Kick It Out, football’s equality and inclusion organisation, has published new research (April 2015) by Tempero to raise awareness of football-related hate crime across social media.
At a press conference (16 November) at Westminster University, Hashima Piperdy, Media and Communications Officer for Kick it out highlighted the rising problem of football-related hate crime.
There is little realisation that hate crime in football is rife — but what most people are not aware of is just how serious the situation is — particularly across social media.
For example, players or clubs in the Premier League are the target where there were an estimated 135,000 discriminatory posts between August 2014 to March 2015 — a shocking 16.8K posts a month with an estimated 551 a day.
This calculates to 1 post every 2 minutes.
Racism in Football
Piperdy informs the ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football’ campaign was established in 1993 in response to widespread calls from clubs, players and fans to tackle racist attitudes existing within the game.
Various players were selected as case studies to understand the volume of discriminatory abuse they received. Mario Balotelli topped the figures with over 8K discriminatory posts directed at him between August 2014 and March 2015.
Some of those players, such as Mario Balotelli, received over 8K of abusive posts to his Twitter account where over 52% of the posts directed at him were racist.
Football-related hate crime is on the rise
Its significance is highlighted in the dramatic rise of reported incidents of hate crime that rose from 19 incidents to 142 from 2012/13 to 2013/1014 in just one season.
The problem of racism in football is so severe — KIO launched a free download reporting app in 2013 to provide football-goers with the ability to attach video, photo and audio evidence to report abuse that helps support investigations into discriminatory abuse and behaviour.
With the rise in reporting figures with 73 incidents reported in the first half of 2015 season the reporting app is viewed as a major success.
Where did most abuse appear?
According to research findings, social media activity on Twitter accounted for 88% based on 134,400 discriminatory posts.
- Twitter (88%)
- Facebook (8%)
- Forums (3%)
- Blogs (1%)
The report does not include mentions on private profiles, which are gated and could not be monitored.
Types of Discrimination
Directed at Premiership footballers and clubs the discrimination type is interesting to analyse for social media networks.
Racism leads with 28% closely followed by gender abuse at 25%.
But what’s the end game?
Piperdy confesses that in an ideal world Kick It Out organisation should not exist. He concluded:
“We want to made redundant because we don’t want to be in that job.”
