In 2021, Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho helped take England to the final of the European Championship. After the defeat, the three players of African descent faced a torrent of racist abuse.

Since then, the incidents have kept coming. Five years later, French footballer Kylian Mbappé faced racist and dehumanising comments online.

UN Human Rights condemned the comments as “despicable and, regrettably, not isolated”, pointing to reports of racist incidents during the FIFA World Cup 2026.

Different competitions, different targets. But both incidents show that even the most accomplished athletes are not beyond the reach of racism and discrimination.

Two UN reports look beyond these high-profile incidents to examine the many ways racism shapes the lives of people who play sport, and those who hope to.

In his report, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk called for confronting the systemic barriers that allow racism to persist within the world of sport. He emphasised that States, sports bodies, civil society, the media, and the private sector must work collectively to dismantle barriers that continue to affect racialised groups’ access to and participation in sport.

In her report, Ashwini K.P., UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, examined and challenged the structures that determine who gets to participate, progress and lead.

The children who never get to play

Before a child joins a sports team, someone has to pay for the equipment, the lessons and the journeys to training.

According to Ashwini K.P., for families from marginalised racial and ethnic groups, those costs can put entire sports — swimming, cycling or tennis — out of reach. Their schools and communities may also lack the facilities they need. These missed opportunities can cut short aspirations to professional sport at an early age.

Children excluded from sport lose more than the chance to compete. They lose opportunities to make friends, build confidence and find a place in their community.

Ashwini K.P. linked these challenges to histories of colonial exploitation and unequal investment, including disparities between countries in their capacity to support sport.

Shut out before the game begins

Cost is not the only obstacle, and children are not the only ones shut out.

At a regional consultation for Latin America organised by UN Human Rights, participants described barriers to accessing sports facilities for Indigenous communities, including geographical isolation, chronic underfunding and sports programmes that overlooked their cultures. The same consultation found that residency and legal status requirements effectively denied migrants and asylum-seekers access to public sports programmes and facilities.

When the rules are the barrier

Years of training, and even international success, do not necessarily secure an athlete’s place in sport when racism and discrimination shape the rules.

Caster Semenya, a Black South African runner, challenged rules introduced by World Athletics in 2018 requiring women athletes with certain variations in their sex characteristics to artificially lower their natural testosterone levels to compete in women’s events. In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Swiss Federal Tribunal had not fully taken her human rights into account when reviewing the decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sport to uphold the World Athletics rules.

Her case is not an isolated one, and the warnings are not new. As far back as 2020, the then High Commissioner for Human Rights warned that such regulations disproportionately affected women athletes from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The report called on States to make sure anti-discrimination laws cover gender, race, and sex characteristics and bind sports and governing bodies, and urged States and sports bodies alike to challenge gender-stereotyped and racist portrayals of women and girl athletes in the media.

The following year, three UN mandates told the European Court of Human Rights that the rules had fallen the hardest on Black women athletes and women athletes of Asian descent, mostly from the Global South, and appeared to rest on the assumption that white femininity is the standard in elite sport — casting women who do not “fit” that image as masculine.

Alexandra Xanthaki, UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, questioned the scientific evidence underpinning the rules on eligibility for the female category in a 2024 report, and warned of their disproportionate impact on women from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Ashwini K.P. observed that women from marginalised racial and ethnic groups are too often targeted because they do not conform to Western cultural stereotypes of femininity.

Blake Leeper, a runner of African descent with amputations below both knees, challenged the maximum height permitted when using running prostheses. In the words of his team, the formula was based solely on measurements of Hispanic and Caucasian athletes.

Dress rules can exclude, too. A 2025 regional consultation for Europe organised by UN Human Rights revealed that, in some contexts, Muslim women and girls were unable to practise grass-roots, amateur and professional sport due to bans on religious attire or due to an enforced attire, arising from decisions by some Governments and sport federations.

In some countries, national federations, including those governing football and basketball, prohibit religious head coverings. One submission to Ashwini K.P. described playing sport without a head covering as women being forced to give up a part of who they are.

Speaking at the Human Rights Council, Awa Dabo, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed that human rights standards require respect for both the freedom to choose to wear religiously significant attire and the freedom to choose not to wear it. She also warned that the reintroduction of mandatory genetic sex tests by some governing bodies raises serious concerns about bodily integrity, informed consent and privacy.