What do we reckon to this proposal?

Re: Positive Discrimination

The English player rule you refer to is due to EU law.

 

Re: Positive Discrimination

Same thing though isn't it ? They wanted to put rules it place to create more English players, These proposed rules are to create more managers of a certain skin colour.

 

I suppose it's similar aye. It's not race though was my point. It's more that you can't prevent other eu nationalities coming here to work. Don't have to guarantee them interviews/work. But if an employer wants them they can come, restricting the number of jobs available to them places them at a disadvantage for finding work. It's meant to be a free market for its citizens.

 

What if no black manager applies for the position. Do they have drag someone in off the street?

Don't agree with the rule. However, football is racist and black players are not offered the same opportunities to get in to management as white players, but I really don't know what the solution to that is. I just don't think this is it.

 

Carlton Palmer next England manager.

Viv Anderson as his assistant.

 

I think if you were being generous you'd say that it's at the wrong level. I think it's deeply misguided.

It's inarguable that most experienced managers in the country are white (just as they're male). If they want to bring the percentages of BME managers up then you could perhaps do it for coaches, or 'lesser' roles. Only then, eventually, will you get people from minority ethnic backgrounds who are experienced enough to step up to manage a football league club. With this rule you could end up interviewing Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger and Chris Ramsey, which is obviously a nonsense.

If you were intereviewing for a coaching position and it was mandated that if some people who were black applied then you had to interview at least one of them, I think that would make slightly more sense, although I'm still not sure I agree with it. But actually, it goes far deeper than that. It's very easy to think that you can solve inbalances by mandating things like this, but it rarely works. Inequality in this country (and throughout society as a whole) runs so deep that it would require massive changes, at all levels of society, to fix them. Giving Chris Ramsey another managerial position will do absolutely nothing to fix any cultural or structural racism, let alone any issues to do with sexuality, dialect or gender.

 

4 out of 72 managers at football league clubs equates to 5.5%. At the 2011 census, 3.0% of the population described themselves as black/black british. By contrast, 6.9% described themselves as asian/asian british. I can't think of any asian managers in the league off the top of my head (which isn't to say there aren't any). So while you don't want to see discrimination, whether direct or indirect, the evidence doesn't seem to support that there is either.

Incidentally, since when was 'Peter' Scudamore the Premier League Chairman? He is the retired Champion National Hunt jockey!

 

I don't think it is the way forward but can see there is a problem with unacknowledged racism in football beyond a certain level and don't know the solution.

Decent article http://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/dec/14/why-so-few-black-football-managers

 

While everything you have written may be perfectly correct (I don't know the figures, but I'm sure you're right), the percentage of BME football managers compared to the general population can be somewhat misleading.

Football League and Premier League managers are, almost exclusively, ex-professional footballers. There have been a few exceptions over the years, but not enough to be statistically significant. There is zero chance that I, and millions like me who have never played the game at a professional level, will ever become a professional football manager. Comparing the number of black managers to the general population, when the majority of the general population have no hope of ever becoming a football manager, does not help us understand if the number of black people qualified to do the job are offered the same opportunity as white people with a similar background. A far more telling analysis can be achieved by comparing the number of black football managers to the pool from which these managers are drawn.

Again, I don't know the exact figures, but I've just read an article that claims 25% of professional footballers in the English game are BME. This may be an inflated figure, but we all know from watching the game that it's much higher than 3%.

 

Totally against it; in my opinion the only thing worse than discrimination is positive discrimination.

 

It's hugely complex and I'm not sure it is necessarily the right approach but can I ask why so many people are immediately opposed to it when it has been successful in the NFL? The number of black coaches significantly increased - not because they had to be given a job but because they had to be given an interview. They weren't getting interview's before, and once they did those appointed were proving to be the best person for the job.

And as others have said positive discrimination has applied to loads of other situations in Britain for years - top universities to try and encourage white working class applicants, civil service to try and move away from white public school males, people with disabilities who wouldn't get jobs without it, female representation on FTSE 100 boards. In the main all of these are accepted as having had a positive impact on the organisations themselves.

Again, I'm not saying it is definitely the right route, just surprised at how quickly people dismissed it.

 

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In each of the examples you have given, the number of applicants or potential applicants for these positions is huge. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs that are suitable for people with disabilities or places at university or careers in the civil service, and even though the board of directors of FTSE 100 companies is a much more elite group, there are still thousands of positions.

How many realistic candidates are there, world wide, for, let's say, the Man Utd job? A handful at the most? But if a black applicant applies they have to interview him, even if he has no chance of getting the job? For me, that's just tokenism and helps no one.

It seems to me these proposals are asking football to run before it can walk. Hopefully, in the future, some of the candidates who have a realistic chance of the Man Utd job will be black, but that's not the case at the moment. We have to work up to that.

I think a better proposal would be that any club willing to offer a position to an ex-player (or even current player), with no previous coaching experience in a professional capacity, should interview at least one, hopefully more, BME candidate if there are the applicants - for any position from academy coach all the way up to manager. It's not just the role of manager that is under-represented by ex-professional BME players, but all coaching roles in football. When that is addressed, then it can be opened up to all management positions. However, in a few years, as the percentage of BME coaches increases and managerial positions at clubs further down the pyramid are fairly represented by BME managers, legislation probably won't be needed. Clubs certainly don't need legislation to employ BME players, they pick the talent, and that will be the case with coaching and managerial roles once football gets over itself.

The proposed ruling is asking for clubs to interview people who, in most cases, won't have the required experience, due in no small part to discrimination within football for many years. Things need to change, but they have to change from the bottom up, not the top down. Because the career of a footballer is pretty short and there is a high turnover in managerial a coaching positions, changes throughout the system won't take that long.

 

I may be wrong, but my understanding is that you only have to interview someone if they meet the essential criteria for the job. That's certainly been the case in my experience of interviewing and understand that was the premise of the Rooney rule