Big jobs for Gerrard & Lamps but not Campbell? It’s discrimination and it must STOP

THE Rooney Rule in football is now a must. And it is time for the discrimination to stop.

I understand all too well what discrimination is. I have been discriminated against in the past and continue to be.

I have won six major broadcasting awards but cannot get on any of the five or six main channels.

Some of that is because I’m outspoken and I’ve called people out in managerial positions. I get it.

But in football the closest Sol Campbell (above), one of our most decorated players, has been to a major job is the assistant managers’ role with Trinidad and Tobago.

Meanwhile, Frank Lampard has walked straight into Derby for his first job. Steven Gerrard has walked straight into Rangers.

Roy Keane walked straight into Sunderland. Joey Barton was unveiled as Fleetwood Town manager yesterday. And what is the common denominator?

If I acknowledge coaching and management is only partly about qualifications, having been in six, seven, eight or nine good clubs I can say a big part is leadership, personality and character.

OK. Where has Joey Barton proved his character, leadership, managerial and captaincy skills over Campbell? He hasn’t.

Then people will go further down the list for excuses. They won’t look for racism until it is blatantly obvious. So then they say, ‘But Barton knows the guy at Fleetwood’. Then it will be, ‘Gerrard and Lampard are more relevant in modern football than Campbell’.

Another is people use the experiences of John Barnes and Paul Ince and say they didn’t get jobs because they were bad managers, not because of their colour.

But the numbers don’t add up.

The stats show that since 1990 one in four England internationals to retire has been from black or ethnic minority backgrounds but only one in seven has gone into a management job.

Meanwhile a white former England player is twice as likely to end up in a managerial job as their black counterpart.

So it is now time for the Rooney Rule, guaranteeing minoriti e s prop er consideration for positions.

And instead of friends giving friends jobs, it is time for a merit-only based procedure. Clubs should have to interview, for example, 10 candidates of which a certain number have to be black or ethnic minority.

Then they can see the man, the whites of his eyes and they can put themselves there.

The excuses have to stop. And if they don’t, pressure needs to be put on the PFA and the FA – who have loosely agreed to put the Rooney Rule into effect – and the Premier League about, at some point, strike action.

Gary Neville nearly took the players out on strike over the PFA getting a certain amount of money from the Premier League. This is a million times more important.

His, and many people’s, colleagues are being discriminated against so they need to stand up and have a show of unity and say, ‘We’re going to go on strike because we want the Rooney Rule. Look what it’s done in the NFL’.

We now have black Super Bowl-winning coaches but 15, 20 years ago they were having exactly the same debate – ‘They’re not captaincy and leadership figures’ was the claim.

At every turn those walls have been broken down and proven to be rubbish.

If Gerrard and Lampard (left) walking into those highprofile jobs while Campbell scratches around in a parttime role doesn’t accurately highlight discrimination I don’t know what does.