Actually, it's been pretty flat the last few years with some indications that it is starting to rise again. But it is true that it is far lower than in the late '80's when the crack-cocaine epedemic was at its height.
That is not a very intelligent view to take. By hiring only one race it is implied that no other race can supersede your selection. That then becomes the self affirming defence. Kind of like court house jury always convict the right persons. It is inherintly flawed and closed minded! So too is your racial position that retorts "What black coach was a shoe in for as position, then obviously passed over for someone less qualified?" I can tell you that of the thousands of black players that have acheived excellence from childhood soccer to the highest levels. To be ingnored from head coaching jobs after they leave the professional and national teams is inexcusable. The psychological preference to white skinned persons seems to be a difficult thing for some people in hiring practices to shake. Why is Stuart Pearce, or Coleman at fulham, or the endless list of ex white players given managerial jobs when better black players having acheived excellence are never given these same chances to coach. If you tell me coaching football is rocket science you are an idiot! There are thousands of Brazilian, English, Dutch, French, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Nigerian, players of the finest quality and mind....please there are endless canditates of black skin that have the knowledge and ability to run a football club. Had Bruce Arena been a black man, conveniently another guy would have been a better candidate. Meaning a black Bruce Arena would never have been hired at the University, nor the MLS and damn sure not the National team level. Get the picture. So racial issues are not always hate based! But the impact by those who don´t want to equally respect people of different colors is significant and can be documented. Please don´t forget the Asian footballers, and others that are in the same position always left out very convineiently for the "better choice" caucasion person. The caucasion player deserves a job also...but in this conversation we are speaking about inequality of opportunity!
Because, and this may come as a shock to you, Pearce and Coleman actually bothered to put themselves forward to be managers. For all the talk of the lack of managers from ethnic minorities there are precious few who actually attempt to follow that career path.
There guy that mentioned that made a post about it, or posted on it quite a bit.. "the rooney rule" or what ever it is. Basically.. im all for equal opportunity, but equality is not taking a black coach over a white or hispanic coach because you dont have a choice about it. Equality is taking the best guy for the job. If very few black coaches have all applied for head coaching jobs and didnt have the credentials as the white coach, so sorry, work on you resume and try back at another time. If i was an owner or a GM and the black guy had better credentials hes hired.. i want to win games and who ever gives me the best chance is who i take. In that other thread it was said that Lassiter would like to coach one day, and eddie pope would make a good coach.. However, i dont think they have applied to coach anywhere so how can they be hired that way ?
You, you have solved the entire problem. No other race other than the majority populations, know how to make themselves available for hire. Wow the equality of opportunity problems have just been solved by you. Only caucasions endeaver to make themselves available for administrative football jobs. Wow, you are saying those other races not hired are at fault. Those who "need not apply" are actually at fault, "brilliant". Why didn't the world think of that before. Wow....what reality are you living in? Do you really believe what you wrote or are you just defending your instincts to reason other races out of the same jobs? Listen, everyone including the majority race in any particular country...all deserve equal opportunity for the same jobs. even a 30% hire rate for non majority races at this point would seem like a miracle! Fairness does not need to match population statistics. equal opportunity/Fair is fair. p.s. Stuart Pearce was still playing when they offered him the Premiership job. Kevin Keegan didn't have to fill out an application when he walked off the field as a player. Many, many players are constantly offered managerial jobs. For christs sake Jurgen Klinsman had zero experience and coached in the World Cup Finals!!! I am done...please teach your children to be fair and spread opportunity around. That is all I am saying.
Yet another reason we should all be hugely thankful of DC United. Give it time and I bet they'll sort it out. It's not too hard to imagine a stadium grand opening at Poplar Point with a black former player like United legend Eddie Pope as coach and Henry or Ronaldinho as DP.
I think you're missing the point here. What he's saying is that clubs can only employ those who put themselves forward for the positions. Since UEFA began to enforce its rules that only UEFA qualified staff could take on managerial positions, the clubs' hands are tied regaridng who they can offer positions to. In short, if black players don't take the time to get the qualifications, they can't get the jobs. There's nothing physically stopping black players from going on to become qualified, it's just a lot of them don't seem to be doing it. Whether or not that's down to preconceived notions within the game about who should or should not become a manager I don't know, but what I can tell you is that, in order for there to be more black managers, more black former players need to take the time to get qualified and put themselves forward for jobs. The only thing stopping that from happening is themselves. If you really think that a respected professional such as Patrick Vieira, Thierry Henry or Sol Campbell, would be passed over for a managerial job on the basis of the colour of their skin, you're mad. What needs to happen here is that a precident needs to be set. Once a black manager establishes himself in the Premiership and sets an example, more will surely follow. If anything, what needs to be examined is why, of the many great black players, so few decide to stay in the game after they retire as players. There's no conspiracy here, stop trying to find prejudice and discrimination where there is none.
Paul Ince, a former Middlesborough player, class midfielder and qualified UEFA coach was given a job an Macclesfield. What was Gareth Southgates qualifications when he got the Middlesborough managers job? What are his qualifications at the moment? He has none! Les Ferdinand is currently doing his UEFA coaching course. Will he be given a premiership job straight away? No! If this UEFA rule is so powerful as you say it is, why was it not applied to Southgate? Special circumstances? Yea right! I do believe that racism is on the rise in Europe at the moment. Its reason? I have no clue! Even in my own country unfortunately. My team were playing in the Irish Cup Final this year against St. Pats from Dublin who had a few black players in their team. A fella sitting a few rows behind me shouted "blacks out" and then said to his friend "I hate them". Sitting in front of me was a child wearing a Derry City jersy who was black. Also sitting near us were a bunch of immigrant children who had been taken out for the day by their local youth leaders to watch the game, a lot of whom were also black. My blood was boiling!!! To this day, I hate myself for not turning around and knocking that guy out!
There may not be so much of a problem with racist chanting in the english league at the moment, the last one I can remember was Dwight Yorke being subjected to monkey noises by Blackburn Rovers fans a few years ago. However, when watching on TV I never see black and asian fans in the stadiums accept for Arsenal. Why is that? My girlfriend is from Putney, London and her family are passionatte Fulham fans. Her dd and brother go to a lot of away games and they told me that you very rarely see black and asian people in football stadiums. Her family emigrated from Bosnia during the war and her dad still has the accent and he regularly get dirty looks in the stadiums accept for Craven Cottage. So dont delude yourself by claiming that there is no racism in English stadiums because there must be some sort of an undercurrent if you dont have minority fns in proportion to the local populations.
Good you didnot, because it would do nothing but getting you a lot of trouble. It only makes clear that people with a past of suppression based on race or religion, as in the Irish case with the English, arenot free of it them selves if they get the chance. I remember to watch on Dutch television news in the sixties a row in New York about a black family, the husband was a teacher if my memory serves me right, that wanted to buy a house in a white neighbourhood. One of the people interviewed picketing against the sale of the house to them was a white elderly Jewish woman, who complained that she survived the concentration camps to have to experience this, to have to live with blacks in her space!!! So bigotry is a "fine" trait that runs through all people and no experience undergone themselves will free them from it, unfortuately.
Yea exactly! There is no nationaliy that is completley free from racism or religous hatred and people who come out with rubbish like "we dont have that problem" is deluding themselves.
Southgate was a long-serving player for Middlesbrough, deemed to have the right "character" for the job. As I said earlier, most managerial decisions with regard to new managers are made on gut instinct. Such decisions are prone to all sorts of bias, conscious or otherwise. You can bet any manager who has success, whether he's white or not, will be looked at by any board higher up looking for a new boss. in a nutshell.
Oh, I see where you're coming from. You think everyone's racist. It's a little thing called the truth, you can try to deny it all you want. Life doesn't revolve around sets of numbers. Does the England team reflect the ethnic makeup of England? PS. Pearce was already at the club at the time, had expressed a wish to become a manager again and as a result got the job. So? The thing they have in common is that they expressed an interest in being a manager. They got their jobs partly through their stature. Now given that you such a firm believer that English football is inherently racist I'm sure you'd like to provide us with some proof as to your accusations.
Fan, singular. He was banned for life. I was going to reply, but there's only one place for this post.
PRENN.... Why does it bother you? Why does it bother you that people that look different should be in these jobs? There are billions of people that are not caucasion. I know...you said none of them want to present themselves for your premeirship jobs, or did someone not also say they are not qualified by some new standard. Wow who are you? This is an MLS general topic thread. The USA is much more focused, both pro & con, on creating a level field of opportunity for diverse people than perhaps you are. But it is always a struggle against the existing practices and mind sets to make the break through changes. Usually there is a period of bringing it to the attention of people that with their eyes wide open never bothered to notice that different people are not getting certain jobs. Usually it begins with the persons that are the different ones to point this out. Then next comes the resistance to the idea that their is even such an issue.(you) Which you have clearly made to be your point. We have heard all the excuses you listed before here in the USA and really from many parts of the world when social change is on the way. People thinking like you have explained resisting change instead of welcoming different people into the equal opportunity. Just because you have these views does not make you a racist. But you have documented in a lasting sense that you are not happily inviting different people to have the same easy opportunity of assignment into administrative football jobs as the fellows you defended earlier. You are doing a good job of exposing your position. I guy that would go on the record against equal opportunity. ...I didn´t know they still made guys like you. There are people that will soon say it is reverse discrimination when someone not white is given easy access to an assignment or jobs. They privately or publicly thrust that in such cases then these different people are really less qualified! We have heard it all before. You are Opposed. We get it.
Trying to call me a racist? Wow, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel aren't we? Now, until you can provide some proof for your accusations you're nothing but a bigot. Have you ever heard of Occam's razor?
how do you propose equal opportunity for club managers? Even if you wanted to bring in some kind of positive discrimination thing, and say 20% of players in England are black so 20% of managers should be as well, how do you apply that to clubs who are employing 1 person to do a job? How do you go up to Fulham, who are looking to appoint a full time boss at the end of the season, and say 20% of your manager must be black? Do you propose that to get this 20% that every 5th manager employed must be black perhaps, with the club in that position barred from employing a manager who isn't black? Or maybe saying that every manager in 5 at a club has to be black, even though as Prenn pointed out, there might not even be a black applicant among those who applied for the job. Beyond the several hundred that clubs get from fans wittily applying, citing their skills at Championship Manager and playing Subbuteo, clubs don't usually get many applications. So tell me, what measures do you take to increase the number of black managers? You are speaking as if you think there is some kind of negative reaction to black managers being appointed here, or there's some degree of hostility towards them. It isn't the case. Unfortunately some people still think football here is a world full of racist chanting, monkey noises and bananas being thrown at players. Sadly I don't have there benefit of their ignorance, so it's hard to get the message across.
What you could do is what the NFL does. Which is that whenever there is a head coaching position open you have an interview process with perspective candidates and at least one of the candidates interviewed must be a minority. This is not perfect but it opens opportunities for minorities and in no way does it gurantee anybody a job. It's just an idea and it has worked well in the NFL to produce a higher number of minority head coaches. Would this work in Europe?
This thread is more racist than a managerial job application process. The NFL thing is an interesting idea, but I don't know whether it would either work, or stand up legally, forcing people to make employment decisions based on race, even if it is only shortlisting. I read a BBC article at the start of the season about this sort of stuff thatlisted the main problems being about encouraging the application in the first place and I think that one or two sucesses would "kick-start" applications from minorities. At the moment, there isn't really any outstanding role-model, which I think Les Ferdinand mentioned as an issue. And to be honest, I think I'd trust his analysis more than that of some of the people in the thread. The fact is, until someone puts together a giant, fact-based, chart of who has applied for which jobs and who ended up getting them, then you're not in a position to claim there's any active racism. I mean, you could look at Ince having to go to Macclesfield rather than getting the Wolves job, but Wolves appointed someone with a lot of experience - there's nothing to suggest that if the skin colours had been reversed there'd have been a different appointment, they simply wanted an experienced option.
Southgate's 'qualifications' were that he was a player and club captain who was retiring from the game when a vacancy at his club arose. In other words, he was an insider. I don't think you can look at this and compare it to Ince ending up coaching in League 2 (where he has done pretty well, btw). It's true that Wolves appointed a manager at the start of the season, but Ince was still registered as a player at that point (and has played a couple of games for Macclesfield, I think)
I am glad this kind of nonsense does not exist in England. And, anyway, I am almost certain it would fall foul of employment law. Anyway, what I think perhaps the PFA should be doing is coming up with a scheme to support and encourage minority players to get a coaching badge. No guarantee they will be employed, of course, but getting qualified candidates is a good first step.
the NFL is just encouraging minority players to become coaches and for the teams to take a look at them. nothing is guranteed. The teams have control over who they will hire they just have to interview minority candidates. Yes, there are some problems with this system like the same minority candidate being interviewed over and over again to satisfy the league, but this policy along with other factors have contributed to more and more minority coaches in the league. I also don't know what employment rules are in Europe so i couldn't say if this would be legal there, but it has done a decent job in amerian football.
out of curiosity, how many head coaches in the NFL are black? From a casual look, it looks like 80-90% of the players are (except at quarterback for some reason), so is the management representative? How about MLS? I often read on these boards about how British coaches get a lot of jobs in the US as soccer coaches, with the implication that owners are blinded by some kind of bias that makes them think a coach from Britain must be good. I don't think any of the British players who went on to be managers in MLS had any kind of managerial record in the UK, yet they got jobs easy enough. what if none apply?