Sometimes the torment comes from opposing supporters. More disturbingly, it can come from the player’s own side: from people who cheered him when he scored and questioned his belonging when he failed.
Clarence Seedorf was not really talking about football.
This was striking because few people have earned a greater right to talk about the game. In his playing days, Seedorf was one of the best midfielders of his generation. He played at the highest levels of European football and became the only player to win the UEFA Champions League with three different clubs. He represented the Netherlands 87 times. Now, during the 2026 World Cup, he was watching the game from another vantage point, as a television commentator.
The game was over. Morocco had defeated the Netherlands after the exquisite cruelty of a penalty shootout, and the familiar machinery of sporting explanation had begun. Why had the Dutch lost? Who had played well? Who had failed? Should the manager have changed the formation, altered his tactics, or made different substitutions? Could the penalties have been taken better?
Seedorf also pointed to a difference between his own miss and theirs. When he failed from the penalty spot in 1996, there was no social media waiting to turn disappointment into an instantaneous public assault.
Three black Dutch players, Justin Kluivert, Quinten Timber, and Crysencio Summerville, had missed their penalties and were now being subjected to racist abuse online. They had worn the orange shirt of the Netherlands. They had stood for the national anthem. For two hours, they had carried the hopes of their country.
Then they missed.
Watching Seedorf’s appeal, I felt a tightening in my throat. Perhaps it was the sadness in his voice, or the fact that a man who had given so much to Dutch football still found himself, three decades after his own missed penalty, asking his country to confront the racism directed at another generation of black Dutch players. I was moved not only by what he said, but by the weariness behind his appeal. How many times must the same argument be made? How many victories must a player deliver before his belonging no longer depends on what happens with the next kick of a ball? How many times must a nation look away before it sees what has been in front of it all along?
Even as I was thinking about Seedorf’s appeal, the World Cup offered another version of the same unsettling story. France played Paraguay, and Kylian Mbappé scored the penalty that sent his team into the quarter-finals. In the aftermath, a Paraguayan senator attacked him on social media through the language of race and ancestry, portraying the French captain as someone merely pretending to be French. The episode offered a revealing inversion of the missed penalty. Mbappé had succeeded. He had delivered the decisive goal. Yet even success could not protect him from being made foreign. If failure exposes the conditionality of belonging, racism can also deny belonging precisely when a black player succeeds too visibly, defeats the wrong opponent, or refuses the role assigned to him.
Listening to Seedorf call on people to speak out rather than remain silent, I found myself thinking about the strange journey of a missed penalty. A player walks towards a stationary ball. Millions hold their breath. He strikes it badly, or the goalkeeper guesses correctly, or the ball travels a few centimeters too far to one side.
It is a small error made under extraordinary pressure.
Yet within seconds, the mistake can travel far beyond the body that made it.
I have watched European football for decades, and the scenes have become painfully familiar. A black player is greeted with monkey chants from a section of the crowd. A banana is thrown onto the pitch. A brown player is told to return to the country of his parents or grandparents. A footballer celebrated one week for scoring the winning goal becomes, after one bad match or one missed penalty, an intruder in the country whose shirt he wears.
Sometimes the torment comes from opposing supporters. More disturbingly, it can come from the player’s own side: from people who cheered him when he scored and questioned his belonging when he failed. The forms change, from stadium chants to direct messages, memes, emojis and anonymous posts, but the pattern is remarkably consistent. Scholars of football racism have long noted this contradiction: supporters may celebrate black players wearing their own team’s shirt while racially abusing black players on the opposing side. Acceptance, in other words, can depend on allegiance and usefulness.
For years, I understood such moments primarily as racism entering football. Seedorf’s intervention made me wonder whether football was also revealing something about the societies around it.
Perhaps racism in football becomes most visible not simply when black and brown players are excluded, but when their inclusion is suddenly revoked.
Europe witnessed a painfully similar moment only a few years ago. When England lost the European Championship final to Italy in 2021, the match also ended in penalties. Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho missed their kicks. All three were black Englishmen, and all three were subjected to racist abuse in the aftermath.
The speed of the transformation was disturbing. These were not marginal figures standing outside the national story. They had worn the England shirt, sung the anthem and carried the country’s hopes through a tournament that had brought millions together. Rashford, moreover, had become one of Britain’s most admired public figures through his campaign against child hunger. Yet after a few unsuccessful kicks from the penalty spot, skin color and ancestry returned to the center of the conversation.
I remember the image of Saka after the final whistle: a young man standing amid the ruins of a national dream that had been placed, unfairly, at his feet. What followed made the penalty shootout seem like more than a sporting drama. For weeks, these players had been embraced as symbols of a new and multicultural England. In victory, their blackness could be woven comfortably into the story of the nation. In defeat, it became the language through which some people attempted to expel them from it.
Yet the abuse did not go unanswered. Supporters, teammates and strangers rallied around the players, and messages of solidarity appeared alongside the hatred. That response matters. A nation is never a single voice speaking in unison; it is also an argument over who belongs to it. The racist message attempts to draw a boundary. The act of solidarity contests it.
The circumstances differed, but the underlying movement was disturbingly familiar. England after Italy. The Netherlands after Morocco. Mbappé after Paraguay. Whether in failure or victory, a black player can suddenly find himself asked to account for his origins.
This was what Seedorf’s intervention helped me see more clearly. The racial abuse following a missed penalty is not merely an outburst of anger. It can reveal the hidden terms of belonging.
Success says: you are one of us.
Failure asks: were you ever really one of us?
Skin color enters the story. So does ancestry. Migration. Religion. Parents and grandparents. Questions that appeared to have been settled by birth, citizenship and the national shirt suddenly re-emerge.
Where are you really from?
Who do you really belong to?
I began to wonder whether the most revealing moment in football comes not when a player “succeeds” for his country, but when he “fails” it.
Who, after all, has the right to fail for a nation?
The question sounds strange at first. Failure is the most ordinary thing in sport. Every striker misses. Every goalkeeper concedes. Every team eventually loses. Even the greatest footballers have sent penalties into the stands or watched them disappear into the hands of a goalkeeper.
Any player who misses a decisive penalty may face cruelty. His name may be cursed in cafés and living rooms; newspapers may dissect his mistake for days. But for black and brown players, criticism has an additional route available to it. The mistake can leave the football field and attach itself to ancestry, skin color, religion, or migration history.
The player has not simply missed.
He can be made foreign again.
There is something peculiar about the penalty shootout.
For most of a match, football is radically collective. A goal may begin with a tackle at the other end of the field. A midfielder turns away from pressure. A winger makes a run. Another player creates space. The striker scores, but the goal belongs to a sequence of actions, many of which disappear from memory almost immediately.
Failure is equally dispersed. A team loses because of dozens of moments: a misplaced pass, a defender arriving half a second late, a forward wasting a chance, a manager making the wrong substitution, tired legs, an unfortunate bounce of the ball.
For 120 minutes, responsibility moves around the field.
Then comes the penalty shootout.
The collective game suddenly creates the illusion of the isolated individual.
One player leaves his teammates in the center circle and begins the long walk towards the penalty area. The defender who missed a tackle disappears. The striker who wasted an open chance disappears. The manager’s decisions disappear. The complicated history of the match contracts around one body.
For some players, however, the walk is longer than it appears.
They do not arrive at the penalty spot alone. Race, migration, ancestry and the unfinished arguments of the nation follow them there.
Before the kick, he is our player.
After the miss, he failed us.
And then, in the darkest messages appearing online, he never belonged here.
We win.
He misses.
He is the problem.
The pronouns change faster than the score.
Belonging, after all, is never only a matter of passports, laws, or citizenship papers. It is also something made and recognized in everyday life: through language, gestures, rituals, shared memories, and moments of collective emotion. Football makes this process unusually visible. For one hundred twenty minutes, millions of people enact a national we. The disturbing question is what happens when failure changes who is permitted to remain inside that pronoun.
A player can therefore be loved without being secure.
This insecurity has a history. European football did not become multicultural in a vacuum. The movement of black and brown players onto its fields followed older routes created by empire, war, colonialism, and labor migration. Soldiers, colonial subjects, and workers had crossed into Europe long before their children and grandchildren entered its schools, universities, and football academies. The national team eventually became one of the most visible places where these histories were gathered beneath a single flag. Yet the old question, who belongs securely and who belongs conditionally, did not disappear when the squad photograph became more diverse. It simply became harder to see.
There is truth in this story. Football has created extraordinary possibilities for mobility, encounter, and solidarity. A national team can sometimes make visible a society more capacious than the one imagined by its politicians. Children watching a match may see a version of their country that resembles the streets and schools in which they actually live.
But then one begins to move away from the field.
The diversity thins.
The players’ tunnel leads to the coaching staff, the boardroom, the federation office, and the executive suite. The further one travels from the grass towards the places where decisions are made, the less multicultural European football often becomes.
The visibility of successful black and brown players can itself become evidence for the comforting idea that football is already meritocratic. One study of football leaders across eight European countries found something revealing. When anti-racism initiatives were proposed, some clubs pointed to the diversity of their players as proof that no deeper problem existed. Yet the institutions governing those players remained far less representative than the teams on the field.
I found myself returning to a simple distinction.
A person may be included because he is valuable.
That is not necessarily the same thing as belonging.
Football is extraordinarily good at measuring value. It can calculate how fast a player runs, how many passes he completes, how many tackles he wins, how much another club might pay for him. It can place a price on his contract, sell shirts bearing his name and convert his body into victories, audiences, and revenue.
Knowing how to value a player is not the same as knowing how to value him as a person.
Who is responsible for the person who must live inside the footballer?
Careers are short and selection is brutal. Thousands of young people enter academies; very few become stars. Even among those who succeed, injury can interrupt a career in an instant. Form disappears. Contracts end. Crowds that once chanted a player’s name move on to someone younger.
Professional football is built upon the constant possibility that usefulness will expire.
And perhaps that is why the moment of failure is so revealing.
Success can conceal the difference between being valued and belonging.
Failure exposes it.
Racism, of course, does not wait for failure. Black and brown players are abused while winning, scoring and simply entering the field. But failure has a particular diagnostic power: it strips away the language of usefulness and reveals how secure, or insecure, the player’s membership had been all along.
The more I thought about the abuse following missed penalties, the less satisfying it seemed to describe it simply as an eruption of ugliness by a few hateful individuals.
Football has developed a familiar ritual for dealing with racism. An abusive message appears. A chant is heard. The club condemns it. The federation announces an investigation. An account is suspended or a supporter banned.
These actions matter. Racist acts have perpetrators, and perpetrators should face consequences. Find the racist. Ban the account. Eject the supporter. Issue the statement. Resume the game.
The institution remains innocent.
Researchers studying European football have described this as the problem of the ‘rotten apple’: racism is isolated in the misconduct of individuals rather than treated as a reason to examine the assumptions and structures surrounding them. The metaphor is comforting because it preserves the tree.
Yet why does a missed penalty so quickly reactivate ancestry? Why does a ball struck over the crossbar make immigration relevant? Why can sporting disappointment turn a citizen into a guest?
The answer cannot lie entirely inside the mind of the person responsible for the insult. The insult draws upon a language that already exists and an older map of who is imagined to belong securely and who remains, somehow, on probation.
The racist message may be communicated by an individual.
Its grammar is collective.
It is what everyone else does next.
For several days, I kept thinking about the missed penalties in the Netherlands-Morocco match.
Not the score. Not the tournament. The misses.
Why should one ordinary sporting error carry so much meaning?
The answer, I began to suspect, has something to do with a privilege so ordinary that those who possess it rarely notice it.
Some people are permitted to fail individually.
Others fail representatively.
When Saka, Rashford and Sancho missed for England, and when Justin Kluivert, Quinten Timber and Crysencio Summerville missed for the Netherlands against Morocco, their failures did not remain at the penalty spot. They travelled backwards through family histories, across migration routes and into old arguments about who belongs to Europe.
This may be one of the least examined privileges of citizenship: the freedom to fail without representing anyone but yourself.
Black and brown athletes are often asked to carry meanings larger than themselves. They become evidence that integration works, that multiculturalism succeeds, that immigrants are loyal, that minorities belong. Their achievements are recruited into arguments about the societies they represent.
A missed penalty can then become evidence about immigration. A poor performance becomes an argument about integration. An error becomes an occasion to discuss ancestry, religion, or origins.
The player fails once on the field and then again, symbolically, as the representative of an entire category of people.
Some people are allowed to be merely themselves. Their mistakes belong to them. They can be foolish without embarrassing their ancestry. They can fail without discrediting their community. They can disappoint without reopening the question of whether people like them belong.
Others carry a crowd of ghosts into every mistake.
Parents.
Grandparents.
Neighborhoods.
Religions.
Former colonies.
Migration routes.
The nations their families left and the nations in which they arrived.
A footballer should not have to carry all of this towards a penalty spot.
But some do.
There is an irony here. Public debates about inclusion often emphasize representation. We count how many black players appear in a squad, how many brown faces appear in an advertisement, how many minority citizens stand beneath the flag.
Representation matters.
But perhaps it is not the final destination.
To represent is still to carry something. The representative stands for more than himself. His success is shared, but so is his failure. He is asked, sometimes without consent, to demonstrate the value of inclusion.
What would it mean to ask for something quieter?
Not the right to be exemplary.
The right to be ordinary.
Ordinary membership would mean that a black footballer could play badly without becoming evidence in an argument about race. A Muslim player could miss without his religion becoming relevant. The child of immigrants could disappoint the nation without being reminded that his parents came from somewhere else.
He could simply miss.
There would be something radical in that ordinariness.
Perhaps this is the difference between tolerance and belonging. Tolerance can be withdrawn. It can depend upon good behavior, gratitude, usefulness, or success. Belonging makes a larger claim. It allows people to be difficult, disappointing, mistaken, and ordinary without requiring them to reapply for membership after every failure.
Perhaps the measure of an inclusive society is not whether black and brown citizens are permitted to succeed within it. Modern nations can be remarkably adept at celebrating diversity when diversity brings goals, medals, victories, prestige, and profit.
The more difficult test begins when the ball flies wide.
Belonging is easy when the goals are going in. The real question begins after the miss.
Can a citizen disappoint us and remain simply a citizen? Can a player fail without becoming a symbol? Can he miss without becoming a stranger?
Perhaps equality requires a freedom more ordinary, and more difficult, than the freedom to succeed: the right to fail and still belong.
Seedorf leaves us with three questions: “What can you do to make a difference? What can you do to make society better? What can you do to make the world better?”
