is not exceptional when placed in an international comparative perspective. Authors such as Feres Jr. (2009), Morin (2010) and Román (2000) concluded that the social group of Latin Americans in the U.S. context has been associated throughout history with traits like hot temperedness, irrationality, emotional instability and criminality in everyday as well as media and academic discourses. In relation to the U.S. sports media, Latin American athletes have often been represented as “selfish” and “hot tempered” and were, thus, assumed to be lacking in team orientation and cool headedness (Juffer, 2002, p. 353). Due to globalization of the media it is well possible that such racialized/ethnicized media representations surrounding Latin Americans have informed Dutch media representations including those of Dutch soccer commentators. Therefore, the compound effect of such ascribed individual characteristics in Dutch sports commentary can very well have a high impact on established stereotypes and public perception about this racial/ethnic group (also Hylton, 2009).

However, those scholars who included the category of “Latin American” athletes or a roughly similar label such as “Latino-Hispanic” athletes (Sabo, Jansen, Tate, Duncan, & Legget, 1996) in their examination of large volumes of sports commentary did not systematically explore their results using “nationality categories” such as “Argentinean,” “Uruguayan” or “Brazilian.” The few scholars that categorized by nationality focused specifically on media representations of Argentinean (Blain, Boyle, & O’Donnell, 1993) or Brazilian soccer players (Billings & Tambosi, 2004). The findings of these studies were largely congruent with our results. In addition, they also found that Brazilian soccer players sometimes managed to escape the negative media stereotypes that are often associated with Latin American athletes more generally. Possibly, the many successes the Brazilian soccer teams have experienced on the world stage throughout history have resulted in a dominant, globally shared perception of Brazilian soccer players as strong on every aspect of the game including the psychological/ cognitive aspect.

Overall, our findings suggest that current Dutch soccer commentary displays a number of racialized/ethnicized themes that sometimes resonate with colonial discourses and are (partially) congruent with racialized/ethnicized sport media representations found in other contexts like the United States and United Kingdom. A cultural studies perspective suggests that the repeated use of the physicality theme and the cognitive/psychological theme to racially/ethnically differentiate among certain groups of players may help to naturalize the constructed character of these racialized/ethnicized themes. If such themes become naturalized, the power relations and hierarchies that are implicated in the use of these themes to (re)construct racial/ethnic differentiation may become invisible and remain unquestioned. This may help to reinforce and naturalize the broader racialized/ethnicized discourses that these themes draw upon. For instance, it may reinforce already taken for granted assumptions circulating in Dutch society that Surinamese people have brawn rather than brain and that Latin Americans are hot tempered. Such naturalization of racial/ethnic difference may be reinforced by the emphasis sport commentators placed on individual players and individual qualities in their commentary.

Individuality

The emphasis commentators placed on individual players and their performances and statistics is congruent with previous studies that examined large volumes of sports commentary and that showed that sports commentators tended to highlight individualism rather than teamwork (Hylton, 2009; Niven, 2005). This focus on individual qualities may give commentators themselves as well as their audiences the impression that sport commentators are purely “objective” reporters who base their commentary exclusively on individual sporting qualities of players irrespective of players their racial/ethnic background. Knoppers & Elling (2004) showed, for instance, that “objectivity” was the most frequently mentioned word that Dutch sport journalists used when asked to reflect on their criteria for paying attention to a sport event. Bruce (2004) showed that U.S. basketball commentators tended to believe that they themselves—as “objective” reporters—do not participate in the construction of (hegemonic) discourses about race and ethnicity. She also found that the commentary practices of these commentators were racially/ethnically biased. This focus on perceived objectivity and individuality of players in sports commentary may allow sport commentators to marginalize the existence of or deny responsibility for racialized/ethnicized patterns in sport reporting. The emphasis on individual qualities can then result in a manifestation of color blind racism in and through sport reporting. Color blind racism operates through the “denial of the structural character of racism” and the perception of discrimination as “sporadic and declining in significance” (Bonilla Silva & Forman, 2000, p. 70). When sports commentary is perceived as exclusively based on objective judgment of individual sporting qualities that are considered responsible for team results, sport commentators may implicitly help to reinforce the dominant notion in society at large that racism or ethnicism in sports reporting does not occur or is a thing of the past. In reality however, numerous studies have shown that racial/ethnic discrimination has not disappeared in sports commentary but has been replaced by more covert, subtle racialized/ethnicized discourses that commentators draw upon (e.g., Bruce, 2004; Hylton, 2009).

Contradictions

Hall (1995, 1997) argued that the media are not only a powerful site for the (re)production of dominant ideas about race and ethnicity, but also a site of struggle over meaning where dominant everyday discourses or categorization practices can be challenged. This was also evident in our study since two dominant classificatory schemes in contemporary Dutch popular discourse to differentiate between people, the “allochtoon”-“autochtoon” and “Muslim”-“non-Muslim” dichotomies, appeared not to be used systematically by the soccer commentators to differentiate between players on any of the dominant themes we identified in the commentary. In addition, players we classified as “Moroccan” were not described differently than the other players. This contrasts sharply with the hegemonic representation of (young) people labeled as “Moroccan” in contemporary Dutch everyday discourse and the mainstream media where the ultimate position of the “Other” is reserved for this social group.

Such findings suggest that soccer coverage may challenge as well as reproduce racial/ethnic constructions that are present in other realms of Dutch social life. Possibly, notions of deviance like criminal behavior or cultural maladjustment that are often used in the (re)construction of the social groups of “allochtonen,” “Muslims” or “Moroccans” in popular Dutch discourse played a marginalized role in the soccer broadcasts we analyzed. The emphasis was instead on the sporting qualities of the players, most notably the technical skills of players. This technical skills theme played a major role in the commentators’ verbal portrayal of all groups of players, a finding that is congruent with previous studies that examined Dutch soccer commentary (Knoppers & Elling, 1999).

Concluding Remarks

We conclude that Dutch soccer commentary seems a place where hegemonic, historically informed and globalized discourses about racial/ethnic groups are reconstructed, confirmed and “naturalized” but also a site where existing racial/ethnic categorizations and hierarchies are challenged. In other words, although the soccer commentators drew on and reinforced widely circulating, centuries-old and internationally shared discourses, their representations also appeared to be important sites themselves for the creation and (re)construction of racial/ethnic meanings and categorizations.

We recommend further research be conducted into how categories used (implicitly) in sports commentary are congruent with the understandings that sport media audiences have of race and ethnicity (Van Sterkenburg, Knoppers & De Leeuw, 2010). Visual images also need to be analyzed as well as the content of future sports and soccer coverage and the numerous talk shows about sport. These may also be places where dominant discourses may be confirmed, reinforced, naturalized and challenged. The (growth in) media attention to women soccer in several European countries including the Netherlands may also provide a fertile field of further study (Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, 2006; Schots, 2010; Women’s Professional Soccer, 2009). Such analyses could provide further insight into the gendered nature of the dominant themes that emerged in this study and in the intersections of gendered and racialized/ethnicized meanings in sports commentary.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Bios

Jacco van Sterkenburg works as a researcher and lecturer at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His current research focuses on inequities resulting from race/ethnicity, gender and other social dimensions in and through (media) sport.

Annelies Knoppers is professor in the Utrecht School of Governance and in the Department of Pedagogy and Educational Sciences at Utrecht University. Her research focus is on sport, physicality and management of diversity in (sport) organizations.

Sonja de Leeuw is professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her research focus is on transnational television culture (both history and theory) and on media and diaspora.

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