Pod Academy

Mario Balotelli, Patrice Evra, Kevin Prince Boateng and Dani Alves are just some of football's most decorated players to have endured racial abuse from fans in the past few seasons. For eighteen months, Dr Mark Doidge, a sports sociologist, has been studying the efforts to combat racism of three of Europe's biggest clubs - one in Poland, one in Germany and one in Italy . Last month he presented his findings to UEFA at their headquarters in Geneva. Alex Burd caught up with him on the phone to discuss his report. He started by explaining how he picked his case studies. Mark Doidge: I used Legia Warsaw in Poland, Borussia Dortmund in Germany and Roma in Italy. The reasons for these clubs was twofold really. One was to have a representative of a club from the north, south and east of Europe so you get a fairly wide geographic spread. The other one was through discussions with UEFA, the clubs should be of sufficient size but also have a bit of contestation within the fan group so it wasn’t a universal group wit