I noticed that it's rare enough for African national teams to have black managers. That can't be helpful. Personally, I don't see a barrier to someone who's good enough in England regardless of colour. However, I suspect things are not exactly the same worldwide.

Red and Blue Army!

In a similar vein, can anyone tell me why we don't get more black fans? Black people obviously love football, just look at our players right through the CPFC system. So why do we get so few black fans?

Judging by the number of black fans in pubs watching Arsenal / Man United etc. (I am thinking of Lewisham) it's not lack of interest more likely it's lack of money.

I would suspect that senior players at the end of their career who are interested in coaching start networking with their club's coaches seeking career advice and opportunities. In many cases they join a smaller club as a player on the basis they will be allowed to coach at some level.

It does seem that black players don't want to do this? I remember one PL owner complaining that he was approached by a world famous black player about being their manager. He offered him a junior coaching position as he had zero experience at any level and the guy was offended he thought he would walk straight into the job.

I think that Pat has proven that if you put the effort in and do the badges you will get a chance at some level, after that it's up to you.

Edited by Badger11 (25 Oct 2022 6.10pm)

One more point

Apparently, it's fine for black players to be massively over represented as football players...way way over their percentage in the population, but it's not fine for them to be under represented off the pitch.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

This article is fairly standard stuff as far as the BBC sports desk is concerned nowadays; disproportionate attention to the same old subject matter, covered to a fairly low intellectual standard and exclusively through the prism of identity politics.

As others have said, if you're determined to categorise people only by their race (a preoccupation that used to be the exclusive domain of racists, but which now underpins the 'woke' philosophy) then you could just as easily point out the disproportionate number of black players, and even managers, in relation to the population, or take the same stats as evidence of a failure to launch within the 'black community' (whatever the hell that phrase even means), but of course that's not how the BBC present it.

Notwithstanding, I do take the point that as most managers are former players, the ratio of black players to managers is noticeable. What I can't abide, however, is the practice of starting with a conclusion (it's all down to racism) rather than investigating the matter objectively. We get nowhere like that, in football or wider society.

Regarding football management vacancies, my instinct is that football is too competitive and valuable an industry to deliberately restrict its own access to talent by discounting people based on race. Clubs hire and fire people from all over the world at a rate of knots in pursuit of even the slightest advantage in management, coaching, technical and support staff. Club owners come from all over the world, from lots of cultures and industries, and the idea they would all, despite their different backgrounds and fierce competition with each other nevertheless conspire to restrict opportunities for black candidates, even when those candidates might add value and give them an advantage worth tens of millions, just doesn't stack up.

Ultimately however, as with any aspect of life, we can only understand whether there is a problem if the matter is properly and scientifically investigated. How many black applicants were there for vacancies in management? What were thier scores at interview compared to other candidates? Is there a correlation showing high scores at interview but failure to get job offers? If you don't have this information then you can only guess, or worse, presume. Which leads back to the BBC.

The tragedy here is that the BBC doesn't need to be an ideological echo chamber. It doesn't have to pander to a particular political mindset, because it doesn't have to sell its product, and is still read by a range of people, if only because we've all paid for it already anyway. It could be head and shoulders above the rest of the mainstream media just because of that freedom, be the place we all go to and trust to set out not only the facts, but the contrasting ways one could assess those facts. It could raise the general standards of public discussion.

Instead we get this same old fixed-position bollocks, and more sadly still, people like Vieira, who are willing and able to articulate their thoughts, are denied access to the reasonable counter arguments that might develop thought and understanding, as are we in turn. The conversation just never happens, and we all miss out.

A lot, if not most women will go for status if they can get it. High status males will mostly go for beauty.....at the high end ethnicity becomes tradable depending upon the individuals and the crowd they mix in.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)