A therapist’s perspective on the racist abuse surrounding this tournament, what research actually shows about racism as a physiological injury, and what genuinely helps, on the pitch and everywhere else the cameras never go.
In February 2006, Samuel Eto’o stopped playing football in the middle of a match.
He had scored twice for Barcelona that evening, and the monkey chants had followed him anyway, rising every time he touched the ball, until he simply began walking toward the tunnel. Teammates surrounded him. The referee pleaded. Officials promised announcements. He was persuaded, eventually, to keep playing, and the story entered football history as a moment of principle. What gets remembered less is the demand hidden inside it: that a man being dehumanized by thousands of voices was asked, by everyone around him, to absorb it and continue working.
Twenty years later, at this World Cup, Kylian Mbappé wins a match and wakes up to a racist attack from a sitting senator, one the United Nations called dehumanizing. The chants Eto’o walked away from now arrive as millions of posts, and they follow the players home in their pockets. Two decades, a generation of campaigns and armbands and slogans, and the story has not changed. It has only become easier to film.
And that, strangely, is where the usefulness begins. Because a stadium is a magnifying glass. What racism does quietly, diffusely, deniably in workplaces and classrooms and comment sections, it does loudly and on camera in football. As a therapist, and as someone who knows this alarm from the inside, I want to use that visibility for something. Racism is not only a social problem and never just words; it is a documented physiological injury, with a mechanism research can trace and a cost the body pays. The tournament is showing us that injury in real time. This piece is about learning to see it, and about what actually helps.
What the Cameras Caught This Summer
The scale is not an impression. It has been measured.
FIFA’s own social media monitoring service, analyzing millions of posts around this tournament, has reported a thirteen-fold increase in abusive content compared with the last World Cup, with racial abuse making up roughly one in ten of those messages, and has concluded that racial abuse has become a persistent threat to the wellbeing of players. The global players’ union has called it a growing and systemic pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents. After a single lost match, the Dutch federation filed a formal complaint over the abuse directed at its players. And some of the ugliest of it has not come from opposing supporters at all. Some of it has come from the players’ own.
Hold that last detail, because it points to a frame that changes how everything else reads. This is their workplace. These are people who trained their entire lives, who walk out to do the thing they are best in the world at, and who are then abused while they work, sometimes by the very crowd that claims them. In any other profession we would name it without hesitating: racist harassment at work, in front of millions, with the expectation that the target keep performing through it. The passion of the job does not soften that fact. It only makes the job harder to walk away from.
The Scapegoat Script
The ugliest moments are rarely one person acting alone, and the pattern behind them is old enough to have a script.
When England lost the Euro 2020 final, the three Black players who missed penalties were buried in racist abuse within minutes, and the same sequence has repeated at this tournament. A group in disappointment goes looking for someone to carry it. Grief without ownership becomes a hunt for a target, and the target is chosen, reliably, along the lines a society has already drawn. Add anonymity, a screen name instead of a face, a pile-on in which responsibility dissolves into the mass, and the last of the brakes comes off. People type what they would never say aloud, because the crowd absorbs the accountability that a single voice would have to bear.
A lost match is collective disappointment, and disappointment is survivable. What is not survivable, or should not be, is the ancient move of loading it onto the same few backs every time. Once you can see the script, you can also see the most protective truth inside it: it was never about the penalty, and it was never a description of the person made to carry it.
The Body Files It Under Danger
Now follow the abuse to where it lands, because this is the part the cameras cannot show.
The brain does not file racism under opinions. It files it under threat. When a slur arrives, whether screamed from a stand or posted from an anonymous account, the response begins before conscious thought: stress hormones flood the system, the heart rate climbs, the muscles brace. This is the same ancient machinery that answers any danger, and it does not pause to ask whether the danger is physical or social, deserved or absurd. Nobody chooses this response, and nobody can decline it. The insult may say everything about the abuser and nothing about the target, and the body will still answer, because the body’s job is not accuracy. Its job is protection.
This is the first thing that shifts when you understand racism as a body event rather than a feelings event. The person targeted is not being sensitive. Their biology is doing precisely what biology does when attacked. Vinícius Júnior, the most racially abused player of his generation, once broke down in front of the press and admitted the abuse had left him with less will to play. That is not fragility. That is a nervous system reporting, accurately, what it has been carrying.
When the Alarm Never Gets the All-Clear
A stress response is designed to switch on, do its work, and switch off. The deeper injury of racism lives in what happens when it cannot switch off.
For people who face ongoing discrimination, the alarm keeps being re-triggered, at work, on the street, in a comment section, in the thousand small moments the body registers as threat regardless of what anyone intended. Research has been mapping the cost of this for decades. The public health researcher Arline Geronimus named it weathering: the way chronic exposure to discrimination wears the body down over time, the way weather wears down stone. Ilan Meyer’s minority stress research describes the same accumulation from another angle, the chronic load of stigma and vigilance that stigmatized groups carry on top of ordinary life stress. And the downstream effects are measurable: reviews and meta-analyses have linked ongoing discrimination to higher blood pressure, disturbed sleep, and elevated cardiovascular risk. Racism does not only hurt feelings. Over time, it wears down organs.
The modern version, on top of everything, has no closing whistle. A stadium used to end at its gates; the online crowd travels home in a pocket. A player can leave the pitch, but the phone comes with him, and for anyone who has faced a pile-on or an inbox full of hate, the nervous system reality is identical. The alarm never receives the all-clear, because the threat is ambient, portable, and always one notification away.
The Second, Unpaid Job
On top of the abuse itself comes a quieter demand, and it may be the most exhausting layer of all: respond with grace.
In 2014, a banana was thrown at Dani Alves as he prepared to take a corner. He picked it up, peeled it, ate it, and played on, and the world applauded his composure. The applause was sincere, and it also revealed the contract: the target of the abuse was the one expected to perform the maturity. Stay calm while attacked. Answer the senator with dignity. Do not let it touch your game, your work, your face in the meeting, and above all do not seem angry, because anger will be entered into evidence against you.
Managing your own response to racism, publicly and in real time, is a second, unpaid job, and researchers who study it in other high-performing environments have a name for its cost: racial battle fatigue, the cumulative exhaustion of staying composed and hypervigilant in spaces that keep wounding you. This is also why the standard advice fails. Just ignore it assumes the response is optional, and it is not; you cannot instruct a brain not to register a threat. You can only override the response after it has fired, and overriding a survival response, continuously, while performing at the highest level with everyone watching, is some of the most invisible heavy lifting a human being can do. The toll accumulates precisely because the person looks calm. Composure is not evidence that it did not land. Often it is evidence of how much is being carried.
The Contract
The body pays first, but the longest bill arrives somewhere deeper, and one sentence names it better than any study.
When Mesut Özil walked away from the German national team, he put it plainly: ”I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.” That is the contract, stated in full. Belong while you are excellent. Miss once, and be reminded what you are. And a welcome handed out on those terms is not belonging at all, because belonging, as psychology has treated it since Baumeister and Leary’s landmark work on the need to belong, is a fundamental human need, not a reward for performance. A person can survive on conditional belonging the way a person can survive on poor food: technically, and at a cost that compounds.
Delivered often enough, from enough directions, the external questioning migrates inward. In an interview after a Swedish couple’s ordinary apartment listing drew hundreds of racist comments, the young man said something I have not been able to forget: he had started to question who he is. That sentence is the injury in its purest form. Because identity sits upstream of mental health, an attack on identity is not a precursor to a mental health problem; it is one. Much of what we call individual suffering is a reaction to environments where belonging has felt conditional. The hypervigilance and exhaustion that people of color often carry into therapy rooms did not originate inside them, and treating it all as private malfunction misses where it came from.
What Actually Helps
If the injury is physiological, the repair has to reach the body. If the injury is relational, the repair has to reach belonging. And if the injury is structural, the repair has to reach the structure. All three, because each one alone is incomplete.
The body first, because the stress the alarm releases is physical and the release has to be physical too: movement that lets the body complete what the threat started, breath that signals the danger has passed, and rest that actually reaches the nervous system rather than collapsing in front of a screen with the phone still open. You cannot think your way out of a stored survival response. The body has to finish it.
Then belonging, because the alarm quiets in company. Being believed without having to prove anything, sitting with people you never have to translate yourself for, naming what happened and having it received as real: these calm a threatened nervous system in a way willpower never will. Research consistently finds that genuine social support is one of the strongest buffers against the health toll of discrimination, and this extends to professional care, where being met by someone who understands the injury without needing it explained can be the difference between a first session that helps and one that becomes another performance.
And then the structure, because it is not the job of the injured to fix this, and football is currently demonstrating, in public, exactly where the structural repair is missing. Start with the whistle. Vinícius has filed complaint after complaint over the years, and the pattern around him is instructive: a match stopped under the anti-racism protocol that ended with no consequence for anyone but him, a yellow card shown to the abused player for his celebration, and, in an earlier case, a club formally alleging that a referee left the racist chants out of his match report entirely, despite players insisting on them in real time. When the officials closest to the abuse cannot or will not register it, the protocol is theater, and the player learns that the system’s ears are not for him. It took until 2024 for Spain to produce its first criminal conviction for racist abuse in a stadium, three fans jailed for what was screamed at Vinícius, and the fact that a first was possible after decades of documented abuse is itself the finding.
Then look at who gets hired, because representation is not a diversity slogan; it is how a system acquires the ability to recognize what its people are living. In England, Black players make up around 43 percent of the Premier League, yet hold roughly 4 percent of managerial roles and fewer than 2 percent of executive and ownership positions, and research led by the sports economist Stefan Szymanski found that a Black manager is 41 percent more likely to be fired than a white one when performance is equal. The pitch is diverse. The dugout, the boardroom, and the referee’s room are not, and as long as the people with the whistle and the hiring pen have never lived the injury, the injury will keep being missed by the very layers with the power to answer it.
Which is also where every bystander comes in, because the crowd dynamic that fuels the abuse has a known off-switch. The moment the people around the target refuse to let it slide in real time, in the stands, in the meeting, in the comment thread, the burden finally moves off the injured. Individual healing matters, and nothing about it substitutes for accountability.
Beyond the Tournament
The World Cup will end, the cameras will move on, and the magnifying glass will be put away. The everyday version will continue at its usual volume, which is to say quietly, deniably, in rooms without replays.
If you have never played a match in your life but know what it is to be the only one in the room, in the meeting, in the corridor, in the comment section, then you already know the real subject here was never football. It was what it takes to live in a body that the world keeps setting off, and the fact that the exhaustion you carry has a cause and a path toward repair.
You are not too sensitive. Your alarm works. It has simply been given far too much to do.
If this piece named something you have been carrying, the vigilance, or the quiet questioning of your own belonging, this is work therapy can hold, in a room where you do not have to translate yourself first. You are welcome to reach out.
Common Questions
Can racism affect physical health?
Yes, and the research on this is substantial. Ongoing discrimination keeps the body’s stress response chronically activated, a burden described in Arline Geronimus’s research on weathering and Ilan Meyer’s minority stress framework, and reviews and meta-analyses have linked it to higher blood pressure, disturbed sleep, and elevated cardiovascular risk over time. Racism functions as a physiological stressor, not only a social one, and the body pays a measurable price when the stress never fully lifts.
Why can’t people just ignore racist abuse?
Because the response is not voluntary. The brain registers racism as a threat and fires the stress response before conscious thought begins. What looks like ignoring it is actually overriding an already-activated survival response, which takes continuous effort and energy, a cost researchers have called racial battle fatigue. This is why composure is not proof that abuse did not land, and why the toll often accumulates most in the people who appear to handle it best.
What helps after experiencing racism?
Repair needs to reach the body, the sense of belonging, and the surrounding structure. Physical release through movement, breath, and genuine rest helps the nervous system complete the stress response. Being believed without having to prove anything, and spending time in spaces where you do not have to translate yourself, calms the alarm in a way willpower cannot, and social support is one of the strongest documented buffers against the health toll of discrimination. And structural change matters: representation among those who coach, hire, and officiate, real consequences for abuse, and bystanders who refuse to let it slide move the burden off the injured, where it never belonged.