Let us start with what does have a date and a paper trail. On 21 May 2023, at Mestalla, the stands hurled racial abuse at Vinicius Jr. until the match had to be stopped. Months later, something happened in Spain that had never happened before: criminal convictions for fans found guilty of racism inside a stadium, with prison sentences and bans from attending matches. A landmark. The only hard, tangible, measurable result in this entire story. And it did not come from a campaign. It came from a judge.
There lies the crux. We have had more than three decades of flags, workshops, banners, knees on the turf and slogans in multiple languages. And when you ask the most basic question — how much has all of this cost and what has it returned — you hit a wall. Not because the answer is bad. Because the answer does not exist. Football has never published the aggregate spending of its anti-racism crusade, nor has it evaluated its programmes with serious behavioural-change indicators. There is no ROI to calculate. There is opacity. And opacity, in this business, almost always conceals something that someone finds inconvenient to show.
The argument, then, is simple and uncomfortable. Investment in awareness-raising has no demonstrable return, and all available signs suggest it has delivered considerably less than promised. The little that has actually moved the needle was enforcement, not gesture. Enforcement versus performance. And guess where almost all the money has gone.
Let us look at what can actually be traced, which is not much. The only reasonably auditable accounts are those of British charitable organisations, which are required to report to the Charity Commission. Kick It Out, founded in 1993 as the campaign "Let's Kick Racism Out of Football", operated for years on modest income — a few hundred thousand pounds — growing towards the million-pound range more recently, according to its own filings with the British register. It is funded by the Premier League, the Football Association, the players' union and the EFL. Show Racism the Red Card, founded in 1996, operates on comparable figures. And that is where transparency ends.
Because the moment you look at the organisations that have real money, the fog is total. UEFA and FIFA, with their "Say No to Racism" campaigns and the Anti-Discrimination Monitoring System they set up alongside the Fare Network around the 2015-to-2018 qualifying cycle, do not clearly publish either the budgets for those campaigns or how much they granted to NGOs. Fare itself, founded in 1999 and partly funded by EU money and UEFA contributions, drastically reduced its structure around 2020 and 2021 without it ever being known precisely how much it had received or from whom. The Premier League launched "No Room for Racism" towards the end of the last decade. LaLiga, Serie A and the Bundesliga have their diversity programmes. None discloses the figures. Not a single aggregate, authoritative number for the sector's global spending exists. Not one.
This is not an accounting oversight. It is a decision. A business that turns over billions and audits every penny of a sleeve sponsorship is perfectly capable of adding up what it spends on anti-racism if it wants to. If it does not show the figure, it is because measuring would require comparing, and comparing would require admitting uncomfortable results.
What results? Let us start with the only piece of data that has a robust time series: complaints. The annual reports from Kick It Out show sustained year-on-year increases in discrimination reports across English football, professional and grassroots, with racism as the most frequently reported category. It sounds like failure. But it is ambiguous by design. More complaints could mean more racism or, conversely, greater confidence in the channels for reporting what was previously swallowed in silence. Without a baseline for actual prevalence — not complaints, but measured victimisation — the figure allows no conclusion. And that baseline does not exist. Thirty years of investment in campaigns, and nobody bothered to build the thermometer that would say whether they work.
Now consider institutional sanctions, where the symbolism is laid bare. When UEFA fines a set of supporters for racist chanting, the sums look laughable beside what it charges for a commercial infringement or a protocol failure. In the match between Bulgaria and England played in Sofia in October 2019, the game had to be halted because of chanting and Nazi salutes; UEFA sanctioned the Bulgarian federation and its president resigned, but the fine amount ended up, like almost everything here, in the territory that the average fan files away as loose change. In the Euro 2020 final, played at Wembley in July 2021, the wave of racist abuse directed at Rashford, Sancho and Saka after they missed their penalties led to arrests and some convictions in the United Kingdom. Again, the judge, not the campaign. In Udine in early 2024, Maignan stopped the Udinese-Milan match because of racist abuse, with the precedents set by Koulibaly and Lukaku showing that Serie A coexists with the problem without resolving it.
And then there is the metric that no banner has moved: representation. In England, a very high proportion of professional footballers are Black or from ethnic minorities. The number of Black head coaches, sporting directors and board members is minuscule. The EFL-adapted Rooney Rule, the hiring code requiring clubs to interview minority candidates, has had a limited effect, as the Black Footballers Partnership has documented. Thirty years of taking the knee and the dugout remains as white as it was in the nineties. There is no room for interpretive ambiguity there.
The dressing room itself has said so out loud. Les Ferdinand, director of football at QPR, questioned whether kneeling still served any purpose when the message had been diluted. Wilfried Zaha stopped doing it in 2021, calling it a degrading and pointless gesture. Several Premier League clubs dropped it as hollow. Vinicius has stated that racism has become normalised in LaLiga. The common thread is the word tokenism. Visible gesture, zero structural change.
The counterpoint deserves an honest hearing. Defenders of the campaigns, from Kick It Out to UEFA, argue something that cannot be dismissed out of hand: that the campaigns have shifted social norms, given victims a voice, raised the reputational cost for racists and meant that incidents are reported rather than buried. Much of the increase in complaints may be exactly that — a sign that behaviour which was once tolerated is now called out. And social media muddles everything: it simultaneously multiplied abuse, its documentation and the ease of reporting it, which makes it methodologically reckless to compare the racism of 2005 with that of 2024. None of this is conclusive evidence against the campaigns. But neither is it conclusive evidence in favour. And that is precisely the trap. A system that only produces ambiguous data is a system that will never have to account for its ineffectiveness.
Anyone wishing to argue for a positive return has the door open the day what does not currently exist finally appears: a real prevalence series, drawn from victimisation surveys rather than complaints, showing a sustained decline, or an independent impact evaluation with a control group. Without those two building blocks, the reasonable conclusion is that the investment has an undemonstrable return and several signs of underperformance relative to what it promised.
In the meantime, the only person who put a racist behind bars in Spain was a judge, not a banner. Perhaps football should ask itself why it spends so much on saying that racism is wrong, and so little on making it costly.
