Racism in sport, or racism in society?

It’s time to wake up and smell the bacon. No number of printed t-shirts, apologetic press releases or player suspensions is going to win us the fight against racism in football. It’s a fight we can’t win.

The misconception is that overt showings of racism are the problem. The on-field disgraces of Messrs Suarez and Terry, anti-Semitic chants by West Ham fans at White Hart Lane and distasteful banners at Millwall are only the tip of a very ugly iceberg that exposes a shamefully bigoted underbelly to the UK’s national game.

The facts are simple. Out of the 92 clubs in the Premiership and football league, only two have managers who are not white. Norwich’s Chris Hughton and Chris Powell of Charlton are the only exceptions to a statistic that ponders the question – in a football set up where around a quarter of our players are black, why is it that we don’t trust them to take on the most pressurized job of them all? The answer is that we live in an inherently racist society.

It’s an uncomfortable realisation, but the statistics outside of the game back this notion up. In the UK, around 15% of people are not white. Use this figure in comparison with NHS employment figures, where less than 1% are of ethnic minorities, or in the police force, where the figure catapults to a paltry 3.3%, and it raises a question mark over the accepted role of ethnic minorities in UK society. 4.2% is the figure in the judiciary, 2.7% in Parliament. On average, it takes a black officer 18 months longer to be promoted to sergeant than if he is white. Hey, we’re not racist, we don’t mind them being here, but trusted in roles of authority? No thank you – we’ll take the white chap. It’s an awful truth, and it’s just plain wrong.

As was a line rammed down our throats throughout the Olympics – sport is a true reflection of the society traits it lives in. This reflection is never truer than when you consider the number of opportunities for ethnic minorities to excel in roles of responsibility in sport. And it’s not just football. Consider the number of Asian county cricket captains or the number of black fly halves in rugby. It is naïve to expect sport to be any different to a general society that still holds such obvious prejudices against minorities in positions of influence. It’s not that there’s a problem with institutional racism in British football; there’s a problem with institutional racism in Britain.

The self-indulgent idea that football can leapfrog the rest of the country and balance the stakes is fanciful to say the least. The flavour of the month seems to be the implementation of a ‘Rooney Rule’, an NFL initiative that demands that franchises must interview a percentage of minority candidates when coaching roles become available. The rule has been successful (black and Hispanic coaches have risen from 6% to 22% in the NFL since its creation), but you have to consider the context in which it has thrived. Southern state bigotry aside, America is a much more ethnically diverse, racially tolerant nation, and the number of their black and ethnic authority figures replicates this.

Sociological differences are one thing, but the logistics of the rule in British sport are equally chalk and cheese. In America, a poor season is jolly frustrating, but where relegation doesn’t exist and league divisions are assigned by geography alone, the franchisers have more time to draw up a long and socially progressive list of managerial candidates, before perhaps handing the opportunity to someone of lesser experience. A British football team whose search for a coach swells from a few days to a few weeks, could see twelve points and a £30 million place in a higher division slip by. It’s just not the same playing field, and it’s a potential disaster that will not work.

We’re talking about a country where a recent poll suggests that one in three of us consider ourselves to be racist, where recruitment to the National Front is on the rise and where people voted for a BNP politician to represent us in Europe. It’s a country where racial tension is still a massive problem within the very fabrics of its cultural identity.

Racism in football? It’s time we widened our horizons and realised that it is up to the politicians and the sociologists to come up with the answer. It’s time we played the long game.

Small time gimmicks and PR stunts may stave off a re-emergence of some of the nasty incidents suffered over the last year or so, but the thing is – there is very little the FA can do. Their game, our game, is inherently racist and will remain so until the society it imitates is not. It’s difficult to even type, but sadly, racism in football is here to stay.