‘When Fair Game Meets the Red Card: Why Football’s Changemakers Still Face an Uphill Battle’
By Steve Piper, for Fair Game
In English football, optimism is always tempered by reality. Two organisations - Fair Game, the governance-focused think tank, and Show Racism the Red Card (SRtRC), the UK’s leading anti-racism education charity - embody that tension. Both believe the sport can do better. Both are committed to helping it move in that direction. Yet both still find themselves facing a familiar challenge: racism continues to surface across the lower leagues of English football.
Fair Game’s work has expanded rapidly, with academic partners and volunteers driving research on integrity, sustainability and effective fan engagement. A recent Fair Game blog argued that meaningful reform depends on listening to supporters, not simply regulating them - a message set to shape the Football for Good Conference in March 2026, where governance, fan-voice and accountability will take centre stage. But listening alone cannot repair a system where racism routinely interrupts the matchday experience.
Recent reports paint an uneasy picture. Throughout the 2024/25 season, hundreds of English Football League (EFL) players have faced online abuse, forming part of the thousands of hostile messages tracked across the league’s monitoring systems.
In October, referees halted two EFL fixtures after racist language from supporters, with managers summoned to address their own fans mid-match - a symbolic reminder of how quickly stadium culture can slip into hostility. Meanwhile, the EFL’s ongoing initiative, One League. One Community. Together Against Racism, aims to drive awareness and consistency across the leagues, but even officials acknowledge that enforcement varies widely between clubs and competitions.
SRtRC continues its hands-on approach. During the EFL ‘Week of Action’, Derby County FC worked with SRtRC to deliver anti-racism training in local schools, helping young people identify and challenge discriminatory behaviour - a clear example of education being used as prevention rather than punishment. Yet the durability of racist incidents makes clear that educational outreach, while vital, cannot stand alone.
The high-profile disciplinary cases, such as recent FA sanctions for racist abuse in the Championship, shows that deterrence remains inconsistent and sometimes painfully slow.
The pessimistic view is unavoidable: despite decades of campaigning, racism in football has proven adaptive. It survives new policies, repackages itself online, and reappears in the lower leagues where media scrutiny is weakest. Even clubs committed to equality find themselves firefighting rather than progressing.
Yet there remains space for hope, if reformers are willing to connect their strengths. Fair Game’s structural expertise and SRtRC’s pedagogical approach naturally complement one another. One works top-down, reshaping the systems that govern football. The other works bottom-up, transforming culture through education. The challenge is to fuse these logics: cultural change backed by policy, policy reinforced by cultural accountability.
The 2026 Fair Game Conference will be a test of whether football reform can move beyond idealism. Fans, especially those from under-represented communities, must be central to the conversation - not as tokens, but as co-authors of solutions.
Meanwhile, SRtRC’s recent school outreach shows that change begins far earlier than the turnstile. If young people can be taught to challenge racism before entering stadium culture, perhaps football can prevent rather than simply react.
Both organisations recognise that football holds immense social power. That is why they continue their work even when progress can sometimes feel painfully slow. There is a pessimism in acknowledging the depth of the problem - but also a stubborn, necessary hope.
Football has always been a long game. And with the right strategies, it can still be pushed towards something fairer, safer and genuinely representative of the communities it claims to serve.
This article is part of a special series highlighting the voices of fans, clubs, and communities ahead of the Fair Game Conference, taking place on 24–25 March 2026.
