A comparison of hometown socioeconomics and demographics for black and white elite football players in the US

Abstract

Despite widespread perceptions of elite US sport as meritocratic, there is little empirical research on the social origins of those who play college and professional sports in the US or how these vary by race. We use the case of American football, linking Entertainment and Sports Programming Network's national recruit rankings data on incoming college football players from 2007-2016 (N=929) with 2000 US Census data. Our study compares hometown socioeconomic and demographic indicators for black and white college athletes and then for those drafted into the National Football League. Findings show that the socioeconomic and demographic profiles of the hometowns producing elite football athletes vary by both athlete race and draft status. Black draftees come from denser, more socioeconomically disadvantaged and blacker hometowns than black non-drafted athletes, while white draftees come from less socioeconomically disadvantaged hometowns than white non-drafted athletes.

Pipelines on the Gridiron: Player Backgrounds, Opportunity Structures and Racial Stratification in American College Football

“…Race is a fluid social construct (Healey and O'Brien 2014) and coding players into discrete racial categories often will not do justice to the true complexity of a player's racial background. However, coding results closely approximate similar work (Lapchick et al 2015;Allison et al, Edwards' (1969) thesis that college sports are more likely to be a casual avocation for white players, while the majority of opportunities for black players are in high-stakes amateur sports. Although athletic scholarships are often presented a road to a college education and upward mobility for athletes, Edwards (2000) expressed concern that African-Americans are often only admitted to colleges to be athletes.…”

Interactive Effects of Racial Identity and Repetitive Head Impacts on Cognitive Function, Structural MRI-Derived Volumetric Measures, and Cerebrospinal Fluid Tau and Aβ

“…Lower socioeconomic status, chronic health conditions and decreased health literacy (Verney et al, 2019), worse early-life education quality (Sisco et al, 2015) and fewer years of education (Weuve et al, 2018), perceived discrimination (Zahodne et al, 2017), geographical location (Liu et al, 2015), and genetic variations other than APOEε4 (Lee et al, 2007;Logue et al, 2014;Mez et al, 2017a;Yu et al, 2017a,b) all contribute to increased vulnerability to cognitive decline among Black participants (Zahodne et al, 2017). These variables may have increased salience in American football players and thus have important clinical implications (Asken et al, 2016(Asken et al, , 2017Allison et al, 2018). Nuanced approaches (Galea et al, 2010) that model the multilevel interactions among social, environmental, genetic, and biological variables will elucidate racial heterogeneity associated with brain aging (in all settings).…”

When Kids Hitting Each Other Is Okay: Examining U.S. Adult Support for Youth Tackle Football

“…First, support for football is thought to be linked to satisfaction with traditional American values and power structures and often emerges because of football’s associations with American traditions, the maintenance of the status quo of social relations, and expressions of hegemonic masculinity (Bachynski 2019; Foley 1990; Hruby 2016; Semuels 2019). Second, support for particularly youth tackle football appears to be connected to viewing football opportunities and training as an important source of social status, socioeconomic mobility, and as a relatively meritocratic means through which especially lower SES and racial/ethnic minority individuals can become successful within traditional American power structures (Allison, Davis, and Barranco 2018; Bachynski 2019; Foley 1990; Semuels 2019; Tompsett and Knoester 2021; Knoester and Davis 2021). Finally, especially intense and meaningful football-related interactions are expected to encourage more support for kids playing tackle football.…”

“…Despite the fact that almost all children who play football will never play professionally, cultural beliefs in the meritocratic nature of sport result in football being viewed by many as a means for socioeconomic mobility (Allison et al 2018; Macaulay, Cooper, and Dougherty 2019; Tompsett and Knoester 2021). Who does and does not see football this way and whether or not these beliefs manifest in support of youth football seem to be linked to social structural locations involving race/ethnicity, class, and education (Allison et al 2018; Knoester and Davis 2021; Semuels 2019).…”