Are the referees in the World Cup 2022 racist?
- Amethyst Aurora
- Dec 6, 2022
- 1 min read
I created, cleaned, and analyzed a dataset with data from the FIFA World Cup 2022. This dataset includes the names of players, their country, their ethnicity, and the number of yellow or red cards they received in aggregate throughout the first round of the world cup.
Below the distribution of yellow and red cards is shown, grouped by continent.

The bar graph below shows yellow and red cards that were given, now grouped by player race.

According to this graph, it appears that yellow and red cards were more or less evenly distributed given where each race tends to come from.
However, when we combine African with two or more races (with some African ancestry), the skew towards yellow cards given to players of African descent becomes much higher.

Is this skew statistically significant?
About 18% of players in the world cup have some African ancestry. However, those with African ancestry made up 38% of total distributed yellow and red cards in the first round of the World Cup. This could be a result of prejudiced calls by referees.



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