This year’s European Championship demonstrated how waves of immigration have redefined sports

A lot has changed since that night almost two decades ago in Real Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium. Successive waves of immigration have transformed politics in Spain, along with Britain and the rest of Europe. Technology has revolutionized the way societies communicate. But young, Black footballers still face personal abuse.

When the two teams meet on Sunday in the final of the 2024 European Football Championship, Spain’s star players will be two young men of color — Nico Williams of Athletic Bilbao and Barcelona’s 16-year-old Lamine Yamal, both second generation immigrants. That’s testimony to a kind of progress of sorts — the Spanish team that lined up against England in November 2004 was all White — but it’s a fragile and qualified kind of progress at best as their opponents know all too well. 

The UK’s immigrant communities arrived a generation or more before those in Spain, which offered little attraction for migrants until the economic boom of the 1990s. There are roughly 300,000 people in Spain with Sub-Saharan African origins while there are 2.4 million people from Black ethnic groups in England, the 2021 census said. And the England team has regularly featured Black players since the 1980s.

Football is seldom ever just about sports, and that’s especially the case in this tournament.

In a year of elections — five in Europe and one for the European Parliament itself — migration and identity have been central, divisive issues. They have loomed large over the 51 games, from Black French players including Kylian Mbappé taking a rare stand by calling on voters to keep extremists from power to members of Germany’s far-right AfD party characterizing their national team as too “woke,” too diverse and not German enough.

When three Black players missed their penalties in the shootout that decided the last European football championship in 2021, they suffered screeds of racist abuse on social media. Ian Wright, ex-Arsenal footballer and father of Wright-Philips, wrote in June that Black players are scapegoated after the sports sections of newspapers plastered images of England star Bukayo Saka after the national team lost a friendly match. Saka was only on the pitch for 25 minutes.

“Now more than ever let’s get behind & support these young people,” Wright said on X. 

A week ago, as Saka spoke of his resilience following a crucial penalty in England’s quarterfinal win over Switzerland, the relief on his face was visible. But fans saying this tournament is his chance for redemption are already adding to a narrative that people with a migrant background need to consistently be exceptional to receive the support of the nation. 

Spain is embracing Yamal, but three months ago he was the subject of a racist joke on one of Spain’s main sports broadcasters. “If Lamine Yamal doesn’t do well at football, he could end up next to a traffic light,” German Burgos said, implying that if he didn’t make the grade he’d wind up begging on the streets.

Burgos, 54, was fired by the broadcaster Movistar+. In his initial apology, he said “sometimes humor gets you into trouble” before a longer statement on social media that said his “intention was not to denigrate Lamine Yamal, quite the contrary.”

The comments from Burgos, an Argentinian who coached at Atletico Madrid, reflect a sense that his comment would be considered socially acceptable, just as the Spain fans a generation ago didn’t worry about being censured by their peers when they joined in the abuse of Wright-Phillips. 

The response of Movistar+ shows that things are changing in Spain, somewhat, and the presence of Yamal and Williams in the national team is a reflection of the way the makeup  of Spanish society has changed. Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez says migrants make invaluable contributions to a society with an aging population — a thought few leaders in the region express — and his government is taking steps to regularize half a million of them.

But he’s facing fierce pushback from the far-right Vox party. The traditional machismo of Spanish society is still there too as shown when the head of the football federation forced a kiss on one of his players as they celebrated last year’s women’s World Cup victory. Leticia Villamediana Gonzalez, associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Warwick University, said the problem is systemic and “needs much, much more time to change.”

Sanchez likes to boast of the diversity of his cabinet, which includes 12 women out of 23 ministers. But apart from the children’s minister, whose father was Palestinian, the whole cabinet is White. 

And racism is a blind spot in much of Spain. Racist abuse like Wright-Philipps suffered has become common greeting last season for Real Madrid’s Black Brazilian striker Vinicius Junior at rival stadiums around the country. Vinicius broke down in tears during a news conference earlier this year when he spoke about the hate he suffers.

“The league has a problem — with these episodes of racism, for me, they have to stop the game,” Vinicius’s coach, Carlo Ancelotti, said after a match in Valencia. In the UK too, football people want more support from the authorities. Wright says he gets obscene racist abuse on social media on a daily basis.

“We have an unconscious hierarchy in terms of our perception of who we consider to be worthy of our empathy,” John Barnes, a former Liverpool player, said at a Bloomberg event in 2022. “We have to admit it and acknowledge it. We can’t just say we see everybody as equal, because we don’t.”

Whether Williams and Yamal help Spain take home the trophy or not, some might be inclined to see their success as a celebration of multiculturalism —  and it is. Williams was born in Spain to a Ghanaian couple who’d trekked across the Sahara to enter the European Union via Spain’s north African exclave Melilla, with little more than the clothes on their backs. But that doesn’t offer any guarantee of continued progress. 

In 1998, France’s World Cup winning team was led by Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian migrants. The nation hailed its “Black, Blanc, Beur” team — meaning Black, White and Arab. A generation later, the anti-migrant far right is gaining support in France and the national team’s captain, Mbappe, another son of African migrants, appealed to voters earlier in the tournament to stop the far right winning a majority.  

“The idea of football teams representing their country immediately lends itself to us imagining what that country is,” said Paul Ian Campbell, associate professor of Sociology at Leicester University. “And so, if we’re saying they represent the country, then there must be an imagined picture of what that country is.”