A picture with baggage: Bukayo Saka and the Iceland fallout

Several media outlets have been criticised for using a photograph of Bukayo Saka to illustrate England's recent defeat by Iceland.

Although the winger only came on in the 65th minute, long after England conceded the only goal of the game, the coverage in The Sun, Daily Star, The Telegraph and the BBC "all featured him as a main picture", said The Independent.

'Historic vilification'

The picture choice "carries baggage", said Morgan Ofori in The Guardian, and anyone covering the national team should be aware of the "historic vilification of black players". With a "surge in support for the far-right" in Europe, and a UK general election that may "see the same", the media's coverage is "all the more important".

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When black players are targeted in the media, it "sends a message that they are not welcome", said Kick It Out chief executive Tony Burnett in a letter quoted by the BBC. It also suggests that they are "only a misplaced kick from being vilified" and "sends a message to online abusers that targeting players is fair game".

Writing on social media, the former England international Ian Wright said certain players were "being set up to be the face of defeat".  F1 star Lewis Hamilton shared an Instagram post which argued that "we need to hold the English media accountable for systemically vilifying Black players".

'Seeping pus'

"We've been here before: the UK media has not learnt from its past behaviours," Delroy Corinaldi, executive director of Black Footballers Partnership told the BBC. He remembered how, in 2018, Raheem Sterling "called out the media for unfairly targeting young black footballers with negative headlines", and "yet here we are a week before the Euro 2024 tournament, and the press are playing their age-old games".

Black fans have "been dismayed over decades" at the "travails of Black footballers on England duty", said Darren Lewis in The Mirror, from "serial winner and goal machine" Andy Cole "not getting a look in when he should have done", to  the likes of Danny Rose "enduring racist abuse with little by the way of any substantive punishment" for the "aggressors".

So "it doesn’t take much to pick at the scab from which the seeping pus of frustration flows across decades". Abuse and racism for Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford after the Euro 2021 final "remains a justifiably sore subject for many fans" because "sensitivities are raw, memories are vivid" and "it takes only the slightest jolt to bring it all back".

But in "some senses" it is "easy to see" how the choice of Saka images was made, Ofori conceded in The Guardian. Pictures of the winger throwing a paper plane off the pitch allowed for headlines about "plane awful" England taking "a nosedive". An image of him "sprawled on the ground" was also visually arresting.

The "best that can be said" is that at least these issues "emerged before the tournament and not after", so "hopefully there will be some lessons (re)learned".