"Football Need to Confront Its Racism"

The Times/Matthew Syed
Rooney rules in vital fight against racism

I loved watching Cyrille Regis play football. He had a marvellous ability to turn and charge in one fluid movement, a skill in abundant evidence when he swivelled past two defenders for West Bromwich Albion against Norwich City in 1982 before unleashing the ball into the back of the net from 30 yards. “A strike of sublime brilliance,” one commentator described it.

Regis was, however, rather less successful when it came to management. After retiring as a player in 1996, he worked diligently as an assistant coach, but whenever he applied for a managerial position he failed to get past first base.

His friend Luther Blissett, who thrilled Watford fans as a player, faced precisely the same problem. After a while, it began to feel like they were hitting their heads against a brick wall.

“You know when you have done well in an interview,” Blissett told the BBC’s Newsnight in 2004 after 15 months of unemployment. “And then you don’t even get a letter afterwards to say that you have been rejected. It’s hard to understand.” Regis made the same point: “As a player it’s tangible. You can hear the racist chants and see the bananas on the pitch. But when you put in applications, you can’t really tell somebody’s heart.”

Was being passed over evidence of racism? It certainly seemed that way, given their qualifications and hard work. But neither of them could be certain and this, in itself, was deeply distressing. This is what psychologists call “attributional ambiguity”.

It is a feeling with which John Barnes is familiar. After an unsuccessful stint as manager of Celtic, the former Liverpool winger persistently applied to lower-league English teams to kick-start his career. Again and again he was knocked back. “I have applied for four or five jobs, with the backing of former England managers, but that hasn’t got me anything,” he said at the time. “Not even an interview.”

Eventually, after years of rejection, he took the national team job with Jamaica before taking up the vacant manager’s post at Tranmere Rovers. Last week, Barnes was sacked by the Coca-Cola League One club after only 11 league matches in charge.

Was Barnes’s dismissal premature? Mark Lawrenson certainly thinks so. “If a club is going to slash its budget only one thing happens: the team gets worse,” the BBC pundit and a former Liverpool team-mate, said. “What’s 11 league games? It’s not even a quarter of the season and it’s certainly not long enough to make a judgment on how a manager in those circumstances is getting on.”

Others disagree. “Results have not gone our way this season and we are at the wrong end of the table,” Peter Johnson, the chairman, said. He pointed out that Barnes won only two league games and he would doubtless also argue that if racism had been an issue, he would not have appointed Barnes in the first place.

On the wider point, the disagreement over Barnes’s treatment highlights the subjectivity that will always exist over the hiring and firing of managers — or, for that matter, anyone else. As Regis alluded to in his Newsnight interview, it is never possible to investigate the “hidden thoughts” of those making the ultimate decisions.

But does that represent the end of the matter? Does it mean we can ignore the question of whether blacks face barriers to employment in football in the way they once faced discrimination on the pitch? For too long the answer has been “yes”.

The lack of a prosecution of a club on equal opportunity grounds was taken by many as proof that no serious problem existed. But the complacency of that stance can be seen by widening the perspective. With Barnes gone there are now only two black men among the 72 managers in the Football League (and none in the Premier League), and only one black chief executive (Jason Rockett, of Sheffield United). Given that blacks constitute about 25 per cent of the players, this is as close to a proof of a culture of racism as it is possible to get.

Sure, it is not the kind of proof required by a court of law — which would need something like a hidden tape with a chairman saying, “I am never going to hire a n****r” — but it is proof all the same.

Indeed, it is a more powerful kind of proof, demonstrating to any statistically literate person that the problem has seeped across the game, permeated attitudes and taken root. To use the parlance of the Macpherson report, racism in football is institutionalised.

Does this imply that football chairmen are riddled with redneck prejudice? No, it does not. Racial biases tend to exist at a much deeper psychological level; so deep, in fact, that many of us are all too often unaware of them (which is often a key part of the problem).

If this sounds dubious, I suggest you take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). This measures the role our unconscious associations play in our beliefs and behaviour. I took it online for the third time yesterday and was again horrified at the way my subliminal biases skewed my answers in ways I scarcely believed possible but was unable to resist. I rated as having a “strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans”.

Racism, you see, exists on two, independent levels. First, we have our conscious attitudes, the things we choose to believe and the values we endorse. But the IAT measures our racial attitudes on an unconscious level: the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we have even had a chance to think. These biases are a powerful predictor of behaviour and unlock the mystery of why black managers continue to be passed over in modern football.

As Barnes put it with remarkable perceptiveness: “When we are talking about the dynamics of being a black football manager, it is often about what is going on at a subconscious level . . . The stereotype of a black man is that he is a good athlete, so we should be able to run fast, box, sprint, play football. But can we think? That is the hardest barrier to overcome.” And if that barrier exists for Barnes, how much more so for the dozens of aspiring black managers who never played top-tier football but who have so much to offer the game?

How, then, to change attitudes? How to obliterate stereotypes that have dogged football for so long? Fortunately, there is a solution that can be wielded quickly and has a proven track record of success.

In 2003, the NFL — faced with fierce criticism over the lack of black coaches — introduced the Rooney Rule. Named after the chairman of the league’s diversity committee, the rule (agreed with the 32 franchise owners) mandated that every NFL team interview at least one minority candidate when the position of head coach became vacant.

The results have been remarkable, not least because the policy has teeth — in 2003, the NFL fined the Detroit Lions $200,000 (now about £125,000) for failing to interview minority candidates. By the start of the 2006 season the number of black head coaches had shot up from 6 per cent to 22 per cent and in February Mike Tomlin, of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who had been hired under the rule, led his team to victory in the Super Bowl, the second black coach to achieve that accolade.

“The Rooney Rule’s effectiveness lies in its potential to deconstruct hidden biases,” Brian Collins, a lawyer, said in the New York University Law Review. “A decision-maker harbouring unconscious bias is forced to confront his own partiality by meeting face-to-face with a candidate he might never have previously considered.”

Yesterday, asked about the potential for a Rooney Rule in football, a spokesman on equality issues for the FA said: “What’s that? I have never heard of it.”

With such a catastrophic lack of awareness from the governing body, is it any wonder that English football continues to languish in the dark ages? A Rooney Rule is not merely overdue; it is the acid test of the sport’s willingness to confront its institutionalised racism.

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/matthew_syed/article6873466.ece