The following article appeared in the Daily Mirror 17.12.2008
For the racists saying 'told you so' after Blackburn sack Paul Ince, I've got one simple reply: NFL
I do not believe that Paul Ince was sacked as manager of Blackburn Rovers yesterday because he is of mixed race.
He was dismissed because, under his direction, Blackburn has only won three games this season and lie second bottom of the Premier League.
He was fired because the Premier League is a panic station manned by more than its fair share of boardroom mediocrities.
But I do believe the odds were stacked against Ince from the start, and that his failure highlights the fact that English football faces serious problems with racial stereotyping, problems which it is not prepared to tackle or even admit to.
The facts are simple. There are 92 league clubs in England. Now, only one of them, Macclesfield Town, the same club that gave Ince his first coaching opportunity, has a black manager, Keith Alexander.
And, er, that's it. Roughly 25 per cent of the players in our leagues are black and all we can muster is one black boss.
It's the kind of figure that undermines us when we point to the kind of overt racism that exists within Spanish football.
Nor are there any black chief executives or black chairmen. The executive levels of English football are run by a white monopoly. It's a closed shop.
We can do pornographers, human rights violators and peddlers of cheap sports tat, but the one thing we can't do is a person of a different colour.
Identifying the causes of the problem is more complex. I spoke to a current player yesterday who is taking one of his UEFA 'B' coaching badges. There were 12 people on his course. None was black.
I spoke to another taking his UEFA 'A' badge. There were 30 on that course but only one black player, the former Charlton Athletic and England left back, Chris Powell.
One of the problems, then, is not simply that club chairmen are not selecting black players for managerial jobs. It is also that they do not have many to choose from.
The question moves then to why black players are not enrolling on the coaching courses.
Is it because they don't have any successful role models to emulate, because they have heard too many tales of rejection to want to tread that path themselves?
Or is it because most of them are not interested in management and want to pursue careers in other branches of football?
The second option seems like too much of a generalisation to me, some thing dangerously close to the idea that black players may not have 'the necessities' to make good managers that was once put forward by LA Dodgers general manager Al Campanis 20 years ago.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Ince's sacking, the tragedy of it is that it will reinforce the idea that black players don't have what it takes to make it at the top level of management.
Just like 20 years ago, when there was a widely held belief that African-American NFL players didn't have what it took to be a quarterback.
When it came to directing the play and the playbook, it was whispered, they had limitations. That myth has been exploded now.
In fact, the NFL puts English football to shame in its attempts to give former black athletes a chance to make it into management as well.
Of the NFL's 32 teams, seven have an African-American head coach.
There's Mike Singletary of the San Francisco 49ers, Tony Dungy of the Indianpolis Colts, Lovie Smith of the Chicago Bears, Herm Edwards of the Kansas City Chiefs, Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Romeo Crennel of the Cleveland Browns and Marvin Lewis of the Cincinnati Bengals.
The NFL also has a rule that for every senior position that arises in one of its team - be it the head coach or a position in its front office - a candidate from an ethnic minority has to be included among the list of interviewees.
Sadly, the Premier League is too busy making money and trying desperately not to do anything to upset the status quo to think of doing anything that innovative.
It's not positive discrimination.
There's no obligation to hire the person. It's just giving someone a chance to put his case and try to impress.
The brutal reality is that in England, black former players hardly ever even get that chance.
Now that Ince has been sacked after 17 games at Blackburn, they must wonder if they ever will.
