Where are the Black football managers?

It is right that former Macclesfield manager Keith Alexander should be posthumously honoured by The Voice’s Black list. He was well respected as an excellent manager and a quite extraordinary human being.

Alexander suffered a brain aneurysm in 2003 and was subsequently given a clean bill of health but died in March this year.

Even as we celebrate Alexander’s life we must still ask the most obvious question of British football, with more than a quarter of all players in top flight football being Black, why is there still only two Black managers - Chris Houghton and Paul Ince, in the top two English leagues?

A few decades ago there was an establishment view that Black footballers were fair weather players: they could dazzle and show their attacking skills in the sunshine, but they couldn’t defend and didn’t particularly like the cold’.

Both were unfair stereotypes, which ignored the evidence of Manchester United’s Chris McGrath who commanded the centre back for more than a decade, and that of Viv Anderson, England’s first Black player and Nottingham Forest defender.

Today nobody questions the pitch positions where Black players play, but there is still a monstrous gap between players and management.

A few years ago Paul Ince pointed the finger at the Chairmen of football clubs, who he argued, because of their age (average age of chair person is 65-75) still harbour the stereotype that doesn’t see black men’s capabilities beyond the football pitch

In yesterday’s Observer, one of their feature writers Anne Kessel opened up the debate again.

In her article she pointed to the NFL model in which Black American football players demanded a culture change.  There is an argument that UK Black players must also become more political.

We at Operation Black Vote would certainly welcome that. These multimillion pound stars are happy to wear kick out racism shirts, but when it comes to challenging football's own structural inequalities they are rather silent.

Let’s hope this year’s Black list awards spurs many more into action, beyond the football pitch.  

Simon Woolley