‘And Now, No Word from Our Sponsors’: Yorkshire cricket, the Azeem Rafiq controversy and the silence of the University

In 2021 Yorkshire County Cricket Club found itself at the centre of international media attention when a former player, Azeem Rafiq, spoke about the racism he had endured at the Club. When an investigation verified Rafiq’s account, all the Club’s sponsors, including Leeds Beckett University, ended their partnerships. Racism in sport is not new, nor is racism in higher education, nor is racism in Yorkshire; what this incident does is to bring these dimensions of racism together and ask important questions about the ways in which they overlap. Two themes emerged from interviews with individuals connected, in different ways, to the University. The first is the University’s muted response to this incident, a silence that was mirrored across other Leeds-based academic and sporting institutions. A second emergent theme is the absence of academic staff from minority ethnic backgrounds working in university sports departments and researching racism in sport.