English when Winning, Black when Losing: How Performance in Sport Shapes Social Categorization

Nan Zhang, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research

Delia Baldassarri, NYU Sociology

According to several sports celebrities' accounts, their national team's performance affects how they are perceived: "When You Win, You're English. When You Lose, You're Black.” The boundaries of national inclusion tend to be more contingent than ethnoracial markers. We build on this observation to investigate under what conditions members of the majority ‘native' population come to see ethnic and racial minorities as ‘us’ rather than as ‘them’. We present results of an experiment on a representative sample of the British population, and use videos of penalty shootouts in major football tournaments to experimentally randomize the ethnicity of unsuccessful players. We introduce a novel categorization task to measure national vs. racial categorization decisions, and find some preliminary evidence that, at least among football fans who strongly identify as English, minority footballers are more likely to be classified according to their race than their nationality when they miss penalties.

Nan Zhang (J.D. / Ph.D. in Political Science, Stanford University) leads the Emmy-Noether Research Group “Making Diversity Work” at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (University of Mannheim). His research spans both Sociology and Political Science, with a focus on group relations, language and identity, social norms, and civic behavior. Major applications include research on immigration, ethnic diversity, and state- and nation-building.

Delia Baldassarri is Professor at New York University and senior researcher in the Dondena Centre at Bocconi University. Her research interests are in the fields of economic and political sociology, social networks, and analytical sociology. Her current research projects include a study of the emergence of cooperation in complex societies, focusing on ethnically heterogeneous communities, and the investigation of major trends in U.S. public opinion.

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