From studio to screen : The production processes of Polish televised football and discursive (re)constructions of race/ethnicity

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ From studio to screen : The production processes of Polish televised football and discursive (re)constructions of race/ethnicity © The Author(s) 2024 Published version van Lienden, Arne; van Sterkenburg, Jacco; Sommier, Mélodine; Kossakowski, Radoslaw van Lienden, A., van Sterkenburg, J., Sommier, M., & Kossakowski, R. (2024). From studio to screen : The production processes of Polish televised football and discursive (re)constructions of race/ethnicity. Media, Culture and Society, OnlineFirst. https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241229191 2024 https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437241229191 Media, Culture & Society 1 –19 © The Author(s) 2024 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/01634437241229191 journals.sagepub.com/home/mcs From studio to screen: The production processes of Polish televised football and discursive (re)constructions of race/ethnicity Arne van Lienden and Jacco van Sterkenburg Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands Mélodine Sommier University of Jyväskylä, Finland Radoslaw Kossakowski University of Gdansk, Poland Abstract In this study, we shed light on the relationship between the production processes in televised football in Poland and representations of race/ethnicity. Previous research has extensively explored representations of race/ethnicity in mediated sports texts, but there remains a gap in understanding the production processes and their connection to these representations, particularly in contexts beyond the Anglosphere. In order to address this gap, in this study we conducted interviews with football media professionals and conducted field visits at football media organizations in Poland. Our findings reveal that football media professionals employ various discursive strategies when giving meaning to racial/ethnic diversity in televised football and within the football media workplace, which occasionally incorporate stereotypes. Generally, football media professionals took a color-evasive stance, and argued that they do not speak through racial/ethnic stereotypes in their work. Critical reflections on the production process are also hindered by the everyday practices and dominant working cultures in the football media Corresponding author: Arne van Lienden, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam, 3000 DR, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected] 1229191MCS0010.1177/01634437241229191Media, Culture & Societyvan Lienden et al. research-article2024 Main Article 2 Media, Culture & Society 00(0) office, which is constructed and maintained by media professionals as a predominantly White and masculine space. We contextualize these findings in light of previous studies on race/ethnicity in sport media, and the complex discourses surrounding Whiteness in the Polish context. Keywords ethnicity, Poland, production study, race, representations, televised football Introduction Recent years have seen an increasing output of research focusing on how representations of race/ethnicity1 in sport media (re)produce (and, at times, challenge) hegemonic racial/ ethnic discourses in wider society (Campbell and Bebb, 2020; Longas Luque and Van Sterkenburg, 2022; McCarthy et al., 2003). Many of these works have found that journalists and commentators often draw on the stereotype of the ‘natural Black athlete’. Based on this racialized stereotype, Black athletes are presented as possessing innate physical abilities, particularly regarding power and speed (Campbell and Bebb, 2020). White athletes, on the other hand, tend to remain more invisible in commentary as the category ‘White’ is typically disconnected from ‘racial’ discourses (Wekker, 2016). When White athletes get drawn attention to, it is often in terms of cognitive qualities such as workethic and leadership skills (Van Lienden and Van Sterkenburg, 2023). Research has also shown that representations of athletes in sport media are often not solely reproducing racial/ethnic ideologies, but that these representations intersect with other social identity dimensions such as gender, nation and class (Campbell and Bebb, 2020; Hylton and Lawrence, 2015). These often-stereotypical discourses concerning race/ethnicity have also been identified in the context of Polish televised football which will be the focus of this study. Content analyses of Polish televised club football and international football have shown that especially the ‘natural Black athlete’-stereotype gets habitually reproduced by football commentators (Van Lienden and Van Sterkenburg, 2022, 2023). Our previous audience reception study concluded that young Polish audiences largely tended to replicate these discourses concerning race/ethnicity in their everyday football talk. This shows that televised football is one discursive site where White-situated racial/ ethnic logics are (re)constructed in the Polish context (Van Lienden et al., 2023). The majority of works focusing on sport media and representations of race/ethnicity have been textual content analyses. This predominance has been noted in media research more broadly, and so has the need for these works to be complemented with studies focusing on other integral parts in the circulation of media, particularly audience reception studies and production studies (Hesmondhalgh and Saha, 2013). The former has seen some, albeit limited, attention in studies on televised sports (McCarthy et al., 2003; Peeters and Van Sterkenburg, 2017; Van Sterkenburg and Walder, 2021) – also in the Polish context (Van Lienden et al., 2023). However, studies that focus on the production process of televised sport and on how sport media professionals understand their role in the (re)production of racialized discourses remain few. van Lienden et al. 3 The few works that have focused on these production processes (see: Billings, 2008; Bruce, 2004; Silk et al., 2000; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021) have been conducted in the United States and Western European contexts and relied primarily on in-depth interviews with sport media professionals. In these studies, sport media professionals generally asserted that they did not rely on racial/ethnic stereotypes in their own reporting, often by taking a racially color-evasive stance (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). Furthermore, media professionals generally conceived of sport media as primarily an audience-reactive medium that – contradicting findings from content analyses – provided neutral and objective coverage of athletes from all racial/ethnic backgrounds (Billings, 2008; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021). These findings reveal the limitations of exclusively using interviews as a means of data collection to understand processes through which racial/ethnic stereotypical discourses are reproduced in televised sport commentary. The present study aims to contribute to the literature on production processes in televised sport by broadening their so far rather limited social-geographical and methodological scope. Social-geographically, this study focuses on the particular national context of Poland, a country located in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) where dominant discourses surrounding race/ethnicity have – for historical reasons – at times followed markedly different trajectories than in Western European contexts (Kościańska and Petryk, 2022; Nowicka, 2018). Exploring the Polish context thus provides insights into the (re)production and adaptation of discourses surrounding race/ethnicity beyond the often-prioritized Western European and North American center. This attention to the hybridity of racialized discourses and broadening of the geographical scope are particularly relevant for it can pose a challenge to popular discourses in the wider CEE region that tend to externalize issues of race and racism to Western Europe and the United States (Kalmar, 2023). Methodologically, the present study combines in-depth interviews with football media professionals with data gathered from participant observations at three football media newsrooms. This approach is primarily inspired by the Cultural Studies approach to cultural production in which an exploration of dominant everyday production practices and ‘common sense’ discourses in televised football media production takes center stage. The study also aims to contextualize these production processes in the wider structural political-economic conditions in which they take place (Hesmondhalgh and Saha, 2013). The research question of the present article can thus be formulated as follows: How do everyday production processes and discourses in Polish televised football media newsrooms, and professional self-understandings of football media professionals relate to the (re)production of discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in televised football texts? Literature review Producing race/ethnicity in sport media For at least four decades, studies have explored how discourses on race/ethnicity feature in sport media texts (e.g. Campbell and Bebb, 2020; Rada and Wulfemeye, 2005; Rainville and McCormick, 1977). These works have mainly focused on the United States and to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom and Australia. In recent years the geographical scope has expanded to other (mostly European) national contexts, ranging from 4 Media, Culture & Society 00(0) The Netherlands (Van Sterkenburg et al., 2012) to Spain (Longas Luque and Van Sterkenburg, 2022) and Slovenia (Ličen, 2015). The majority of studies have explored traditional print media and televised sport. Although digital (social) media has provided novel ways of producing and consuming mediated sport (Kilvington and Price, 2019), television remains the most widely used medium to watch football, also in the Polish context (Jakubowska, 2015). A recurring finding in many textual analyses is that Black athletes are often made sense of by (predominantly White and male) commentators and journalists according to the stereotype of the ‘natural Black athlete’, in which disproportionate weight is given to the physical attributes of Black male athletes (Campbell and Bebb, 2020; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2012). This focus on Black physicality provides a reductionist interpretation of Black athletic capabilities that aligns with and (re)produces wider circulating racialized logics concerning Black people (Carrington, 2011). On the other hand, societally valued cognitive qualities are more often assigned to White athletes (Hylton, 2009). Within sport media representations, these racialized logics are often co-articulated and intersecting with discourses on gender, national and other social identity dimensions (Campbell and Bebb, 2020; Van Lienden and Van Sterkenburg, 2023). Occasionally, sport media texts have been found to challenge – or at least not actively reproduce – dominant common-sense discourses surrounding race/ethnicity, showing the potential for sport media to also serve as a more progressive site (Longas Luque and Van Sterkenburg, 2022). Previous works have mainly used textual analysis to explore discourses on race/ ethnicity in media products. Studies focusing on the production process of sport media in relation to race/ethnicity remain scarce. This dearth has been identified in Media Studies more broadly, and works have called for production studies to help elucidate ‘the complex relations between structure, production, the text and racialized epistemologies’ (Saha, 2012: 426). The present study aims to develop an understanding of these relations by relying on a Cultural Studies approach. With this lens, the central focus is on everyday production processes in football media, as well as the discourses regarding race/ethnicity that journalists and commentators draw on (Caldwell, 2008; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2022). In doing so, this study also aims to gain insight into the wider structural conditions in which these everyday meaning-making practices regarding race/ethnicity occur. Previous studies have provided in-depth explorations of the production of printed and broadcast sport media texts (see: Barnfield, 2013; Boyle, 2006; Silk et al., 2000). Studies that have explicitly focused on sport media production and race/ethnicity in the United States (Billings, 2008; Bruce, 2004), the United Kingdom (Farrington et al., 2012) and The Netherlands (Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021) mostly relied on interviews with sport media professionals. These works found that – the predominantly White – sport media professionals rarely reflect on the discursive nature and agenda-setting dimension of (sport) media texts (Bruce, 2004; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021). In a study on the Dutch context, some of the media professionals interviewed did acknowledge the lack of racial/ ethnic diversity in sport media newsrooms and the limitations this could have on the range of perspectives included (Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021). Farrington et al. (2012) found that in British print and broadcast sport media, this racial/ethnic homogeneity is reproduced through closed recruitment procedures that often did not reach racial/ethnic minoritized sport journalists. Generally, research on sport media production identified van Lienden et al. 5 how professionals’ hegemonic self-conceptions lead them to often adopt a racially colorevasive stance that rejects the idea that they speak through racial/ethnic ideologies. Occasionally, media professionals may even discard the idea that sport media are shaped by or are shaping racialized discourses at all, notwithstanding previous findings in content analyses (Billings, 2008; Bruce, 2004; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021). Race/ethnicity and Whiteness in Poland and Polish sport media Academic interest in the (re)production of racial/ethnic stereotypes in sport media has predominantly centred around a small number of national contexts in the Anglosphere and Western Europe. The present article aims to expand this narrow social-geographical scope by focusing on sport media and constructions of race/ethnicity in the specific national context of Poland, located in the Central Eastern European (CEE) region. Scholars have called for more attention to the more regional and nation-specific racial/ ethnic constellations within the CEE region (Nowicka, 2018) and the role Whiteness plays in the region (Imre, 2023). Previous research into Polish football media found recurring parallels between hegemonic racial/ethnic imaginaries in Western European and Polish sport media (Van Lienden and Van Sterkenburg, 2022, 2023). These previous studies showed that the ‘natural Black athlete’-stereotype is the dominant way Black athletes are made sense of by journalists commenting on Polish and international football games. Young audiences of televised football have also been shown to generally reproduce these racialized discourses of natural Black athletic prowess (Van Lienden et al., 2023). These discourses can be said to reflect and further produce a Black-White dichotomy, which is the dominant prism through which ‘race’ is understood in wider Polish society (Nowicka, 2018). This present paper will use race and ethnicity as conflated constructs (‘race/ethnicity’) to do justice to everyday discourses in Poland that invoked interchangeably markers of difference constructed as biological (hair and skin colour, other physical features) and markers of difference constructed as cultural (language, customs) (Jaskułowski 2019; Van Lienden et al., 2023), echoing larger trends in Europe to substitute ‘race’ for culture and ethnicity (Lentin, 2008; Morning, 2009). The frequent reliance on racialized imaginaries concerning Blackness in Polish football media shows the prominence of racialized imaginaries in the Polish context in general (Balogun and Pędziwiatr, 2023). Mayblin et al. (2016) argue that due to the racial/ ethnic homogeneity of Polish society – around 95% of the population self-identifies as White, Roman Catholic and ethnically Polish – there is little space for oppositional discourses regarding race to find a foothold in Polish popular discourses. Although the latest census was completed before the influx of Ukrainian refugees following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, it remains clear that this relative homogeneity markedly differs from many Western European contexts. This homogeneity, together with the absence of a history of overseas colonial possessions and popular discourses portraying Poland primarily as a victim of German and Soviet imperial projects (Mayblin et al., 2016), is also associated with a particular ‘ordinariness’ and innocence (Wekker, 2016) of Whiteness that previous works have identified in the CEE region more broadly and Poland in particular (Balogun, 2020; 6 Media, Culture & Society 00(0) Imre, 2023). Imre (2023) argues that these intensifying popular and political attachments to a White European identity in the CEE region serve in part as compensation for anxieties about national identity and belonging that arose after the fall of the communist regimes in the late 1980s. Our previous audience reception study also brought to the fore that young audiences of televised football generally conflated Whiteness with Europeanness and Polishness in their everyday football talk, and routinely placed non-White people outside of dominant conceptualizations of Europe and Poland (Van Lienden et al., 2023). Previous research has drawn connections between these relatively uncontested reconstructions of White Polish and European imaginaries and the CEE’s concomitant ambiguous position in Western European-based hierarchies of Europeanness (Imre, 2023). These works argue that multiple and relational racializing hierarchies are at play in the context of the CEE region (Imre, 2023; Lewicki, 2023). Popular discourses reflect an attachment to belonging to White Europe, in part through racializing discourses that are particularly aimed at Blackness and the social group of Muslims (Balogun, 2020; Jaskułowski, 2019). These works situate these attachments to White Europeanness, in part, as a way to escape the CEE’s ‘Easterness’, which has traditionally been hierarchically placed in a peripheral position to Northwestern European Whiteness in dominant Western-based conceptualizations of European Whiteness (Dyer, 1997; Rzepnikowska, 2023). In our previous audience reception study, we also found how young audiences of televised football sometimes ‘measured’ Southern European, Balkan and Central European Whiteness against a perceived normative Western European Whiteness (Van Lienden et al., 2023). They typically did so by invoking a supposed Polish footballing backwardness and parochiality in opposition to Western European football cultures. The present study aims to further elucidate these complex and entangled racializing hierarchies and attachments to Whiteness in the Polish context and explore whether and how these epistemologies bear influence on the production process of televised football. Methodology The present article employs a two-level methodological approach. The first step involved sixteen in-depth interviews with football media professionals. All the interviewees identified as Polish and could be categorized as White although they did not self-identity in racial terms, aligning with the common positioning of White individuals as a-racial (Dyer, 1997). Fifteen identified as male and one as female. The interviewees were between 19 to 45 years old. Their social positionality is in line with the general demographic of Polish sport media professionals, which remains a male-dominated environment (Organista et al., 2021). The interviewees were predominantly based around the Polish capital Warsaw, where most football media organizations are located. The majority of the interviewees (12) were university-educated, mostly in journalism studies. The study can be considered ‘white-on-white research’ (Philippo and Nolan, 2022), where both researcher and participants identified as White, and where research is conducted in White spaces. Although easily rendered invisible through their ubiquity, Whiteness and masculinity permeated the research process in myriad ways. For instance, during the van Lienden et al. 7 participant observations in exclusively White and predominantly male spaces, the White male first author – who conducted both interviews and participant observations – was easily trusted and treated peer-like by the participants, which might have been more difficult to attain for racially/ethnically minoritized researchers. Although Whiteness and masculinity have unquestionably borne an influence on the inquiry and analysis process, we have aimed to be reflexive and critical about the various ways discourses of Whiteness and masculinity were factored through the research process and aimed to stay open for alternative readings of our data. Most interviewees were initially approached on social media and additional interviewees were gathered using the snowballing technique or during field visits. The interviewees worked at several of the most well-known sport media organizations in Poland that draw large audiences in the Polish sport media landscape. Two interviewees who had worked as writer/editor and presenter had recently left their jobs in football media. Most of the interviewees worked primarily as match commentators (9), others worked as onscreen analysts (3), chief editor (1) or production assistant (1). We aimed to gather interviewees with a diverse set of roles and functions in order to best explore newsroom routines and practices. Some interviewees held jobs both in televised sport and other forms of sport media, generally serving as writer or interviewer for online football news outlets. The interviews took between 45 and 90 minutes and were conducted either inperson or online in Polish and, occasionally, in English. The participants signed an informed consent form before the interview or consented verbally at the start. After 16 interviews, saturation was reached, meaning that the interviewees no longer appeared to draw on newly emerging themes and broadly repeated themes that had come to the fore also in previous interviews (Boeije, 2009). The in-depth interviews were supplemented with 4 days of participant observations at three sport media organizations spread out over multiple visits to Warsaw in MarchApril 2022 and October 2022. Most of the interviews with football media professionals were also conducted during the 8 weeks that the first author spent in Warsaw. Two of the visited organizations are subscription-based television channels that broadcast various football leagues, the other was an Internet-only platform that provides mainly YouTube content on Polish football and other European leagues. This format appears to be increasingly popular within the Polish context (Sportmarketing, 2022). Access to these sport media organizations was obtained through contacts established in the interviews. During the participant observations, the first author was given free access to the newsrooms and studios of the organizations for 1–2 days, and he was free to speak to various employees and to visit studios where football shows were being recorded. The sport media organizations were aware and gave approval of the research being conducted. Based on previous research, a protocol was developed in which various elements were included that were relevant to explore and helped shape the field notes being made during the visits (Van Sterkenburg et al., 2022). Themes in this protocol were, for instance, the positionality of people encountered in the newsroom, the spatial lay-out of the newsrooms, and codes and styles of everyday conversations. This protocol served as an observation guide to identify elements of importance in the production process, but throughout the field visits we remained open to unexpected aspects as well as those 8 Media, Culture & Society 00(0) specific to the Polish context. This two-level methodological approach, interviews and observations, allowed us to explore the discourses that football media professionals draw on regarding their own work and race/ethnicity, as well as to gain insights in some of the everyday practices and norms that constitute the production process of televised football. The transcripts of the in-depth interviews and field notes from participant observations were first coded openly, then axially, and finally followed by a round of selective coding (Boeije, 2009). Results Racial/ethnic and national stereotypes in football media Interviewees drew on a range of discourses regarding the topic of race/ethnicity and racial/ethnic stereotypes in televised football. Two dominant discourses that were identified were: 1) an awareness of racial/ethnic stereotypes in sport media, and 2) racial/ethnic stereotypes as valid and/or a non-issue. Most interviewees displayed some awareness about the reproduction of racial/ethnic and national stereotypes in Polish football media, indicating a certain level of reflexivity regarding practices within the football media industry amongst the interviewees. For many years we at [media organization] have quite often described foreign players in terms of their origin . . . that when someone comes from Africa, he is a fast and sprinting player, or someone is from South America . . . so he’s probably technically good. Mikolaj (interviewer and journalist)2 There was, however, quite a broad variation in the degrees of critical awareness among interviewees. Only two interviewees explicitly reflected on their own individual or their own organization’s practices like in the quote above. The most common response focused on the poor level of other analysts and commentators who, interviewees argued, tended to rely on stereotypical racial/ethnic ideologies due to ‘laziness and unpreparedness’ (Jarosław, presenter) or in order to ‘mask some of their gaps in knowledge about individual players’ (Jan, editor-in-chief). In other words, when interviewees did acknowledge how football media can serve as a site where racial/ethnic stereotypes are (re)constructed, it most often did not include critical self-reflection or a reflection on the practices in their own organization. Interviewees typically argued that they were well-prepared and therefore went beyond ‘lazy’ racializing frames or drew on color-evasive frames: ‘It’s a tough topic for me you know, because I don’t see the skin-color’ (Robert, production assistant). Furthermore, interviewees frequently drew on examples of well-known explicit racist incidents on Polish television or in Polish football stadiums. Equating discussions about processes of racialization/ethnicization with explicit racist incidents was a common trend in the interviewees’ discourses. This reflects how, in the Polish context, debates surrounding ‘race’ are popularly equated with instances of overt racism (Balogun and Pędziwiatr, 2023). Multiple interviewees referred, for instance, to a well-known incident van Lienden et al. 15 of classed hierarchies in which responsibility for racism is placed at the social ‘backwardness’ of some audiences and colleagues. This reflects how in the European context normative and invisible Whiteness is often negotiated through other social identity dimensions such as gender, nationality and Europeanness and in this latter case, through social class (Essed and Trienekens, 2008; Hylton and Lawrence, 2015). Cultures of production in the ‘locker room’ Our study has also shown how dominant cultures of production in televised football are factored through Polish male Whiteness. Although diversity was valued by most interviewees in a normative and broad sense, our findings reflect that, in practice, the White, Polish and male homogeneity of football media offices was (re)produced through dominant forms of interaction on the work floor. One prominent ideological discourse that our study identified was the dominant shared discourse of a good editorial team as a ‘locker room’ or ‘ecosystem’. Gregory (2009) notes how the metaphor of the locker room is more often applied in predominantly male working environments, and how ‘locker room’ practices such as course banter and the sexualization of women serve to reproduce a specific performance of hegemonic masculinity. This male-dominated culture has also been noted in previous studies on Polish sport media (Organista and Mazur, 2020). In the Polish context, where White Polish males form the absolute majority of football media professionals, especially in senior management roles, the importance assigned by interviewees to the locker room mentality and homogeneity in the newsroom was striking. Paired with interviewees not being aware of any codified diversity policies, it was indicative of how, notwithstanding the nominal value given to diversity, meaning-making processes regarding race/ethnicity in the production of Polish televised football take place in an environment in which there is little to no reflection on and/or recognition of wider gendered and racialized power relations. This homogenous male Whiteness – which was often fairly invisible to and ‘invisibilized’ by interviewees – might in turn serve as a constraining force in the production of racialized stereotypes in mediated content. Another, more structural factor, that appeared a constraining force on football media professionals in critically reflecting on their own reporting and own organization pertained to the precarious working conditions and the time-pressure involved in producing – often live – content. The time-pressure and dynamism of sport media production has been noted as a constraining factor on critical self-reflection in previous production studies (Bruce, 2004; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021). Previous works have also pointed at the relation between hegemonic neoliberal working cultures in journalism and racialized cultural productions (Saha, 2020). The particularly precarious nature of journalistic work in Poland has been outlined in a previous study by Gober (2020), who highlights how the project-based model of journalistic employment, marked by insecurities and long working hours, became dominant in post-communist Poland where collective bargaining and self-regulatory journalistic bodies are absent or marginal. Agency to instigate change in cultures of production thus seems to primarily reside within editorial offices. However, challenging ‘common-sense’ – working practices appeared to be constrained by the importance interviewees placed on marketing themselves well and maintaining good 16 Media, Culture & Society 00(0) relationships in the field in the precarious, small and network-based world of football media. Furthermore, connected to this precarity is the fact that many television journalists combine their work with jobs in other football media (written and/or online journalism work). This suggests that discourses surrounding race/ethnicity in televised football production also permeate and are (re)produced in other football media environments in the Polish context. Concluding remarks The findings in this study have shed light on the complex and ambivalent ways in which Polish televised football media professionals (re)produce discourses surrounding race/ ethnicity, and how editorial practices and routines influence the representations that end up on the screen. These findings provide valuable insights into the broader operation and functioning of a football media environment which is overwhelmingly White and male, a phenomenon not limited to Poland but prevalent across various European contexts (Carrington, 2011; Van Sterkenburg et al., 2021).We conclude this paper by elaborating on recommendations for interventions in meaning-making processes surrounding race/ ethnicity in the production televised football. Firstly, when looking at the Polish context it remains a critical task to further problematize Polish Whiteness, in which White Polish people perceive themselves as innocent and not complicit in (re)constructions of racialized social structures and practices (Kalmar, 2023; Wekker, 2016) that this study has found to also permeate the production process in televised football. Practically speaking, this could involve football media professionals to follow training in racial/ethnic biases. Especially in the Polish context where journalistic education appeared little valued by football journalists a particular responsibility should lay at the media organizations to provide such critical education of their workforce. Secondly, a similar critical and sustained attention should go out to gender imbalances in football media production, which have also been identified in European (see: Schoch, 2013) and North American contexts (Xu and Billings, 2021). Although gender diversity in the editorial office does not necessarily cause more balanced representations of race/ethnicity, nor does it directly relate to racial/ ethnic diversity on the work floor, an increase of gender diversity would be invaluable in deconstructing the processes of exclusion that are connected to the masculine locker room-culture in Polish football media. Lastly, we will highlight some drawbacks in our study and provide some suggestions for future research. In our study we have predominantly interviewed football media professionals in more junior functions. The interviewees were mostly employed on short-term contracts, below forty years old and employed at multiple football media organizations at the same time. Although they were representative of a large part of the Polish football journalistic workforce, future studies should focus particularly on the structures and practices in the senior tiers in football media organizations. Secondly, the field visits at various football media organizations were an invaluable source of data, but these visits were relatively short. It appeared the only way to do this at this point in time and they provided useful snapshots of daily routines and practices. However, we hope for future research to do more immersive ethnographies of football media newsrooms. van Lienden et al. 17 Funding The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research is part of the Dutch Scientific Council-funded research project ‘How Racist is Televised Football and do Audiences React?’(project number: 016.VIDI.185.174). ORCID iD Arne van Lienden https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2946-5939 Notes 1. In this paper we treat race and ethnicity as conflated constructs (race/ethnicity) to do justice to how in everyday discourses on identity in Poland, people often conflate ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ markers of difference. For further elaboration, see theoretical framework. 2. Names of respondents have been pseudonymized. Their age and job title(s) are mentioned between brackets. The quotes have been translated from Polish to English by the first author. 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