Rooney Rule opens up fight for the top job
THE FA have vowed to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for the post of England manager when Gareth Southgate leaves the job.
As part of a raft of new initiatives announced yesterday aimed at increasing diversity and promoting equality throughout football, FA chief executive Martin Glenn pledged to follow the principles of the NFL’s “Rooney Rule” when filling any vacant post at the organisation in future.
Why not just give the position to the best person for the job? Goodness knows, Glenn’s job appointing the last two England managers was hard enough without fulfilling any quotas.
Sam Allardyce’s controversial selection was the result of a lack of real stand-out candidates and quickly backfired.
Southgate himself emerged from a frantic fog of desperation, his cool-headed approach as caretaker helping England out of the post-Euro 2016 doldrums sufficiently enough to merit the role when there really was no Plan B.
In future, Glenn wants to create one of those artificially, promising an interview to at least one candidate from a black, Asian or minority ethnicity (BAME) background.
“That principle will absolutely apply,” he insisted. “We’re doing this for two reasons. In soft terms because it is the right thing to do but there is also a business case for it.
“If your management team reflects more the people that you are serving, then you’re going to make correct decisions. What we’re seeing now is more BAME players and what we want to do is make sure that, post their playing career, there’s an opportunity for them to carry on contributing and that they feel the FA is also for them.”
All 72 EFL clubs adopted a similar philosophy at their AGM last month. However, at the very top of the game, the Premier League say they have no plans to follow suit.
Currently, the only non-white manager in the top flight is Brighton’s Chris Hughton. That one-in-20 ratio in the dugout compares with the fact that exactly a third of the players who kicked off this season in the Premier League were from BAME backgrounds.
That was the sort of discrepancy in American football that drove Dan Rooney to spearhead a move to get more of those players involved in coaching when they hung up their boots.
The presence of a few different faces in the interview chair initially ticked a few boxes. Then it may have opened some minds. Perhaps it even introduced a different style of candidate. Slowly, the numbers crept up. Two NFL head coaches out of the 32 in 2003 – a record eight today.
Positive discrimination? Maybe. But in the cut-throat world of American franchise sports, one thing is for sure. All eight of them will have been the very best person for the job, whatever route they took to the interview room.
There’s a business case for it