In defending Raheem Sterling let’s not canonise a footballer
Forget Brexit, if you can, and turn instead to that other subject that divides our nation. I’m talking, of course, about Raheem Sterling, a footballer who can raise the blood pressure quicker than any other figure in the English Premiership whose name doesn’t begin with Jose.
Sterling is one of the few homegrown superstars of the sport. He is a supremely gifted player, extremely well paid for what he does, yet capable, at the same time, of being something of a prat. If you’re a Liverpool fan, you’ll remember him as the breakthrough star who proceeded to dump largely on the team that had nurtured him. Then there were the laughing gas incidents, the unsanctioned interview with the BBC, the wage dispute, and long boring months as he manoeuvred his way to another (richer) club, all the time proving himself to be a fast running ego whose eye for goal was not matched by an eye for his teammates. Some players are missed by team and fans. Sterling is not one of them.
At City, he initially struggled but found form under Pep Guardiola and seems to have proved his worth. There have been the occasional controversies along the way – at a time of high-profile gun violence, he had an M16 tattooed down his right leg – but Manchester City fans might well love him as much as Guardiola who this week called him an “incredible human being”. And, to be fair, he is an incredible human being given the rarity of first-team regulars for the Champions of England.
When it comes to attracting the opprobrium of fans, however, there is nobody more likely to get the terraces chanting something hurtful. Yet this last week, something different happened. When Sterling went to retrieve a ball that had run out of play at Chelsea, he was greeted with racial abuse from several fans. “Regrettable” doesn’t begin to cover how appalling it was. It was deeply offensive and again shamed a club that has had a few high-profile incidents of this kind in recent years.
Yet what Sterling did after the match was itself unusual. He released a brief statement about his experiences as a black player and specifically highlighted two newspaper articles which he presented as an example of how the media helps “fuel racism [and] aggressive behaviour”. In his comment, Sterling highlights two stories taken from The Daily Mail. In the first, the headline reads: “Young Manchester City footballer, 20, on £25,000 a week splashes out on a mansion on market for £2.25million despite having never started a Premier League match”. In the second story, it describes how “Manchester City starlet Phil Foden buys new £2m home for his mum”. The point Sterling makes is that the first story, about the black player Tosin Adarabioyo, is negative whilst the second, telling exactly the same story but about a white player, is portrayed positively.
The reaction of the media has been laudable in its intent. Sterling has received support from many of the big-name sports journalists and rightly so. Strip out the racism, much of the criticism towards Sterling has been beyond anything the player’s behaviour has warranted. Henry Winter is right to acknowledge the “toxic climate”. What is problematic, however, is that Sterling’s message about the media isn’t, on the face of it, entirely cogent. It’s also wrong to leave it unchallenged simply because one might agree with his general point. There is undoubtedly racial bias across the media. Bias is manifold. Writing from a small working-class town in the North West, you tend to also notice the bias towards the South East, specifically London, and those people with certain educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. However, it is unfair to cast an allegation of racism towards a journalist who will never have an equally prominent place from which to defend himself, nor explain the context of his story. Indeed, as that journalist, Anthony Joseph, explains:
The story was done at a time when BT had a documentary on teenage footballers earning millions. […] It was topical and there was a huge debate about it. The same day there was at least an hour segment about it on Talksport. The original story, which I followed up, appeared in The Sun. […] I spoke to the player’s agent, who had no issue with the story and how it was represented. Reporters don’t do headlines, but I still don’t feel it vilifies him. It was just topical at the time, nor did I even make a connection of his colour – it didn’t even cross my mind.
This gets to the flaw in Sterling’s argument. The simple rule of discrimination analysis is that you must always compare like with like. You can’t measure the size of an apple by holding it up against a toaster. It tells you nothing about either apples or toasters. In the same way, you can’t compare reporting by two different journalists, working independently, and claim they exhibit some degree of hypocrisy, any more than you can look at any two strikers and claim they have hypocritical attitudes towards scoring goals.
Look more broadly at The Daily Mail – a paper I would normally go out of my way to avoid defending – and you’ll see that they have a scattergun approach to journalism. Online they are heavily reliant on feed aggregation, with junior staffers rewriting articles, with the resultant allegations of plagiarism, highlighted in a high-profile article at Gawker, in 2015, titled “My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online”. The result isn’t so much institutional bias as an all-you-can-eat buffet of reheated news and hastily-knocked together filler. Indeed, a representative selection of similar stories, involving players of mixes ethnicities, reveals no obvious pattern.
“Oakland Raiders’ Karl Joseph fulfils his 8th-grade promise to buy his mom her dream home by splashing out on a new pad”
“A WAG’s paradise! Footballer Samir Nasri’s former Cheshire mansion goes the market for £5.7million which comes complete with its own nightclub, cinema and swimming pool”
“Neighbours slam Premiership star as ‘itinerant, garden-grabbing footballer’ as he plans to build new £500,000 house” (Fabricio Coloccini)
“Head to Cardiff for a property bargain! Most expensive house sold in Wales for three years went for just £3.1million – to Arsenal star Aaron Ramsey”
Now, of course, football has – and might always have – an ongoing problem with racism. In few other arenas are racial problems so obvious and yet it is also one of the places where true racial integration can be said to work and flourish. It’s a great virtue of the English Premiership that fans of all clubs take players of all ethnicities to their hearts and, very often, it has nothing to do with performances on the field. It’s easy, of course, for Liverpool fans to adore Mo Salah or Sadio Mané, yet fans also speak warmly about Djimi Traoré, Ryan Babel, and Kolo Touré, players whose limited ability on the ball was compensated by spirit, character, and humour. At the same time, there was nothing racial in their dislike of El Hadji Diouf.
Sometimes things so go too far and Sterling has been an example of that. Human beings particularly love to simplify complicated situations. J.K. Rowling must be a “bad” writer because she writes the world’s most popular children’s stories. James Joyce, by contrast, must be the “best” writer because hardly anybody reads, let alone understands, Ulysses. Footballers are particularly susceptible to this kind of reductive thinking because football is itself couched in the pantomime of hero worship and villainy. Fans secretly enjoy (in that they rarely acknowledge the farce in which they’re engaged) the taunts of the opposition as much as they enjoy playing up to the idealised model of hate. The problems start when people start to believe in the fictions they construct and especially those fictions based in class, race, and nationhood. The results are the ugliest scenes we see around the sport. It produces the racist taunts, the thrown objects, the firms, the riots and even the occasional deaths.
To untangle the current Raheem Sterling controversy from all that is fraught with difficulty. The pantomime that exists inside football exists in nearly every area of life. We are living in polarised times, especially in our politics, and the result are games of shuttlecock across the media divide, with every lobbed shot by Polly Toynbee smashed back by Richard Littlejohn; every Owen Jones overhead given a clout by Rod Liddle. This is exacerbated by the nature of so much commentary in a world of clicks and page views, and this is even true of the responses to Sterling’s comments, by which journalists perhaps strived too earnestly to prove that they are not part of the problem. They might not be, but race relations will never improve by turning Raheem Sterling into as much of a saint as they made him a sinner. Like the English game, the media, and fans, the truth lies somewhere between the oversimplifications. He’s just another of us flawed human beings struggling to make sense of it all.