FIFA Anti-Racism Measures: Symbolic Compliance, Structural Failure

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Summary

• FIFA and other football organizations have been criticized for ineffective anti-racism measures, as high-profile racism incidents lead to temporary outrage but minimal long-term change.
• Football organizations often prioritize compliance over genuine solutions, allowing racism to persist in the sport through symbolic gestures rather than meaningful action.
• Football’s anti-discrimination efforts are hindered by coordination issues, symbolic governance, vague policies, and a lack of accountability among organizations.
• FIFA could enhance anti-racism efforts in football with clearer policies, strict enforcement, uniform rules, independent oversight, community development, education, and corporate support.

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Football, also known as soccer, is one of the most popular and diverse sports in the world. It also suffers from a pervasive racism problem. Racism and discrimination surfaces in the stands, on the pitch, across social media, and within football’s own governance structure.

This abhorrent reality has not gone unnoticed—FIFA (the International Federation of Association Football), other football governing organizations, players, and fans have repeatedly called out such atrocities and demanded these actions stop. Spanning from international and regional bodies implementing regulations to specific leagues and individual clubs endorsing a self-monitoring approach, the responses appear rigorous.

Brands also have the opportunity to speak out against racism and discrimination in football. For example, following the 2021 racist abuse of England football players on social media, more than 100 brands and agencies signed an open letter condemning the social media companies’ “lack of adequate action” to combat online discrimination and calling for the advertising industry to come together to find a solution. The 2026 FIFA World Cup—with its $4.5 billion sponsorship ecosystem for the 13 host cities in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and large corporate backers like Bank of America and Coca-Cola—could be a prime venue for football’s stakeholders to commit to substantive change and for their sponsors to hold them accountable.

Despite countless anti-racism initiatives, though, racism and discrimination has continued seemingly unabated in international football. The practical mechanisms for prevention, deterrence, accountability, and redress continue to lag. The approach to racism in football is a mile wide—including a proliferation of campaigns, codes, and committees—but an inch deep—with toothless sanctions, inconsistent application, and minimal structural reform. This is the disturbing puzzle at the center of world football.

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The cycle is a familiar one. A high-profile incident triggers outrage; governing bodies promise investigations; clubs and national associations issue statements; players kneel, banners fly, hashtags trend. In rare cases, sanctions arrive: partial stadium closures, modest fines, short bans, or educational sessions. But even then, attention subsides. The match calendar rolls on. Absent substantive changes to the policies and compliance surrounding this issue, the structural drivers—including club incentives, platform dynamics, and institutional fragmentation—will remain intact.

Building on the thesis from our prior article, this piece argues that football’s current anti-racism posture is symbolic rather than substantive: It privileges box-checking and reputational management over structural change and measurable outcomes. Nothing has changed in the past year to alter our analysis. Rather, recent anti-discrimination initiatives reinforce our thesis. Football organizations have continued with business as usual. Policies and procedures exude legitimacy to the public, but maintain managerial discretion and control among organizations. In other words, recent responses continue to talk the talk of anti-discrimination, but refuse to put words into action.

The reasons underpinning these organizational failures are complex and multifaceted. Our focus, though, is on the organizational predicates that lead to ineffective policymaking and implementation. In football, these include inconsistent and unclear governance structures, vague and ambiguous rules, and discretionary enforcement mechanisms. Because these organizational flaws exist within the rules and regulations of football organizations, a mindset shift is not enough. Rather, we offer a series of interconnected proposals that we hope will move the sport closer to substantive compliance and transform anti-racism efforts from futile gestures to impactful initiatives.

Racism in World Football and Insufficient Responses

Football’s racist history has been heavily documented. And while the sport has never had more anti-racism initiatives, discrimination is still on the rise. The 2025 season saw a surge in online hate crimes targeting footballers, with over 170 referrals regarding online racism, compared to 54 in the first three months of the 2022–23 season and 41 in 2023–24.

Racism and discrimination across football takes many forms. In stadiums, players continue to face targeted chants, gestures, and signage. On the pitch, players are met with racial slurs and confrontations from the opposing team, and sometimes even the match referees. Online, waves of abuse crest after high-profile matches, exploiting anonymity to flood players’ accounts with racialized vitriol. After each incident, a statement might be made or a minor sanction implemented, but the pattern has pervaded. This cycle has become part of football’s governance rhythm. It is not for lack of recognition or expressed commitment; it is the predictable outcome of a business-centered approach that meets public expectations of response but does little to change behavior, incentives, or power.

Recent episodes illuminate the gap. In March 2025, Palmeiras player Luighi Hanri Sousa Santos was targeted with racist gestures from a fan of the opposing team. In response, CONMEBOL—the South American Football Confederation—fined the opposing club $50,000 and banned fans from attending home games during the tournament. Palmeiras president Leila Mejdalani Pereira pointed out the shortfalls of this response, observing that “[i]f you’re a minute late entering the pitch, it’s $100,000. If you light a flare, $78,000. You see how CONMEBOL views the offence of racism. It’s absurd.”

After a recent qualifying match for the 2026 World Cup, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee sanctioned the Salvadoran Football Federation (FESFUT) for racist and discriminatory behavior by fans during a match between Suriname and El Salvador. The sanction included a $62,715 fine against FESFUT and a partial closure of El Salvador’s next match. Opting for a fine and partial stadium closure instead of the harsher sanctions in the committee’s arsenal—including suspensions, point deductions, and forfeits—is a result of vague and ambiguous committee rules that allow for too much discretion. While the committee has used its discretion to impose harsher penalties in other contexts, including point deductions for overdue payments, those same approaches are never applied to punish discriminatory behavior.

FIFA has publicized a new strategy for dealing with racism during matches. In August 2024, the 74th FIFA Congress implemented a “no racism” gesture where a player crosses their arms to signal racist abuse during a match. In response to this signal, a referee can start the three-step procedure for responding to in-match racism: (1) stop the match and make an announcement requesting the incident to stop, (2) suspend match play for an appropriate period of time accompanied by another announcement, and (3) abandon the match.

The “no racism” gesture illuminates the broader problems with football’s anti-racism initiatives. First, each of these actions is entirely discretionary. In this way, enforcement is selective, rather than uniform. Each step gives the referee sole discretion to “decide whether or not to stop the match.” Second, the language governing the protocol is vague and ambiguous. There are no defined actions or examples that correlate with particular responses. Third, the protocol applies inconsistently across matches due to the convoluted governance structure of world football. To date, it is not clear whether any match has been abandoned under the protocol.

New Institutional Understanding of Anti-Racism Policies in World Football

Why does the “no racism” approach, like many other remedial efforts, suffer from these problems? We argue that organizational dynamics have led football organizations to interpret rules meant to regulate them and develop internal policies and procedures in response—in this case, anti-racism policies—that reflect their perspectives and values. These policies are afforded considerable deference despite not curbing racist behavior. The policy preferences of these organizations then shape how compliance is approached globally on this issue.

Enforcement of anti-racism policies by football organizations remains weak, and, too often, the racist behavior and cultural environment are given the benefit of the doubt. Ultimately, organizational responses and actions have been mere window dressing and failed miserably. By deflecting responsibility, football organizations let racism thrive throughout the game. We rely on new institutional organizational theory to explain how football’s governing bodies and related actors have engaged in largely symbolic gestures of compliance without undertaking effective solutions to curtail discrimination.

Organizational Predicates Underpinning the Problem

Football’s anti-discrimination approach suffers from four key problems. First, the convoluted authoritative structure of association football has created a coordination issue. Each organization has its own rules and policies and applies them differently. Second, administrative bodies engage in symbolic governance that substitutes for structural reform. Symbolic acts communicate condemnation and commitment but lack the depth of mandatory sanctions, evidentiary protocols, and escalating penalties that deter misconduct. Third, policies are drafted with vague and ambiguous language, which creates inconsistent application and exploitable loopholes. These initiatives often have an individual focus, punishing specific perpetrators rather than addressing structural problems that contribute to discrimination. Fourth, these bodies often defer responsibility to one another, rather than using their authoritative capacity to tackle discrimination head-on.

World Football’s Coordination Problem

Coordination failures begin with the sport’s multilayered, “pyramidal structure.” FIFA sits atop continental confederations (UEFA, CONMEBOL, CAF, AFC, CONCACAF, OFC), national associations, leagues, and clubs, each operating under overlapping but distinct authority. Incidents in domestic competition are processed by national disciplinary bodies; similar conduct in continental competitions engages confederation regulations; international qualifiers invoke FIFA procedures. But the authority of each of these bodies also overlaps. For instance, football clubs are solely affiliated with their national associations, national associations are members of both FIFA and their regional confederations, and while the confederations are not members of FIFA, FIFA statutes still “bind” them. The authoritative bindingness that FIFA enjoys, though, is disputed. In fact, FIFA’s Good Practice Guide explicitly states that its recommendations are meant to be “tailor[ed]” to other bodies’ own requirements.

Football’s convoluted governance structure results in overlapping and contradictory efforts, where clubs can either respond to top-level regulations by leaning into the ambiguity of the rules or challenge the authoritative bindingness of the rule itself. In this environment, coordination yields to case-by-case improvisation, which is visible, flexible, and politically palatable but ill-suited for deterrence.

Football Organizations Function as a Symbolic Structure

The internal incoherence across anti-discrimination policies—and the lack of clarity about which policy applies in any given situation—has rendered governing organizations into symbolic structures. Institutions signal action to the public, such as through the “no racism” gesture, but maintain discretion that allows racism and discrimination to reproduce throughout the game.

The cause of this problem is twofold: (1) FIFA’s contemporary approaches to addressing racism are overlapping and imprecise, and (2) this imprecision has resulted in weak enforcement mechanisms.

First, FIFA consists of diverse governance organizations, including FIFA’s Congress, Council, judicial bodies, conferences, special committees, and practice guides, and the authority of each of these bodies or policies is unclear. Prior scholarship has distinguished FIFA’s various bodies and policies into two categories: (1) “hard provisions,” which include legally binding obligations; and (2) “soft instruments,” which have “some legal character” but are not rigid requirements.

Second, any supposed legal bindingness is only a powerful distinction if backed by a strong enforcement mechanism, which FIFA lacks with respect to certain actors and has been reluctant to use against others. While some binding rules and regulations state that a certain punishment “shall” be implemented in a particular situation, the instances in which sanctions have been used indicate that these punishments are applied selectively, not mandatorily. And harsher sanctions, such as match annulment, forfeiture, and point deductions, are not used in response to racism or discrimination at all, even though they have been used in other contexts.

Vague and Ambiguous Rules Symbolize Authority but Eschew Compliance

Rule design has compounded the problem. Anti-racism provisions in disciplinary codes often employ broad language—prohibiting racist behavior in general terms—without providing detailed offense definitions, presumptive penalty ranges, or standardized evidence requirements tailored to modern abuse modalities. For example, FIFA’s Good Practice Guide states that “one racist or homophobic comment does not necessarily make a person racist or homophobic.” Limitations like this pave the way for organizations to claim that a specific act was harmless rather than directly confronting the issue.

Moreover, much of FIFA’s guidance merely “encourages” organizations to act in a certain way or “suggests” a specific course of action. This ambiguity invites discretion, and discretion yields variance. Vague rules also slow processing. Without clear thresholds and protocols, fact-finding becomes ad hoc, timelines stretch, and sanctions arrive after the public cycle has moved on. The disincentive to set clear rules is a structural one. Vague rules are designed to portray FIFA as a legitimate champion against discrimination, while simultaneously maintaining the status quo of the sport.

Decoupling of Responsibility

Passive language has granted associations and leagues with an ample amount of wiggle room under FIFA’s policies. When a particular punishment seems too harsh or unfavorable to the club or association’s desired outcome, the ambiguity in the rules gives them a safety valve to pass off enforcement to someone else, until ultimately nothing is done.

A poignant example of this defusal of responsibility occurred in 2021. When UEFA ordered a fan ban in response to racist chants, the ban was ignored. While FIFA officials claimed that UEFA could have requested for the ban to apply to the competition, UEFA officials stated the opposite, alleging that they were prevented from asking for the ban to apply and noting that FIFA had the power to enforce the ban unilaterally. In fact, both parties were wrong. This is just one example of how FIFA’s convoluted and ad hoc administrative structure has allowed the organization to shift the responsibility for curbing discrimination.

A Path Forward

Racism is a problem well beyond football. But by shifting the regulatory structure from a loose amalgamation of ambiguous language and contradictory rules to a top-down approach that unambiguously requires compliance, we believe that these regulations can push football toward a substantive, rather than symbolic, compliance scheme.

Our recommendations span the following:

1. Anti-racism policies must be clear and afford organizational actors less discretion.
2. FIFA must implement strict enforcement mechanisms against racist behavior.
3. Football organizations should apply uniform anti-racism rules.
4. FIFA must strengthen and expand its jurisdictional reach.
5. FIFA must create an independent anti-racism enforcement body.
6. Grassroots anti-racism community development should be expanded.
7. Anti-racism education should continue.
8. Corporate sponsors should back reforms within FIFA and demand that FIFA make good on its commitments to anti-racism.

Conclusion

World football organizations have acknowledged racism in every way that is easy. There are written rules, campaigns, and symbolic acts on the world’s biggest stages. Yet incidents persist because the organizational structure of world football is flawed. The current framework consists of an unclear authoritative structure, weak enforcement, vague rules, and a diffusion of responsibility.

The alternative is harder but feasible: standardized definitions and protocols, portable and escalating sanctions, victim-centered support, binding platform collaboration, and transparent metrics that let institutions—and the public—see whether harm declines. If football’s leaders choose depth over display, the sport can move from rhetorical commitment to measurable progress.

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Endnotes

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Author

Shauhin Ahmadi Talesh

Univ of California Irvine Sch of Law

Shauhin Talesh is Professor of Law, Sociology, and Criminology, Law & Society at the University of California, Irvine. He is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans law, sociology, and political science. His...

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Author

Shauhin Ahmadi Talesh

Univ of California Irvine Sch of Law

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