Introduction

According to Carrington, ‘sport provides a contested arena through which competing definitions of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region are articulated’ (2008: 424). In the context of race more specifically, when people speak of racism, they often allude to two distinct social practices – namely antilocution and physical attack (see Allport, 1954). Language is rightly an important social practice (Bourdieu, 1991), which in turns shapes other social practices to do with the expression of racism.

A high-profile example of when this issue reared its ugly head took place in 2004 when former manager Ron Atkinson – who perhaps most famously guided Manchester United to win the FA Cup (the Football Association Challenge Cup) in 1983 – then an ITV football pundit, resigned after making overtly racist comments about Chelsea football player Marcel Desailly. ‘Big Ron’, as he was affectionately known in the football industry, unwittingly believed his broadcast had finished and his microphone had been muted. In making reference to what he perceived to be the poor performance of the French defender, who had been playing in a Champions League match for Chelsea against Monaco, Atkinson said, ‘He’s what is known in some schools as a fucking lazy thick n****r’ (quoted in Prior, 2004). Atkinson’s conversation was picked up by microphones which ordinarily would have been switched off once the broadcast from the stadium had ended. The remarks were inadvertently broadcast to an international audience. Big Ron was ‘outed’ as a ‘closet racist’, with some expressing disbelief that a manager renowned for having given fledgling Black players a so-called ‘chance’ when others were unwilling to do so way back in the 1970s could express such sentiments.

Those who sought to defend Atkinson the man while at the same time censuring his comments pointed out that at best there seemed to be a level of dissonance between his verbalizations and his social practices, which appeared at face value to be antiracist. In an attempt to defend himself, Atkinson pleaded: ‘I have had Cyrille [Regis] and big Paul Williams both on the phone. I was one of the first, if not the first, to play black players’ (Kelso, 2004, square brackets in original).