Matthew Bazell
Whilst many of us strongly oppose the greed and sanitisation of modern football we have to also be pragmatic enough to praise the game on the issues where change has been made for the better. In September this year, MPs singled out football as having a racism problem. Now, Parliament might be a beautiful structure built of solid material but it’s a metaphorical glass house full of stone throwers. A paper brought out by MPs highlighted the lack of ethnic diversity at management and administration level. Indeed, if you are going to address a racism issue in football you would start there. To quote Les Ferdinand “I watch our [Spurs] games from the Directors box. 99% of the time I’m the only black person in there”. But this is the business side of the game, and it’s no surprise that the people who run football tend to look the same as the people who run other global corporations. This simply reflects a wider society issue, therefore are we going to hear the MPs give the same message to, for example, the banking industry? I can bet you that a game of park football will be far more racially integrated than an office party held for a typical media or advertising company.
This follows the case of John Terry and Anton Ferdinand which has given fuel to people who brand the game as still being racist. That’s a strong accusation simply because John Terry is an individual and in any industry you cannot account for an individual being a prat. All you can do is punish that person if warranted and in John Terry’s case the FA acted accordingly by stripping him of his England captaincy. Let’s get some perspective here: in the 1970s and 1980s black players had bananas thrown at them along with monkey chants from some ironically un-evolved creatures. The kind of folk that would have given Charles Darwin a few sleepless nights before releasing The Origin of the Species. In the time since then, we’ve seen an industry massively improve its act to a degree where change is clearly measurable. In the same period of time the demographic of Parliament hardly changed. For example, the Labour Party brands itself as being the party of tolerance, yet thirteen years of power and Paul Boatang was the only black man to have held a ministerial position. A person with nine missing fingers can count on their hands how many black Conservative MPs there have been. Yes David Cameron does have black pals who he invites round his house for tea, but they usually tend to be heads of state. So we’ve seen no change in Parliament during the period of time when football tacked a racism problem and for the better part succeeded. If the game mirrored the House of Commons, Viv Anderson would still be the only black man to have ever played for England.
No-one is saying that there is no problem, but let’s just be aware of the hypocrisy of those who take the high ground when they themselves provide such an appalling example. Government and media institutions that point the racism finger at football, need to take a hard look at their own industries before throwing stones. Honesty, it’s like Gary Glitter saying “Society has a paedophile problem which really needs to be addressed”
Matthew Bazell is the author of Theatre of Silence: the Lost Soul of Football
