Former Brighton & Hove Albion manager Chris Hughton has urged English soccer’s stakeholders to develop a framework that would provide coaches from minority backgrounds with more opportunities to take up senior positions.
Hughton’s comments come in the wake of worldwide protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis on May 25.
“Over the years ... there were so many BAME coaches who would apply for jobs and not even get an interview,” Hughton told the Guardian, referring to coaches from black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds.
Photo: Reuters
“If you are looking at the makeup of our stakeholders and they are without ethnicity, it doesn’t make things easier,” Hughton said.
“There is no doubt that our stakeholders have a responsibility. We have to set things in place to encourage more BAME coaches to want to take their badges,” he said.
The English Football League last year said that clubs would interview at least one BAME candidate for first-team managerial positions, but Hughton said that the decision might not lead to more equality in the sport.
“I would have no doubt that a lot of people would use it as a sticking plaster: ‘I will interview at least one BAME person for the job because I have to,’” Hughton said.
“What I would rather have is for everybody to use it in the right way. This has to lead to BAME individuals in positions of real authority,” he said.
NOT ONLY SOCCER
In rugby union, England prop Ellis Genge has echoed Manchester City winger Raheem Sterling’s call for increased representation for minorities in senior coaching positions in sport.
“The issue in rugby is it has been a white man’s game for a number of years. There’s not really many black coaches or ethnic coaches, especially here in England,” Genge told the BBC.
“I don’t think people are commercialized, especially the black and African boys in rugby, or women, to be icons, we are not presented like that,” he said.
Genge, who has won 16 caps, said that he and England coach Eddie Jones, who was born to a Japanese-American mother, were subjected to racial abuse during their tour of South Africa in 2018.
“I remember after a game we were walking through one of the tunnels, and they started hurling racist abuse at myself and a few of the other ethnic boys, and Eddie himself,” the 25-year-old said. “It is still very rife, especially in sport.”
Demonstrators in Bristol last week pulled down the statue of a 17th-century slave trader, and Genge said that their actions were “warranted after 10 years of asking.”
“I’ve got a lot of black family in Bristol and we’re all proud Bristolians, but at the same time, we didn’t want a big statue in the middle of a slave trader,” he said.
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