For black female professional footballers, racism has become a distressingly regular part of the game. Earlier this year, England defender Jess Carter told the BBC that the racist abuse she received online during the 2025 Euros made her fearful to leave her hotel room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Black sportswomen routinely deal with racial abuse from fans and teammates. But less discussed is how their bodies, emotions and on-pitch performances are spoken about by sports commentators. It\u2019s not just negative comments, either. Clear racial stereotypes emerge when comparing positive comments about black players with those about white players. Our 2025 study examines commentary during the 2019 Fifa Women\u2019s World Cup, does just that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We analysed 2,905 comments of praise given to footballers during 80 hours of BBC and ITV coverage, across all 52 matches at the tournament. We found that white women were more frequently praised for their intelligence and technical proficiency, while black women received the most praise for their perceived physical prowess and natural athleticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
White players were more frequently praised skills learned through practice, such as having a \u201clovely technique\u201d (49.4% of all comments about white players), followed by physical (20.3%), character (16.2%), cognitive (10.8%) and natural (3.3%) abilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Black players received almost double the amount of praise for their physical prowess (39.5% of comments about black players) and natural abilities (5.8%). They received notably fewer praise comments for learned skills (36.8%), as well as lower amounts of praise for character (11.9%) and cognitive attributes (6.0%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These differences were especially noticeable in the coverage of national teams from white-majority countries that had more than two black players in their starting squad. England\u2019s two non-white players (accounting for 18.2% of the team) received 50% of all of their team\u2019s praise for natural attributes. These were comments praising qualities that were perceived to be innate, such as being a \u201cmagician\u201d on the pitch. England\u2019s visibly white players (81.8% of the team) received almost the entire amount of the praise given to the whole team for cognitive attributes (96%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n