Security guards follow me through shops, police cars pull me over. We need to talk about that
Ex-Manchester City player Nedum Onuoha has felt the effects of racism, but insists debate is the only way to eliminate it
NEDUM Onuoha still considers Manchester City his club. ‘Why wouldn’t I? I had been at City since I was 10 years of age. It was the team that I followed and that becomes part of your identity and that is bigger than certain individuals and personalities,’ the former centre-half explains.
Onuoha’s time at Eastlands came to an end under Roberto Mancini. A decade on and he is still at a loss as to why the Italian cast him out in such a cold manner. City, of course, were changing at the time. The injection of petro-dollars from the Middle East meant they could now bid for some of the biggest stars in the game, such as Robinho. Onuoha found himself lost in the mix.
He wasn’t the only one. Onuoha had basically grown up alongside Stephen Ireland in the City side. They were in the academy together, became first-team players around the same time. Under Mark Hughes, Ireland became an integral part of the side but the Cobh native was another to be shunned by Mancini.
‘I’ll hold my hands up and say that Stevie Ireland was a far better footballer than I was,’ Onuoha says. ‘And it probably affected Stevie even more, because he had been a key part of the team under both Sven [Goran-Eriksson] and Mark Hughes. He had been City’s player of the year a couple of seasons before, he was falling from an even higher point.
Stevie Ireland was overlooked at City but he fell from a higher point than me
‘I didn’t take being marginalised by Mancini particularly well, but Stevie had an even better campaign and was a better player, so being overlooked was definitely more detrimental to his mental health.’
His difficult relationship with Mancini, being cast aside in what’s called the ‘bomb squad’ and being forced to train with the Under- 18s, is one aspect of his career that he explores in his autobiography, Kicking Back, which is released this week.
It’s not a typical footballing memoir because Onuoha was not your typical footballer. From a Nigerian family that settled in Manchester, the importance of education was drilled into him from a young age
(his late mother was a university professor). That made him a bit of an outlier in dressing-rooms as his career began.
‘It is changing now,’ Onuoha points out. ‘Academies in bigger clubs have tied in with schools to ensure that players are getting an education. In the past, because you didn’t need your A levels or GCSEs to be a professional footballer, it wasn’t seen as important. But I think clubs, and players, are looking at that differently now, because 90 per cent of academy players don’t go on to have long careers.’
Onuoha’s own career took him from City to QPR to the MLS with Real Salt Lake, where he was when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, leading to the Black Lives Matter protests. Being in the States at that time led Onuoha to confront the racism that he experienced during his own life, which forms a central plank of the book.
He reveals a story about a photoshoot during his time at City along with teammate Joe Hart. When Onuoha got into the car, he was stopped almost immediately by police who told him that they had reason to believe that his car was involved in a robbery.
‘I’ve spent my life worried about doing something wrong,’ he writes at one point. ‘Or something that’s considered by others to be wrong. I am a 6ft 2in physically imposing Black man. People see me as a threat. Some cross the road to avoid me. With law enforcement, it’s the opposite; they won’t leave me alone. Security guards follow me through shops, police cars pull me over.’
What happened to George Floyd and the subsequent protests have allowed Onuoha to open up about the racism he has suffered.
‘In the past, I would have only talked openly about it with other people who had the same shared experience. But I realised after the protests that when I speak about the issue of racism, I can give a real sense of perspective. The more it is talked about, the more we can try to eliminate it in society.’
And while football has tried hard to change attitudes within the game, Onuoha says old-school stereotypes still remain, where Black players might be considered big and strong. It is about changing mindsets, and that will only come around through education.
‘People making assumptions about a player based on their race is something some footballers have to deal with but the perceived lack of intelligence is a cliché all footballers have to deal with,’ Onuoha points out.
The lack of opportunities for Black players to go into management remains an issue for the game, but Onuoha feels that this shouldn’t be remedied by tokenism, although he admits that it is a catch-22 situation. Black players aren’t getting opportunities in coaching and as a result, many are reluctant to go into coaching.
‘I support Black managers getting opportunities, but they have to be capable. Don’t give a Black person a job because they exist, picking someone who might not be good enough from the get-go ticks a box but misses the point. ‘There are some who are more than talented enough but don’t get an opportunity because a club or owner or chief executive are afraid of taking a leap of faith – and I suppose this is the paradox. How do people get the necessary experience if nobody is willing to give them a chance?’
Onuoha has gone down the punditry route, rather going into coaching after hanging up his boots in 2020. ‘I enjoy talking about football, so to be able to do it for a living was a no-brainer, really,’ he says. And his sharp and incisive analysis means that he has become a popular guest on the Guardian Football Weekly podcast as well as various BBC shows.
And he feels he is bringing something different as he has only recently retired and has a better understanding of the modern game than some established pundits.
‘I enjoy being able to try and speak in a way that represents the modern game. I can bring my own experience from being in a dressing-room recently. Sometimes, I think that players can be misrepresented because the people talking about them aren’t really part of the industry any more and don’t understand where the modern game is going.
‘With football punditry, there can be a case of an old boys’ club who can agree on everything and talk about how things were back in their day. But there is a younger player now, involved in a different game because football is different now to what it was 20 or 25 years ago.’
Onuoha uses the example of Paul Pogba’s goal celebration for France in the Euros last summer to illustrate how out of touch certain pundits are.
‘When Pogba scored that goal against Switzerland in a game that France subsequently lost, I was in a
studio with people who were getting uptight and saying
“why is he doing that ridiculous dance?”.
‘But I understood why he was doing the dance.
He was doing it for all of his followers on social media, because all of those youngsters who love Paul Pogba are going to be doing that dance after they score a goal.’
Onuoha is keen to bring a nuanced eye to his punditry, because what is said on television is often taken as gospel.
‘Before I played with him at Sunderland, I used to think Titus Bramble wasn’t a very good footballer because every week on Match of the Day, they seemed to be highlighting mistakes he made. And then I played alongside him and trained alongside him and I saw how good a player he was. But the narrative around Titus was all these mistakes that he was making
‘It is the same with Harry Maguire this season. Obviously he has had a tough time with United this year, but every time that Maguire is talked about on the television, it is about what he is doing wrong. There is nothing about what he is doing right. I think in this position, you should look at the complete picture.’
Kicking Back is a fascinating read, because Onuoha’s story is so interesting. His name still causes problems – so much so that in Starbucks, he sometimes calls himself Nathan.
Early in his career, an academy coach got around the issue of pronouncing his name by giving the nickname of ‘chief’ which stuck throughout his career.
In the context of players of Nigerian descent such as Adam Idah and Andrew Omobamidele now representing Ireland, it is interesting to see how Onuoha’s own name caused issues within the game.
‘It didn’t annoy me as much at the time,’ he says. ‘It depended on the person saying it, some people just couldn’t be bothered to learn how to say my name while others made an effort.’
And he also experienced racist chanting in the
Balkan states when he played with the England Under-21s, incidents that left a mark.
From joining the City academy at 10, being one of the first-team players, along with Stephen Ireland, being left out in the cold when the club was changing to his time in America when racial issues came to the fore in that society, Nedum Onuoha has led an interesting life in football. It is what makes him one of the more fascinating voices currently in the game – and one we should hear more from in the future.