Pitch Black (26 page)

At the start of the season, Johnson had been informed that he was to be fifth choice centre-back and in September, with Derby already struggling, he was loaned out to Sheffield
Wednesday. Johnson had been a regular in their promotion-winning season and had been a fans’ favourite. The decision to loan him to Sheffield Wednesday became increasingly baffling as Derby’s defence proved very accommodating to Premier League sides.

When he arrived at Wednesday, they had made the worst start in their history, losing the opening six games. Johnson was thirty-four and manager Brian Laws showed tremendous faith in him, allowing him the responsibility of making organisational changes on the pitch. With regular playing time, Johnson played some of his best football for many years. Wednesday won their first two games with their new defender in the side and would go on to avoid relegation on the last day of the season. His impact was such that he had begun to discuss a permanent eighteen-month contract with Wednesday, which Johnson, now approaching thirty-five, would have given his right arm to sign. However, these plans had to be shelved as a number of events conspired against him. Derby, shell-shocked and unable to string together decent results and performances upon their return to the Premier League, faced an injury crisis and Johnson was recalled in December 2007, thus ending what was supposed to be a six-month loan after only three months. On his return, he appeared as a first-half substitute and was met with rapturous applause from the Derby faithful and chants of ‘One Michael Johnson’. The following week threw up one of those anomalies that seem to appear regularly in football and he again made a first-half substitute appearance as Derby were drawn away at Sheffield Wednesday. Johnson received his second rapturous welcome in two games, this time from Sheffield Wednesday fans.

However, things had changed at Wednesday. The chairman
had resigned, so the discussions on the possibility of a permanent contract at the club had been curtailed without any formal offer on the table. He was loaned out to Notts County, where he had started his career, but his experience at Wednesday had made him think seriously about impending retirement and how he was going to spend it.

The responsibility he had been given under Laws at Wednesday had made him keen to pursue a career in coaching. He remained at Notts County until the end of the 2007/08 season and in the process scored his first goal for the club, some sixteen years after making his debut for the team. He was now out of contract at Derby and signed a twelve-month deal with County on condition he would coach the under-21 squad. At the end of the 2008/09 season he retired to take a role as head of youth development at the club.

County had abolished their youth system as part of a cost-cutting exercise some two years earlier and much against the wishes of its supporters, so Johnson’s first task was to establish a structure that could nurture young players and provide home-grown players for the youth team.

He had no players and no coaches, so first set about identifying and hiring good-quality youth coaches. He then established a number of training camps in Nottingham and the surrounding area to identify young talent and recruit them to the programme. The first year was a struggle as the programme was being established, but by the second year the youth team missed out on winning the league by a single point and reached the quarter-finals of FA Youth Cup, where they were knocked out by a Liverpool team featuring Raheem Sterling and Andre Wisdom.

In spite of his success, Johnson was soon removed from his post. The club recruited Martin Allen as first-team
manager and, naturally in those circumstances, a new manager would wish to bring in his own backroom staff. Allen was no different, but, critically, he wanted to bring in his own people not just for the first team, but also to oversee the youth set-up, a move that in this day and age is highly unusual. Youth development at the club was in dire need of consolidation and stability, given that the existing structure was only two years old, but nonetheless, the chief executive of the club agreed to Allen’s requests, Johnson was paid up for the few months left on his contract and he left to be replaced by the under-12s coach, who had less experience and fewer qualifications. Six months later, Allen was sacked and before long the youth set-up that Johnson had worked so diligently to establish was in tatters, mired in controversy and facing a police inquiry and the intervention of social services.

In May 2013, Brett Adams and Lee Broster resigned from their posts as youth coaches at Notts County following allegations of racist bullying and abuse. Adams was alleged to have thrown a banana at a black youth team player with the words ‘fuck off’ written on it, before telling the youngster to ‘fuck off and eat it’.

In response to hearing rap music in the changing room, Broster is alleged to have said, ‘No wonder you black lads always go around stabbing people when you listen to music like that,’ and, on another occasion, switched off the lights in a room and said, ‘Make sure you black lads smile so I can see you.’

Adams and Broster resigned after an internal club investigation but the club was subsequently criticised by Nottingham Social Services for the way it carried out its inquiry, in particular for paying insufficient attention to protecting the
children and young people who had made the allegations and for not involving the local authority sooner.

The incident is amongst the most serious issues not just of racial prejudice but of safeguarding and child protection, and while the club acted promptly, the FA didn’t use the opportunity to provide guidelines to clubs in handling such matters.

Since leaving Notts County, Johnson has applied for numerous jobs and has been unsuccessful in obtaining a coaching role. He has the UEFA A Licence, B Licence and Pro Licence, the highest-level qualifications in professional football. He has established a youth academy at a professional football club from scratch and made it competitive and successful. He has applied for roles as first-team coach, assistant manager and as youth team coach and has never had an interview. His applications for jobs have also been realistic in so far as he hasn’t applied for roles vacant at Manchester City or United, Arsenal, Chelsea or indeed any other Premier League club, but rather for roles at Championship level and below. He has taken advice to update his CV, developed new networks, attended workshops, participated in forums, taken additional professional development opportunities, attended training courses and gone and watched training sessions to pick up fresh ideas and tips and to increase his profile, but to no avail. His experience as a Premier League player, international footballer and successful and qualified youth coach leaves the game shorn of his talents, and Johnson himself frustrated.

Johnson has since gone on to become a vigorous campaigner for more black coaches in the game. He was appointed to the FA’s Inclusion Advisory Board in January 2014, but resigned when it emerged that he had said in a BBC interview in 2012 that he would not support a Football
Association campaign against homophobia ‘because of my beliefs, because of the Bible that I read, in the Bible it does state that homosexuality is detestable unto the Lord’.

Johnson has since changed his position. At the time, he had just started his Christian journey and was reading Old Testament scripture. He now believes that homophobia is incompatible with Christianity and that Christian teachings mean that God made man in his own image, which can mean gay or straight, black or white. He asserts that the FA could have used the incident to highlight the problem of homophobia, and that he would participate in any initiative to tackle the issue.

Along with Jason Roberts, Johnson launched a report in November 2014 entitled ‘Ethnic Minorities and Coaching at Elite Level in England: A Call to Action’, based on research by the Sports People’s Think Tank. The report found that at the ninety-two professional clubs there were nineteen BME coaches out of 552 senior positions, representing 3.4 per cent of the total.

Amongst much else, the report recommended that 20 per cent of coaches in professional football in England should be from BME backgrounds by 2020 and that urgent action was needed to address the fact that less than 1 per cent of senior administrators and governors are black.

For Johnson and other black players, they feel the game demonstrably wants their talents as footballers but doesn’t view them as managers. The stereotypes that the early generation of black players did so much to challenge – those images of them as lacking the intelligence to be given the responsibility to provide the tempo and creative hub of a side – now appear to work to prevent them from progressing into football management.

Upon retirement, Paul Davis could have continued his career in someone’s midfield, trying to get on the ball, moving it along, picking the right passes, making himself available and occasionally watching the net bulge as he put that sweet left foot to good use or employed that somewhat underrated heading ability. He had offers to continue playing, but he’d always wanted to be a coach at Arsenal and wanted to work at the top end of the coaching hierarchy. He got his preliminary coaching badges at age seventeen, even before he got into the first team, and completed his coaching training towards the end of his playing career. He got a job at Arsenal’s academy, where he would help in overseeing the development of players like Ashley Cole, and he was happy to have such a great experience. He was doing well and was confident in his ability to transfer his talents to the elite players. After seven years in the same role at Arsenal’s academy, the ambitions Davis had to move up the coaching ladder were continuously frustrated by the club hierarchy. Pigeonholed as a developer of the youngest players, and constantly overlooked for higher-level coaching roles, he couldn’t see any way out of the impasse and he walked away from the club he loved, where he had been since he was thirteen.

Davis has been unable to find a coaching job, except for a brief, ill-fated stint as Paul Gascoigne’s assistant at non-league Kettering, and his talents and experience have gone criminally to waste. Davis has long since given up trying to find a coaching role and now works for the PFA in a coach education role, where he puts former players through their qualifications and get them employed.

Davis’s experience of the glass ceiling that affects black
coaches is borne out by the Sports People’s Think Tank research, which showed that black coaches are overwhelmingly operating at academy level or in community programmes, rather than in high-level coaching positions. The higher up the coaching ladder you go, the less likely you are to see black coaches or managers.

IN APRIL
2014, Norwich City manager Chris Hughton was sacked from his job. This would have been a relatively unremarkable event in a season that had seen a number of high-profile sackings in an increasingly impatient club management culture. Hughton’s side had been languishing near the bottom of the Premier League for most of the season and the sacking was a last-ditch and ultimately futile attempt by the board to keep Norwich in the top flight. However, what was distinguishable about the event was it now meant that there was not a single black manager in any of the four divisions within English football.

At the start of the 2013/14 season, a decision on the proposal for an English version of the ‘Rooney Rule’ had been quietly dropped from the debate amongst the seventy-two Football League chairmen, without resolving the issues behind the under-representation of black coaches and managers that had led to the promotion of the rule. The Rooney Rule was named after Dan Rooney, the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers of the US National Football League.
In response to the fact that, while some 70 per cent of pro footballers were black, that figure dropped to only 28 per cent amongst assistant coaches and 6 per cent amongst head coaches, the NFL introduced a rule requiring that for each coaching position, a minority candidate had to be interviewed. Since the rule was introduced in 2003, the number of black head and assistant coaches has increased dramatically. Cyrus Mehri, a US-based lawyer and the architect of the scheme, has spent a great deal of time discussing how such a scheme might be implemented in the UK, helping to promote the Coaching Fair Play strategy, designed to work along similar lines.

If the Football League’s lack of action was designed to end these discussions, it was to fail miserably.

The same circular counterarguments rumbled. Some arguments against the rule were legitimate, but its opponents were unable or unwilling to put forward any viable proposals to address the under-representation of black footballers at managerial level. The counterarguments could be characterised as falling into four broad categories. These were: that there was no real problem; that some form of footballing meritocracy would see black managers emerge in the future; that the proposals were discriminatory; and that the proposals were tokenistic. Of these, the issue of tokenism was a genuine and legitimate argument for abandoning the rule, given that it opened the door for black managers being invited for interview merely for show, abiding by the letter but not the spirit of the new rule.

There have been some desperate arguments put forward in the press. Those of the
Daily Mail
’s Martin Samuel are only examples and it would be unfair to suggest that he is the sole culprit, but his arguments require some dissection.
His main argument is that chairmen need to hire quickly as the wait could cost points that could ultimately be the difference between success and failure.

However, the manager is the most important employee of the club. It’s crucial to get the right person for the job, and perhaps if the hiring process were more rigorous, with more attention paid to meeting specific skill requirements, chairmen would be more likely to make the right appointment in the first place. In those circumstances, black coaches would be less frustrated, happier that the process was open and transparent, and more easily persuaded to consider a career in coaching. Secondly, a proper selection procedure might make chairmen less trigger-happy. They might learn from the example of Charlton from 1991 to 2006: Alan Curbishley took them into the top flight early in his leadership, only to face relegation at the end of the season. The board gave a lesson in sticking by a manager, and Curbishley repaid the favour by taking them back to the top in 2000. Since then the club have had seven managers and are no nearer getting their status back.

According to Samuel, for the lack of black managers to be the result of prejudice, ‘we first have to believe one thing: that the chairmen of football clubs would deliberately undermine their chances of success rather than employ a black man’. Here he gives chairmen and other decision-makers far too much credit. As Samuel himself pointed out when he severely criticised the FA appointment of Roy Hodgson over Harry Redknapp to the England manager’s role because Hodgson was safe and mediocre, the wrong person can easily be employed, not least when an organisation is ‘devoid of ambition’, to use Samuel’s description of the FA.

Almost twenty years had passed since Frank Clark had asked black coaches to bide their time and it had been over twenty-five years since Viv Anderson had been appointed as the only black manager. In the intervening years, the number of black coaches remained chronically low. The sacking of Hughton immediately reignited the debate as to how to address the lack of black coaches in the game.

As we have seen, the 2014/15 season kicked off without a single black manager in any of the four English divisions. In September, Chris Powell was appointed as manager of Huddersfield Town and later that month Keith Curle was appointed as manager of Carlisle United.

The first group of black British footballers had struggled to break down the stereotypes that had been foisted upon them and had challenged the perceived notions about them. Black footballers had been cast for their skill, speed, strength and athleticism. The compliments they received for their ‘natural athleticism’ barely masked the racist undercurrent of blacks as primal, exotic and operating on instinct alone. They were perceived as lacking discipline, ‘bottle’ and the required intellect. It was this perceived lack of intellectual skills that continued to impede the progress of black managers. Leadership, delegation, relationship building and, above all, strategic thinking and tactical awareness were the qualities that were thought to be missing from the make-up of black managers, and that a slew of coaching and managerial qualifications failed to make up for. Today, a game in which the participation of black people as players is celebrated and promoted cannot seem to bring itself to apply the rules it promotes on the pitch to the level of club management and the boardroom. A number of highly respected and extremely capable black administrators have proved their ability, yet
their talents are rarely called upon. Despite their knowledge and experience in the game, their ability to manage areas of significant responsibility and the management of large budgets and of colleagues, their experiences are very rarely acknowledged as something that would be beneficial for clubs, associations and governing bodies.

It was for all these reasons and more that the Coaching Fair Play initiative gained support when it was first touted.

The campaign to address the under-representation of black managers has highlighted other inequalities in the game. The issue of black fan participation remains one of the game’s biggest challenges and is linked to issues around grassroots football. The other issue of representation at administrative and boardroom level is likely to emerge as a key concern when the dust begins to settle over the issues of black managers. The same arguments that were used to oppose strategies to increase the representation of black footballers will be familiar to those currently campaigning to increase the racial diversity of football coaches. The football authorities have, with a few honourable exceptions, always demonstrated a reluctance to embrace change as far as the increase in diversity is concerned, but they have shown they are able to move rapidly when commercial interests dictate. All-seater stadiums and moving match kick-off times to suit broadcasters are two examples of how quickly change can be implemented, when there is the will to do so. Change in the diversity of those charged with making the key decisions as to how clubs or the sport are managed is likely to be met with similar levels of resistance.

The early support for Coaching Fair Play demonstrated in microcosm how far issues of racism have developed within the English game. On one hand, the issue is a hot
topic within football circles, due to the refusal of anti-racist campaigners to allow the issue to die. Instances of overt racism are largely dealt with, albeit often crudely or tentatively: football culture is no longer willing to tolerate such behaviour and, in that sense, football has progressed. On the other hand, black people within the game still require progress around equality and access to roles within the game, outside of the pitch, training ground and dressing room.

Coaching Fair Play offers a path for promoting more lasting equality in the game and providing former black players with an opportunity to prove they possess the requisite intellect to coach and manage – and that battle continues, both within the game and outside it. Those opposed to the Rooney Rule have offered no alternative ideas on how to tackle under-representation at coaching and managerial level, other than to wait for some, as yet undefined, period of time. And where the football authorities have consistently failed ever since black footballers became a feature of English football is in the area of leadership. They have always been reactive and always been embarrassed into taking action in tackling racism, so much so that they have always been a key part of the problem. The game’s leadership, the FA, the Football League and the Premier League, have failed to take the lead in furthering and promoting issues of anti-racism and equality and generating a healthy debate and discussion around representation. As the lead custodians of the game, it is ultimately their responsibility to provide a culture within the game where black people can play with dignity and respect, without vile abuse from the terraces or lazy pronouncements about their ability from managers, chairmen or fellow professionals. It is also their responsibility to support equality and take the lead in ensuring their committees and structures
are sufficiently diverse to ensure that a range of different perspectives are brought to bear when key decisions are being made. They are not in a position to demand that clubs address issues of racial inequality when they fail to put their own house in order, and therefore, in the absence of any such leadership worthy of the name, the Rooney Rule will almost certainly be adopted in some form, in spite of its flaws.

Football has had a huge impact on race relations in this country, sparking parliamentary inquiries into racism and causing public figures across the political spectrum to publicly condemn racial abuse. Through formal initiatives, such as Kick It Out and Show Racism the Red Card, and informal discourse, football has been responsible for drawing widespread public attention to issues of race. For all that still remains to be done in order to mirror black players’ participation on the pitch with that off it, fundamental changes have been made. The far-right groups who have used football as a means of increasing their profile and to recruit to their ranks have been utterly and thoroughly routed. They may still occasionally come out of retirement to wreak disquiet when the England team play abroad, but the days of publishing racist league tables are over. More casual racists can no longer hide behind the activities of the organised far right, and are now policed by more enlightened stewarding and fellow fans unwilling to tolerate racist abuse. In fact, for football supporters, racist abuse is likely to be vilified on fan forums and message boards where it occurs at games; the accusation of racism is now a stick with which to attack your opponents and to denigrate your fiercest rivals.

While the football authorities and the media claim progress has been made, the reality is that both the football authorities and the media have, to a large degree, been part
of the problem. The movement, such as it was, came from black players themselves, and the impact of that movement has extended beyond football and sport more generally. Football exerts a huge cultural and social influence in Britain and beyond. Whether that influence is too great is a fruitful debating point, and its influence on the career and educational aspirations of black boys and young men is another important discussion to be had about the game’s impact, but there is no question that that influence can be used for good as well as evil. The stereotypes that continue to bedevil black footballers – that they aren’t clever enough, they can’t lead, they don’t work hard, and can’t handle the pressure – will continue to be confronted and overcome, because black footballers have come too far to stop now.

The authorities once tried to characterise racism as a normal part of the game: seeking to make it normal absolved the authorities from having to deal with it, putting the onus back on to black players.

When Bobby Barnes was an apprentice at West Ham, like the other apprentices, he received free tickets for home games. Barnes was so concerned about the possibility of being racially attacked as he left the ground, he used to leave early and sprint all the way along Green Street, not stopping until he got a mile away from the ground, where he could relax. Upton Park was one of the grounds where black players knew they were going in to be for a stormy time. It was an intimidating place, with the crowd close to the pitch, and a belligerent welcome was routinely generated for opposition teams. For black players there was a particularly hostile reception.

Barnes grew up idolising Pelé and the great 1970 Brazilian side – the team that had the single most important impact on the progress of black footballers in Britain. There isn’t one black footballer who began playing professionally in the 1970s and early ’80s who wasn’t inspired by their achievements. They were a predominantly black team who played a brand of football radically different from anything around at the time; they were all-conquering and their best player was black. For budding players raised on the increasingly sterile, functional and bland version of the game that was usually served up in Britain, Brazil provided a blueprint for a different style of football. A generation of players found inspiration on sunny fields in Leon and Mexico City. But although Barnes was inspired by Brazilian flair and had Jamaican parents, he was also an east London boy from Leytonstone and his local team was West Ham. Improbably, on 1 April 1972, the Hammers fielded a team that included three black players in Clyde Best, Ade Coker and Clive Charles – an event not emulated in the top flight until the Three Degrees took The Hawthorns, forming the backbone of the best West Brom side since the 1960s. At the time there were probably fewer than ten black footballers playing professional football in England or Scotland, so for three players to be included in one side was quite an achievement.