The courage of two women against gender and race gaps | LaLiga VS

In her beginnings as a soccer player, Vero Boquete (Santiago de Compostela, 1987) suffered many difficulties for being a woman. When she wanted to play in her neighborhood, some “older” boys prevented her from enjoying her passion for the ball. But she did not give up and she managed to make history in Spanish women’s football. Something that Lucía Mbomío (Alcorcón, Madrid, 1981) also identifies with, one of the few racialized journalists in the media, who from her childhood knew the rejection and prejudice of others because of her skin color. Mbomío and Boquete chat in the LALIGA VS video podcast about the gender gap and racism.

Mbomío, a renowned activist against racism, warns that the gender gap deepens even more among racialized women. An example: 60% of the daughters of migrants in Spain do not reach high school. The Madrid journalist says: “Racism is like dust.” “You don’t see it while it’s floating, but it’s around all the time. And when it has already been deposited and there are a lot of specks together, it is already too late, because you have to clean it.” Something that Boquete was not aware of until his tour of the United States, where he played in two stages between 2010 and 2011 and 2019 and 2020. “There are many things that white people don’t know. There (the United States) you are not European, you are Latin, and they tell you this in a derogatory way. That we have to continue talking about racism seems like an insult to human intelligence.”

Boquete, the first Spanish player to publish her biography in 2013 (Vero Boquete, the princess of the beautiful game), comments that racism, like sexism, appears in sport and in any area of ​​society. “The same things are experienced, but they do not have the same visibility.” But it leaves room for some optimism. “We are creating an army of strong men and women with better principles and slightly more social values. That is my hope and that is what I try to transmit daily and what I try and want football to transmit.”

The Monitor for the Observation of Hate in Sports

LALIGA has developed a tool that independently monitors the conversation on social networks and audits the level of hate and racism spread around Spanish professional football: one more step in its efforts to detect and eradicate violence and hate speech in football and in society. Every day and using a semantic engine with more than 50,000 linguistic rules and artificial intelligence algorithms, MOOD tracks up to 800,000 messages, calculating metrics that allow the fan to evaluate the progress of our football in this fight week by week.