One third of the players in the premier league are from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at the top of the game.
And where better to start than with the chairman of the Englsih Football Association Greg Clarke.
In comments to the culture and sport select committee in parliament yesterday, he managed to offend almost everyone.
Girls scared of getting hurt by the ball says Clarke
He wrote-off half of humanity when he claimed that girls and women were scared of getting hurt by the football.
Tell that to Megan Rapinoe!
Being gay a ‘life choice’ says Clarke
He then moved on to gay people, where he said sexuality was a “life choice”.
Racist generalisations about Asian fans and players
As for people from South Asian backgrounds, he reckons they are more interested in being a doctor or accountants, which apparently is meant to explain why there are so few Asian people involved at the higher levels of the game.
According to Clarke, there’s “a lot more South Asians than there are Afro-Caribbeans” in the FA IT department because “they have different career interests”.
“Coloured” like its 1950 or apartheid South Africa
And just to cap it off he decided to deploy the racist 1950s word coloured to descrribe black people.
This all comes after months of Black Lives Matter movement protests.
This is after the FA claimed to be supporting the cause of racial equality by urging players and clubs to get behind taking the knee.
The sad truth is that the people who run the game are far behind the times and need to be cleared out wholesale.
Players should strike action against Football Association’s racist bosses
It is not surprising when people like Clarke are running the game that such little progress has been made on diversity. There are still just three non-white managers in the whole of the professional game.
Fans – black and white – deserve better than this.
BLMM urges black players and their white colleagues to demand that this happens and to threaten strike action until it does.
As campaign group Kick it Out has pointed out, the FA launched its diversity code just a couple of weeks ago – it’s such a shame the FA don’t follow it!