Racial Bias in Newspaper Ratings of Professional Football Players

Jan C. van Ours and ,
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Francesco Principe

No 16419, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study whether there is a racial bias in ratings of professional football players in Italian newspapers. We find that there is such a bias. Conditional on objective performance indicators black players receive a lower rating than non-black players. This is not a difference across the board but predominantly present at the lower end of the newspaper rating distribution. The best black players are not subject to a racial bias in ratings. We also find that clubs do not have a racial bias in the wages they pay to players. We speculate that for clubs there is sufficient competition to remove racial wage discrimination. Clubs simply want value for money. Newspaper football experts do seem to have a racial bias in their rating of players. We hypothesize that this might be unconscious discrimination related to stereotyping of black players.

Keywords: Racial bias; Newspaper ratings; Professional football (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J71 L82 L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16419 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Racial bias in newspaper ratings of professional football players (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:16419

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16419

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().