TI 2021-072/V Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper Racial Bias in Newspaper Ratings of Professional Football Players Francesco Principe1 Jan C. van Ours1 1 Erasmus University Rotterdam Tinbergen Institute is the graduate school and research institute in economics of Erasmus University Rotterdam, the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Contact:
[email protected] More TI discussion papers can be downloaded at https://www.tinbergen.nl Tinbergen Institute has two locations: Tinbergen Institute Amsterdam Gustav Mahlerplein 117 1082 MS Amsterdam The Netherlands Tel.: +31(0)20 598 4580 Tinbergen Institute Rotterdam Burg. Oudlaan 50 3062 PA Rotterdam The Netherlands Tel.: +31(0)10 408 8900 Racial Bias in Newspaper Ratings of Professional Football Players Francesco Principe* Jan C. van Ours July 30, 2021 Abstract We study whether there is a racial bias in ratings of professional football players in Italian newspapers. We find that there is such a bias. Conditional on objective performance indicators black players receive a lower rating than non-black players. This is not a difference across the board but predomi- nantly present at the lower end of the newspaper rating distribution. The best black players are not subject to a racial bias in ratings. We also find that clubs do not have a racial bias in the wages they pay to players. We speculate that for clubs there is sufficient competition to remove racial wage discrimination. Clubs simply want value for money. Newspaper football experts do seem to have a racial bias in their rating of players. We hypoth- esize that this might be unconscious discrimination related to stereotyping of black players.