‘Attributes of Oppression’: The Quantitative Construction of Black Female Footballers in FIFA22

This article focuses on the quantitative construction of Black female footballers via ‘player attributes’ in Electronic Arts’ hugely popular FIFA (now EA SPORTS FC) football video game franchise. Especially indebted to Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, and her insights into the digital reproduction of racist discourses and outcomes, the article explores the ways in which this fundamental game-play system reproduces the tropes of misogynoir that Black women have long been subject to in sports and wider societal discourses. Paying particular attention to the opaque process through which the game’s developers generate this quantified system of making sense of athletic bodies, the article’s findings add to Noble’s vital arguments around how computational systems are ultimately products of human and social processes that inevitably inherit the world views of their authors. The implications of what is presented here go well beyond sport and media, or gaming and digital cultures, and into the wider history of how racial bodies have long been scientistically constructed. Indeed, in a subtle call back to forms of scientific racism that flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, the attributes system employed by developers not only reproduces intersectional tropes around the relative value and meaning of Black and white female athletic capabilities; it also reifies these tropes.