Allowing logos has to be more than just a sop to the young men who make the Premier League all their money

season and wearing Black Lives Matter logos on their sleeves was more than just a sop to the young men who make all their money for them, then it has to be the start of real change.

At some level, too, it has to accept that its involvement in the issue of racial injustice is political. And it has to do more than accept it. It has to embrace it.

That would be a departure. Until now, it has made a virtue of standing for absolutely nothing politically. Folks who fly ‘White Lives Matter’ banners behind light planes buy replica shirts, too. But, like it or not, it has now stepped into a different domain.

It might tell itself that saying ‘black lives matter’ is a simple message that should unite everyone and in a perfect world it would. But it didn’t work that easily for Martin Luther King Jnr and it certainly isn’t going to work for Masters, last seen in action pleading the Fifth a few days ago when being grilled by MPs about the prospect of Saudi Arabia buying Newcastle United.

If Masters cannot even bring himself to admit that a regime that murders its opponents and cuts them into little pieces with a bone-saw and executes criminals in public might not be suitable owners for one of his best-supported football clubs, then we probably also have to accept he may not be a man who is particularly big on human rights.

There are other problems for the Premier League, too. Far from being revolutionaries, the players taking a knee before matches are essentially conservative as a collective.

They are young men, usually from working class backgrounds, usually suspicious of radicalism and usually earning a lot of money from jobs they have worked themselves into the ground to get.

BUT they have had enough of being patronised by football’ s hierarchy. I spoke to a Premier League player yesterday who has been prominent in t he Black Lives Matter conversation and he was at pains to point out that English footballers are not protesting about defunding the police or the iniquities of capitalism but they are protesting about the lack of diversity within the upper echelons of the English game.

They are protesting about the lack of black coaches in the English game. They are protesting about the lack of black managers in the

English game. They are protesting about the lack of black executives in the English game. And he was particularly scathing about the Premier League’s recent refusal to reveal the extent of the diversity of its own workforce.

The Premier League has also consistently refused to entertain the idea of instituting a Rooney Rule, an idea pioneered in the NFL, which compels cl ubs to i nterview a black or ethnic minority candidate when t hey have a managerial vacancy. Only one of the 20 Premier League cl ubs, Wolverhampton Wanderers, has a black manager, Nuno Espirito Santo.

The rule has, in theory, been implemented in the English Football League but in reality, there is a loophole which allows clubs to conduct their recruitment processes informally, exactly as they did before.

The number of black coaches in the League has actually gone down in recent weeks after Sol Campbell left Southend United. There are 91 clubs across the four top divisions in the English game. Only five now have a black manager.

If the Premier League’s endorsement of the message that black lives matter is to have any coherent meaning, if its logos and its giant flags in our empty stadiums are to have any worth, then it has to take real steps to fix that lack of opportunity. The new work placement programme it announced for BAME coaches last week felt like a facesaving exercise and little more.

The Premier League’s current threeyear television deal, remember, is worth £9.2bn and yet it gives funding of only £300,000 annually to Kick It Out, English football’s most prominent equality and inclusion organisation. The money is gratefully accepted, by the way, but set against the enormity of the Premier League’s revenues, it is a drop in the ocean.

This is a critical moment for the League and its relationship with racial equality. There is a realisation among protesters and activists that the revulsion over the killing of George Floyd in plain sight has given the racial equality movement great momentum, just as horror over the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 was seen as the catalyst for a new phase of the American civil rights movement.

People are bored of the kind of platitudinous excuses in which sport’s governing bodies have become expert. In the States, it was announced on Friday that, after years of pressure, the ownership of the NFL’s Washington Redskins had finally agreed to review the team’s name, which is seen by many as a dehumanising insult to Native Americans.

In the American National Women’s Soccer League, it used to be a story when a player knelt for the national anthem. Last week, it was a story that made national headlines when a player, Rachel Hill, of the Chicago Red Stars, remained standing. She was not ostracised for it, by the way, as some have suggested players here would be if they decided they did not want to take the knee.

The debate here has largely been reasoned, too. Sky Sports analyst Matt Le T is si er said he was conflicted about wearing a Black Lives Matter badge on his lapel because he did not agree with the aims of the political movement.

Some of his colleagues have stopped wearing the badge, too. Others, like former England defender Ashley Cole, chose to display it. The BBC banned its presenters from wearing it. On BT Sport, it is a matter of personal choice.

A healthy exchange of views is only to be welcomed. If the sight of footballers wearing Black Lives Matter logo son their sleeves prompts any of us to try to learn more about the civil rights movement, for instance, that can only be a good thing.

A small example: the acclaimed American television documentary ‘13th’, which explores the history of racial inequality in the US, was made in 2016 but I hadn’t bothered to watch it. I watched it on Friday.

It is a time of accelerating change in the way sport and race interact and in our awareness of the obstacles black men and women in this country still face. Last week, I listened to the NBC football presenter Robbie Earle, his voice cracking, talking about sensing white women crossing the road to avoid his path in a city centre.

MY friend Darren Lewis, the sports journalist and television presenter, wrote an article about his day- to- day experiences, too. ‘To be black in this country is to be seen as a threat first and a person later. Being black is having to tell your children, as my father warned me, that they will need to work twice as hard and shout twice as loudly to be as valued as much as their white counterparts.

‘Being black is having to activate your kind, smiley nature to actively (constantly) set white people at ease on your initial meeting.’

All the while, the NFL sings songs and the Premier League puts a logo on a sleeve. No wonder black footballers are saying enough is enough.

‘Justice too long delayed,’ Dr King said, ‘is justice denied.’ If the Premier League is serious about racial injustice post-logo, it needs to act fast or another generation of black managers will be lost to the game.