In view of the fact that football generates such an intense following and involvement in countries such as Spain, and that the number of foreign players has risen steadily, the question could be raised as to whether this sport might alter citizens’ attitudes, behaviours and opinions regarding immigration.
Some studies seem to suggest that this impact is possible. For example, a recent study by Alrababa’h et al. (2019) analyses how the presence of Muslim star player Mohamed Salah at Liverpool FC has influenced Islamophobic attitudes and behaviours in the county of Merseyside (where the team is located). The results showed that hate crimes against immigrants have declined by 18.9% since the arrival of Salah in the team, whereas there was no similar effect for other types of crimes, as can be seen in graph 2. Likewise, anti-Muslim tweets by Liverpool fans fell by half (from 7.3% to 3.8%) in comparison with other English Premier League clubs. In other words, the results of the study point to a more positive perception of the effects of immigration.
This effect could be explained by the fact that foreign players offer a positive model of immigration, whereby the foreign player contributes to the achievements of the team with which the population of a city, region or country (the latter in the case of national teams, which sometimes also include players born abroad) identify. If this were true, this improvement in attitudes to immigration by part of the population could depend on the success or failure of the team (the better the performance, the better the attitude) and the relative contribution of the foreign players concerned. In this way, an improvement in these attitudes would be detected in proportion with players’ contribution, although in any event the improvement would only be observed in the team’s home community.
In order to test these hypotheses, a research project was carried out combining the attitudes to immigration expressed by Spanish citizens in the European Social Survey, conducted every two years, with the performance of the various football teams that played in La Liga in the period 2002-2016. Performance was assessed by taking into consideration not only the outcome of the championship (which team won) but also the comparison between the position each team actually reached and the position it could have been expected to reach in terms of its budget.
The results show that attitudes to immigration improve when foreign players contribute to the successes of their football team. This improvement is only found in the team’s home community, not in others. Thus, in the study carried out, opinions on the benefits of immigration improved notably in the region of the team that won La Liga. For example, Valencia CF won its last two leagues in the 2001-2002 and 2003-2004 seasons, with the participation of twelve foreign players in the first league championship and nine in the second. Correspondingly, the perception of the role of immigrants in society expressed by the inhabitants of the Valencian Community in 2002 and 2004 was significantly more positive than the perception they had in later years, when the team’s performance was not so positive.
This effect is more visible the more important the role of foreign players in the team’s victories and performance. The appraisal of immigration tended to be more favourable the more foreign players the champion side had, and the more minutes they played. Graph 3 shows this trend in two ways: when the teams won La Liga (left) and when clubs finished the season in a higher position than could be expected from their budget (right).
