Richard,

That Daily Mail article that you've posted [today] about racism in English football (The lack of black football managers is not because of racism - Mail Online) is an absolutely disgraceful example of the ignorance perpetuated by that newspaper on a daily basis. Perhaps for some balance you might want to post this article that appear in March of this year in the Guardian (Why aren't there more black football managers? - Guardian) and perhaps this article from the Daily Telegraph from 2008 (Paul Ince sets example for a generation - Telegraph).

Donal Blaney obviously hasn't got a clue what racism even is. Racism is about discrimination based on the colour of one's skin, not about their nationality. It is incredibly ignorant to say that football in England does not suffer from institutional racism because there are a high proportion of managers of that are not British. How can he claim that hiring white men from France or Italy shows that English football does not discriminate based on race? It's just nonsensical.

Blaney also claims that there is a much higher percentage of black players compared to the percentage of people of African descent in the whole country. However, this is a very misleading statement. Professional footballers are largely drawn from lower income families. So, instead of showing the percentage of black people in England as a whole, it would be much more appropriate to show the percentage of black people that occupy the lower income brackets of that society. Admittedly I don't have an official census data to back this up but from my observations as a former resident of London, non-whites probably represent well over half the number of people in London in the lowest income bracket. With this in mind I am willing to wager that the percentage of black people in the lower income brackets in England is at least much closer to to the proportion of professional black English footballers. Which means blacks are not really over-represented as players in England.

Blaney also argues that this larger proportion of black athletes somehow shows that there is no racism involved in the selection of managers. Football managers in England are almost exclusively drawn from the pool of former professional players. So, if approximately 25% of the pool of potential football managers are black, why has there been only a handful of black British managers in the top four levels of the game? Surely, all things being equal, the number of managers would be somewhere closer to 25%, but it's not even close to 1%!

Reducing the issue of racism to only incidents of name calling trivializes the issue and allows individuals within a society to distance themselves from any responsibility for the problem. Yes, of course, you should always challenge someone making racial slurs, but institutional racism is RIFE in football and this is the underlying reason that on-field racist acts persist. I personally believe that British white players and fans will be far less likely to think of using racial slurs in their songs and chants if more people in positions of power, like the manager and the owner, are non-white. I would love to see a collection of recent photographs of various English Board of Directors meetings to see how many non-whites are involved in those groups. Including the FA, the Premier League and the Football League my guess is that the number is pretty close to none.

Sincerely,

Martin Rose