Rooney Rule: The system is broken and it needs to be fixed NOW, by Oliver Holt

By Oliver Holt in Mirror Football Blog

Published 22:30 08/09/11

A few years ago, I stood on the touchline at a training pitch, talking to a former Premier League manager.

The conversation turned to one of the best players of the time and the manager began to laugh.

“There are only two things wrong with Thierry Henry,” he said. “He’s French and he’s black.”

Maybe I should have exposed the guy. Maybe I should expose him now. But I don’t really see the point.

He isn’t a bad man. In fact, in every other way, he is someone I have always admired and liked. He is just a product of his generation.

Elements of football in this country are still stuck in that generation. That’s why we have 92 league football clubs and only two black managers.

I would not claim that English football is institutionally racist but I would point out, as our first black manager, Keith Alexander, used to do, that in the vast majority of club boardrooms, you only see white faces.

That is one of the reasons why 25% of our players are black but only 2% of our managers are.

The situation is not improving. In these pages today, Andrew Cole, a player who won the Champions League with Manchester United, reveals his fears about being shunned by the system if he starts applying for managerial jobs.

Sure, there need to be more black and ethnic minority players on coaching courses but if they cannot see the prospect of advancement, they will think there is no point.

So the system is broken. It needs to be fixed. It needs to be helped. There needs to be a structure in place that has a chance of easing the cycle of despair.

The Rooney Rule has worked spectacularly well in the National Football League in the USA.

It ensures that when a head coaching position becomes available, the team has to interview one ethnic minority candidate among other candidates as part of the process.

That’s all. It is not a quota system. It’s not the same as all-women shortlists. Just give someone a chance to state their case and then pick the best person for the job.

Representatives of the Premier League, the Football Association and the Football League heard the case for adopting an equivalent of the Rooney Rule at a meeting in London earlier this week.

They know that something needs to be done to move towards correcting such an obvious injustice.

The first step should be a move towards making the interview process for appointing a new manager more professional and open.

That would favour all candidates because it makes the process more thorough. It would benefit the clubs, too.

It might stop them wasting so many hundreds of millions of pounds on paying up managers they have appointed in haste.

The FA needs to move to give black managers more responsibility within the national set-up.

More work needs to be done to encourage black players to commit to coaching courses and take their badges.

But they need to be given hope that there might be at least the chance of a job at the end of it.

A giant leap forward will come if more enlightened clubs adopt the policy on a voluntary basis.

Every one that does will be a huge victory for progress and a light at the end of the tunnel.

There will be plenty of opposition and some of it will be both crude and bigoted but it is a worthy cause. The injustice has gone on long enough.

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Rooney Rule: Back our Open Goal campaign to encourage more ethnic minority managers in England