How the football codes in liberal democracies confronted racism

As of 2021, Australia's A-League had 34 African-Australian players make an appearance, compared to 26 last year and 18 in previous years.

In the AFL, there are many Australians of African background playing in 2021, including the 2021 All Australian Aliir Aliir (Port Adelaide) and the brilliant Isaac Quaynor (Collingwood).

While the AFLW is less represented by African Australians, the South Sudan Akec Makur Chuot (Richmond) leads the way for many other talented youngsters to join the ranks in coming years.

In Australia's rugby codes, players of Polynesian and Melanesian backgrounds are numerous and play in nearly every club with many achieving Australian team representation.

Major football codes offer sporting opportunities where Australians, Brits and Americans of all racial/ethnic backgrounds can interact and enjoy participation from the junior level to the professional leagues, which helps breakdown barriers between them.

What remains important today, however, are efforts by the liberal democracies to never allow racism to gain a foothold in society again.

In the US, a 2019 Pew Research poll showed that 65 per cent of Americans (65%) felt that it has become more common for people to express racist or racially insensitive views since Trump was elected president with 45 per cent feeling that this had become more acceptable.

Nevertheless, the US will never be able to ignore the issue of racism in sport ever again, as reminded to all Americans by many NFL players taking the knee in respect to the Black Lives Matter movement, a movement that also led various national team to do the same during the recent Euro 2020 football competition, including England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland.

In Australia and the UK today, there is near universal condemnation of racism, including in sport.

In 2021, after the Euro final when the English soccer player Marcus Rashford received a torrent of abuse online om Twitter and Facebook after missing a penalty, many prominent public figures including Prince William and Prime Minister Boris Johnson strongly condemned the actions.

A British government source stated "We want real-life consequences for the people who are tweeting this abuse" with the British government seeking information on the account holders.

Twitter said the "abhorrent racist abuse directed at England players … has absolutely no place on Twitter" and that it had removed 1000 tweets and permanently suspended accounts.