If only football had the balls officially to adopt the target of one in five coaches coming from a black and minority ethnic background by the end of this decade. Not because the executive ranks of the all-parliamentary football group are telling it to – though the outrage of a bunch of white MPs indicates a fine line in irony – but because the game has done more for race relations in this country than plenty of those lining up to denigrate it again.
Of course, you only have to repeat that embarrassment of a statistic – a mere two black first-team managers in the top four English divisions – to realise it must do much, much more. Calls for a Rooney rule are becoming sustained, but I also like Martin Samuel’s idea of the leagues insisting on at least one BME executive at every club. Why not both? Either would be such a hugely progressive step that it would cast football as a trailblazer, something from which the whole of society – yup, including media organisations like this one – could take practical inspiration.
It is fashionable to cast football as the last bastion of all sorts of horrors, as though to walk into any ground were to step back into a past from which all the rest of society has moved politely on. Clearly, that’s partly down to the ugliness of the race rows that have played out over the past few seasons, from Luis Suárez to John Terry by way of Roy Hodgson’s impenetrable monkey joke. It certainly hasn’t been pretty – but at least it’s been spoken openly about.
It wasn’t exactly edifying to have an England captain under investigation by the Met for alleged racism – but at the same time, it was worth considering both that England was the only country where senior figures even reacted to Fifa president Sepp Blatter’s preposterous claim that there was no racism in football, and that the case against Terry would not have made it off the pitch in many other countries. Airing dirty linen in public isn’t the worst thing.
It would obviously be infinitely preferable if there weren’t any dirty linen to air, but I don’t think any of us imagines that, say, Westminster’s closely guarded laundry basket is anything other than pretty stinky, despite the fact that the main parties mostly give the impression that embedded racist attitudes are something only to be found in Ukip. The BBC has done a scrupulous job of highlighting football’s problems with BME under-representation in football, as, it must be said, has the Guardian – both organisations of absolutely overwhelmingly white management. We should have the decency to admit that as far as its efforts to address the problem go, football gets a bad press – from a press so preponderantly white that even now, an executive awayday on any paper would look like a first division team bus circa 1963.
Where the Beeb is concerned, meanwhile, it often feels as if the entire issue of race within the corporation has been telescoped on to the biannual Jeremy Clarkson race row – an event so counterproductive that you just know the Top Gear presenter longs for the next one. And why wouldn’t he? It’s a hell of a scoreline. Column inches devoted to Clarkson vs column inches devoted to the dearth of senior black BBC executives: about 10,000 to one.
Perhaps as a diversionary tactic, perhaps because it’s easy, many have developed a habit of loading football with expectations that are often unreasonable, such as demanding it act as a moral and ethical force at all times, as though the game defined society rather than being a reflection of it.
Sometimes, the ire directed at pampered/preening/multimillionaire/insert-cliche-of-choice footballers feels like something more insidious: a veiled belief that young working-class men shouldn’t be so lavishly remunerated, despite the fact the market says they should. When Ed Balls said Wayne Rooney was worth his £300k a week but that some banking salaries were ludicrous, an astonishing number of people leapt on him for it, making fatuous points about a series of missed chances or a lack of fitness. To which the only reasonable response is: congratulations! You just equated a dip in form with bringing global capitalism to the brink of implosion. Honestly, you deserve everything you don’t get.
All in all, then, it would be nice if everyone had the good grace to acknowledge that this whole under-representation business isn’t just a football problem.
But if only football would take this first radical step, because the lesson of history is clear: sport does have the power to be transformative, and to run ahead of its time. Baseball’s colour line was crossed long before the civil rights movement forced politics to catch up, just as football had been serving up black role models for decades before the first black man was appointed to the cabinet. Chuka Umunna became the first black shadow cabinet member only in 2011. And it is notable that he recently expanded calls for a Rooney rule in football to advocating something similar across the whole of society’s bigger institutions, from education to business to the media and beyond.
So here’s hoping that the game takes it upon itself to set an example to others. While the ball-kickers are mulling over the leap, perhaps an all‑parliamentary group on parliament could be set up, and forced to come up with its own series of recommendations on how Westminster might do better on this front. You know, just to keep football company.
