Are Minorities Punished More Harshly for Underperformance? Evidence from Premier League Soccer

Positive intergroup contact has been shown to improve attitudes toward stigmatized minorities. A concern with the contact paradigm is that it may place unreasonable demands on minorities to be high-performers. Are minorities judged more harshly for under-achieving relative to the majority group? Conversely, are minorities more readily rewarded for their success? We use evidence from English top-tier soccer to answer these questions. We measure how journalists and fans react to players’ performances, using objective measures of performance. We find little evidence of discrimination based on nationality and ethnicity. These results are consistent across three diverse datasets consisting of millions of social media posts, hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles, and tens of thousands of Fantasy Premier League transfers. The discrimination we do uncover — when players perform extremely poorly — is small in magnitude, and often runs counter to the expected direction. Journalists and fans punish poor performances, but not differentially so based on player identity. The results suggest that minorities need not uphold ‘model minority’ myths in order to be accepted.