The arrival of a Muslim player keeps prejudice at bay on Merseyside
“IF HE SCORES another few then I’ll be Muslim too,” chant Liverpool fans whenever Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian striker, finds the net. Since arriving in June 2017, he has done so with record-breaking frequency. On June 1st he scored his 71st goal in 104 appearances, to inspire the Reds to victory in the Champions League, Europe’s most prestigious competition. As usual, he celebrated by kneeling in prayer.
It is unlikely that Mr Salah—whom another chant describes as a “gift from Allah”—has converted many fans to Islam. But a working paper by political scientists at Stanford University has found signs that his popularity might have helped to tackle anti-Muslim sentiment on Merseyside.The cleanest evidence came from a Facebook experiment on 8,000 British Liverpool fans.
The academics also hunted for signs of broader changes in Islamophobic sentiment in Liverpool since Mr Salah was signed. First they looked at hate crimes, in which the perpetrator is motivated by race, religion or another type of identity. Of 23 English regions analysed, almost all saw a rise in the number of such crimes in the ten months after Mr Salah’s arrival, part of a long-term trend that the Home Office puts down to better recording by the police.
Then the researchers turned to Twitter. They identified British followers of Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Everton , and analysed 44,000 tweets that mentioned Muslims, Arabs or mosques. In the 14 months after Mr Salah’s transfer, 7.6% of Islam-related tweets by Liverpool fans had negative sentiments, about the same as the 7.3% during the previous three years. But the figure for Everton jumped from 18.6% to 21.3%; for the other teams it rose from 7.1% to 10.
Most parts of the country, including Merseyside, saw a spike in anti-Muslim sentiment in the summer of 2017, after terrorist attacks in London and Manchester. If Mr Salah has played even a small part in reining in Liverpool fans’ prejudice since then, that is an achievement as remarkable as leading the club to European glory.
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