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Comment by HL33tibCe7 | Hacker News Reader

I noticed something similar recently when watching women’s football during the Euros. The commentators - who by the way aren’t sexist, this isn’t a conscious thing - would make comments that they would _never_ make about a male player. My (least) favourite example, among many: “her mum is in the crowd tonight and would be so proud”.

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I've definitely heard that said about a male player, I'm not sure why you think they wouldn't. I haven't even watched much football, only Euros and World Cups.

The player's families are mentioned sometimes, but it happens quite often at big national team games (Euros, World Cup). E.g. Modric's wife and kids were shown many times at the 2018 World Cup. Eden Hazard's family, and his parent's history, was also mentioned multiple times at that same World Cup.

It was even more prominent with Kasper Schmeichel, the Danish goalkeeper, whose father is a former goalkeeper. The father was shown extremely frequently celebrating his son's saves, and after a penalty shootout where Kasper performed very well, the comments were exactly "look at how much his dad is celebrating, he must be really proud of his son".

It’s extremely common in college (American) football to mention that a player’s family is attending and often cut to showing them. I’ve seen it in NFL and MLB games as well.

The wonderfully simple German language has a nuance with pronouns where you can use an article as a pronoun, which is something you might do when referring to an animal. I noticed commentators doing this a lot when referring to female athletes, but when they talk about male athletes they use normal pronouns. And a lot of comments in general that just make you think "WTF?".

Do you mean f.e. using "die" or "eine" instead of "sie"? If so then I can chip in with similiar observations down in Austria and southern Germany, though overwhelmingly with males, using "der" instead of "er".

Though of course I may have missunderstood what you are actualy referring to.

I'm watching a lot of football (live and on TV) and this is very normal comment in man's game.

This probably is an example of an unconscious bias, but not the one you think it is.

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