Ous tackles in my day’
dark times, Walters, 54, is not sure the battle against prejudice has been yet entirely won. When he retired from the professional game after leaving Bristol Rovers in 2002, he actively pursued a career in coaching. He obtained his Uefa A Licence and worked in Aston Villa’s academy and then at the Football Association. But he found his advance up the ladder stymied. Never mind the fact he had played at the top level for so long and was capped by his country, he found less-qualified coaches promoted ahead of him.
“It’s hard to know if it was prejudice or not. I accept that just because you were a good player doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good coach. But I was getting turned down for jobs I was overqualified for. There’s so many people of colour who are professional footballers – over 30 per cent, isn’t it? – so why are so few managers? Makes you think.”
He gave up coaching some eight years ago and these days his management skills are employed on the property portfolio in which he wisely invested while still a player. But his experience has led to him becoming an advocate of introducing into the game something akin to the Rooney Rule, the insistence in American football that every time a coach is appointed, team owners have to consider a BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) candidate.
“If you’d have asked me at the beginning of my coaching career whether I believed in the Rooney Rule, I’d have said no. I wanted to get there on my own merit, I didn’t want positive discrimination. Now, I believe it could be really helpful.
“Football has always been a game of not what you know but who you know. What usually happens is the chairman gets his mate in. If you had the Rooney Rule, a chairman doesn’t have to select the black candidate, he might still give the job to his mate. But if he has to see the black lad, he might stick in his mind. And when he sacks his mate after a year, he might remember the lad he saw in the interview process and think, ‘Yeah, he impressed me=’. Though he admits a football version of the Rooney Rule would be too late for him.
“It’s passed me by, coaching. Unfortunately.” He pauses. “That said, if someone said you can be England manager next month, I’d be straight down to Wembley.” His first intervention, no doubt, to ensure the players’ canteen was stocked with brown bread.
Wingin’ It: The Mark Walters Story By Jeff Holmes is out now. Price Publishing (£18.99)