Race and Risk: Exploring Online Responses to the Euro 2020 Final

In July, 2021, England lost the Euro 2020 football final to Italy. Following the loss, Black England players were widely racially abused online; Twitter alone took down over 1900 offensive posts directed at the players. In response, many commentators condemned the online racism and sent messages of support to players. How might online platforms such as Twitter reconfigure racism, according to a late-neoliberal logic of assetized identity? How might the football game, as a widely-publicized symbolic site which stages a relation between competition, chance, and nationhood, inflect this expression of online racism? In this paper, I analyze a range of online responses to the 2020 Euro finals, paying particular attention to narratives that express levels of expectation about posters’ and platforms’ roles in propagating online racism. I analyze how online responses to the Euro final express conflicts over race in reputational terms. Reading the football final’s online aftermath as a distributed event suggests the need to extend insights from W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, and Cheryl Harris, to arrive at an account of assetized, late-neoliberal racial capitalism, which recodes racism as the uneven distribution of reputational risk. Such an understanding has the potential to nuance debates on data colonialism, by detailing how online racism sits within a continually shifting expression of multiple colonial temporalities, both on- and offline.