Racism in English Football and the Rooney Rule (Part 2)

In Part One I concluded with two digressions: a thought experiment about Wayne Rooney and an expressed intent to watch Clarke Carlisle’s documentary “Is Football Racist?”  The Wayne Rooney question requires no further discussion.  It was intended to make people think.  There is no right answer.

The documentary was quite interesting and I highly recommend it.   It can be found here.   Not surprisingly, Carlisle concluded that there was racism in football—even though he never personally experienced it.  He also appeared to conclude that the problem was worse in some other countries than it was in England—no doubt true.  The most interesting part of the documentary to me was the examination of the discrimination against English players of Asian descent.  Apparently, even today many clubs will not sign such players.  Some articles on the subject can be found here, here, and here.    

I never intended to focus my discussion on this issue specifically on discrimination against any one minority.  If racism is a problem and, obviously, I think it is, the problem should be addressed for all minorities who are subject to such discrimination.  In fact, any solution should not be limited to discrimination against racial minorities.  If English football is discriminating against gay people, that should stop.  If women want to become coaches, managers, or referees they should be stopped by their inability to do the job, not by a refusal to hire them in the first place.

Having established, at least to my satisfaction, that racism and other forms of discrimination exist in English football, my next two questions were whether the football authorities should try to fix that problem and, if so, whether the Rooney Rule is an appropriate remedy.  To address these questions, I must explain the Rooney Rule.

Many people think that the Rooney Rule involves some kind of racial quota.  Therefore, they oppose the rule because they claim that any kind of racial preference is wrong. I do not agree with that claim, but it does not matter because the Rooney Rule does not involve a hiring quota. Instead, as implemented in the NFL, the Rooney Rule simply requires that every time there is a vacancy at the head coach level or in high-level management, the NFL club must interview at least one minority candidate for the job.  They are not required to hire the minority candidate and, most of the time, they do not.  Nevertheless, since the implementation of the Rooney Rule, the percentage of NFL head coaches who are black has gone up.  Before the rule was implemented eleven years ago, there had only been seven minority head coaches in the entire history of the league.  Since that time, 17 of the 32 NFL teams have hired at least one minority head coach.    However, that total is somewhat deceptive because, as of now, the total number of minority NFL head coaches has just gone from seven to 20.    In 2013, there were eight head coaching vacancies, but no minority hires.  The NFL responded by creating an advisory panel of high profile people to put together a short list of qualified minority candidates each year to be distributed to team owners. In 2014, two of the seven head coaches hired in the off season were minorities.

Logically, if some form of the Rooney Rule were implemented in English football, it would require teams to interview a least one minority candidate for each managerial opening, but it would not require a minority hire.   One possible problem with this rule is that it might be illegal.  This is not a trivial claim.

Clearly, racism is far more legal in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom.  Criminal charges were filed against John Terry for his allegedly racist statements.  Had such statements been made by a player during an NFL game, the player probably would have been penalized, fined, and suspended, but he would not have faced criminal charges.  In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution protects our right to say racist things to anyone we want at virtually any time.  I am free to publically call the President of the United States the N-word repeatedly with no fear of legal consequences unless I was making a serious threat to him.  On the other hand, I am not sure it would be legal for me to use that word at all in England even in a discussion like this.  (But maybe it would be ok.  See here.)

Over the past 40 plus years, there have been various affirmative action programs in United States which were designed to make up for the racism of society and past discrimination by giving racial preferences in hiring, school admissions, and other areas to minorities.  Based upon my understanding of British law, such affirmative action plans would not have been legal in the United Kingdom—until the passage of the Equity Act 2010.  (My understanding of the relevant law is based primarily upon a brief review of the Equity Act website (here) and a Law Review Article from the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal entitled “Red Card: Using the National Football League’s ‘Rooney Rule’ to Eject Race Discrimination from English Professional Soccer’s Managerial and Executive Hiring Practices” by Jeremy Corapi—found here.)   

However, even now the legality of preferential hiring in England is dubious.   Take, for example, these two illustrations from the Equity Act:

A police service which employs disproportionately low numbers of people from an ethnic minority background identifies a number of candidates who are as qualified as each other for recruitment to a post, including a candidate from an under-represented ethnic minority background. It would not be unlawful to give preferential treatment to that candidate, provided the comparative merits of other candidates were also taken into consideration.

An employer offers a job to a woman on the basis that women are under-represented in the company’s workforce when there was a male candidate who was more qualified. This would be unlawful direct discrimination.

Given these two examples, I do not know how any English employer would ever feel safe admitting that they hired someone preferentially based upon their race, ethnic background, or gender.  However, the Rooney Rule avoids this problem because it simply asks the club to hire the most qualified person they interview, after interviewing at least one minority candidate. The effectiveness of the rule is dependent upon breaking the cycle where by the (mostly) white club owners and board members hire from the group of people they know—white footballers.

The fact that the Rooney Rule appears to have been at least a partial success in the NFL does not mean that it would work in English football.  There are a number of significant differences between the United States and the NFL when compared with England and the English football leagues.  Minorities are a much higher proportion of the population in the United States than they are in England—36.3% according to the 2010 census as reported by Wikipedia here.  We view people as members of a minority both by race, if they are not white, and by ethnicity if they are Hispanic or Latino.  Functionally, this means that people whose national origin is from any country south of the USA border are considered minorities—although technically Hispanic would also refer to people from Spain, but not people from Portugal or Brazil, but people from Brazil are still Latino.  This means that, by American standards, the BPL is not doing too badly with minority representation at the managerial level because there are four minority managers:  Roberto Martinez, Manuel Pelligrini, Gus Poyet, and Mauricio Pochettino.  But I digress.

Other differences between the NFL and English football arise out of the financial incentives that are created by the structure of each sport.  The most significant difference is, of course, the existence of relegation and promotion in England and the non-existence of anything like that in the United States.  The Salary Caps and revenue sharing processes in the NFL are also important.  Basically, while no NFL team wants to hire a bad head coach and lose games, hiring a bad head football coach is not the end of the world.  You may have a bad season or two, but the coach cannot permanently cripple your team.  Your club’s revenue will basically remain unchanged because of revenue sharing. In fact, given the preference awarded to bad teams in the annual draft of college football players, there are advantages to being really bad rather than simply being mediocre.

Obviously, in English football the exact opposite is true.  Sustained mediocrity is the goal of some BPL clubs, whereas a single bad year might lead directly to the financial destruction and possible dissolution of your club.

This means that the stakes are relatively higher in English football managerial hiring decisions than they are in NFL hiring decisions.  As a result, it is probably harder to get a club owner or president to consider an untried or inexperienced manager because of the risk it could go disastrously wrong.  For the person making the hiring decision there is the problem of blame.  If you hire Mark Hughes and your team gets relegated you can fall back on the self-evident claim that Mark Hughes was a qualified manager.  If you hire Joe Nobody and you get relegated you have no one to blame but yourself.  You can’t even blame Joe Nobody because you will have already fired him.

When I reached this point in my analysis, I realized that I needed to know where English football managers came from.  In order to determine that, I went through the last five years of managers in the BPL and the Championship and determined what job they held immediately prior to becoming a manger in each of the two respective leagues.  The results of that research can be found on an earlier blog post.    As you can see, BPL manager's prior job was usually as a BPL manager or a manager in the Championship.  The primary prior job for Championship managers other than Championship or BPL manager was League 1 manager.  I chose not to continue to research down to League 1 and League 2 for several reasons.  First, I did not want to spend the time.  Second, the historical information on the identity of those managers was not as readily available.  And, third, I did not believe it was necessary to illustrate my point.

This suggests that the best way to get minorities to be managers in the BPL is to get minorities to be managers in the Championship.  The best way to get minorities to be managers in the Championship is to get minorities to be managers in League 1.  I assume that the best way to get minorities to be managers in League 1 is for them to be managers in League 2.  I don’t know whether the trend would continue all the way down to the bottom of the pyramid.  Quite possibly, at some level it makes more sense to promote a coach or player from the same or higher level to manager than it does to hire the manager of an amateur club.

Nevertheless, this suggests that for the Rooney Rule to be effective, it would have to be imposed in the lower levels of the football league, not just in the BPL.  In fact, one could almost make a case that the rule might be unnecessary at the BPL level because if there were a sufficiently large pool of minority Championship managers, they would inevitably become managers in the BPL either by earning promotion for their teams or in the normal hiring process.

Recently, FIFA Vice President Jeffrey Webb, stated that racism in English football is “right in front of your face. ”   He cited Eddie Newton, an assistant manager at Chelsea when they won the Champions league, who was now working as a Chelsea youth coach, as an example of someone who was qualified to manage but could not get an interview.

Former Birmingham and Derby defender Michael Johnson stated that, since retiring from play in 2009, he had found it impossible to get a job in management, despite having an UEFA Pro license.  He applied for 25-30 coaching jobs and received only three interviews.  

Of course, it is impossible to prove that racism prevented either of these two people from being hired.  It is possible that there was a perfectly good reason for each and every decision that was made not to hire or, even, interview them.  The problem is that if they, and other qualified minority candidates, can’t get interviews, their changes of being hired are virtually non-existent.  If the Rooney Rule were implemented, these two individuals, and others like them, would get interviews and, very likely, some of the individuals making the hiring decisions would choose to hire them.  This is exactly what happened in the NFL.

On the other hand, it may well be that, due to past discrimination, the number of minority English coaches qualified to manager in the BPL, or at least at the very top of the BPL, is quite small.  If, fore example, there literally are no English minority managers who would reasonably be considered to be qualified to manage Manchester United, then there would be no point in requiring Manchester United to interview a minority for the job.  However, this is not true further down the pyramid.  The relatively small number of minority coaches with an UEFA Pro license might explain why few of them get hired to manage a BPL club, but it does not justify not hiring them to manage a League One club where only a lesser license, experience, and skill level is required.

To me this makes the appropriate solution obvious.  The Rooney Rule should be enacted, but it should be phased in starting with League Two.  After a couple of years, the situation should be re-evaluated and unless there is a good reason to change course, the rule should be applied to League One.  Two years later, the Rule should be applied to the Championship.  Unless there is a good reason to change course, the BPL should be next.  In addition, teams should be required or, at least, encouraged to offer their players and coaches any necessary assistance in obtaining more advanced coaching licenses. Further, the English version of the Rooney Rule should apply to all relevant victims of discrimination which would include racial minorities as well as gay people and women.

Of course, there is nothing magical about my choice of two years for each step of the phase in process.  That amount of time sounded reasonable to me, but perhaps one year or three years would be better.  Or maybe, the process should start simultaneously at both League One and League Two. Maybe the rule should apply to all coaching vacancies, not just managerial vacancies.  Those decisions should be made by people more familiar with the system than I.

What is clear to me is that the status quo is both unacceptable and unsustainable.  Pressure for action will mount and, if nothing is done, it will create severe problems for football.  Black players will come to realize that while there has certainly been progress over the past thirty years, they are blocked from any further progress by institutionalized racism.

The football establishment is currently talking like it wants to deal with this problem, but there is a risk in talking about solving a problem—if you don’t eventually take action, your hypocrisy will become clear and the situation will degenerate to where it is worse than if you had just ignored the problem.  The FA will want to avoid that by doing something.  Because it worked to some degree in the NFL, absent a better idea, the Rooney Rule is the most logical something to do.

Note: I apologize for the uneven spacing of the article.  Blogger insisted upon it and I do not edit HTML so I was stuck with it.