The quick turnover of managers in the Premier League is often referred to as many things.
A revolving door. A merry-go-round. A sack race. Strangely, they all have slightly childlike, fun qualities to them. Who didn’t like running round and round that revolving door once upon a time? Who didn’t like the merry-go-round, or the sack race?
Yet if you analyse the statistics in the Premier League, it is anything but fun for football managers.
To date, 244 different managers have been employed at 49 different clubs. That includes several managers who have had multiple cracks of the whip at various clubs, so 406 separate appointments have been made in total, during 28 years. That works out at 14.5 different appointments every season, meaning on average almost 75 per cent of managers will make way at some point during each campaign for a fresh face. Staggering, right?
Now consider how bleak those numbers are if you are a black, Asian or minority ethnic manager trying to make it into English football’s elite.
How many do you think there have been in the Premier League’s near three decades? Hazard a guess… okay I’ll tell you: nine. Paul Ince, Chris Hughton, Ruud Gullit, Avram Grant, Jean Tigana, Chris Ramsey, Darren Moore, Terry Connor, Nuno Espirito Santo.
That’s roughly one new Bame manager given a go every three years. If you’re a white manager, almost nine of you are given a shot every season.
Of those nine Bame managers, four of them have managed for less than a year in the top-flight. Ince, six months. Ramsey and Moore, nine months. Connor, four months.
A few have been given more than one shot. Hughton has had three spells at Premier League clubs. Grant had three. Gullit had two. That’s still brings the total to only 14 of the 406 appointments made in Premier League history.
I’ll be completely honest here, if the above statistics are not spot on it is because I have tried to work it out myself. What I can say is that they will not be a million miles away. But that is part of the problem: as far as I’m aware these types of statistics do not exist in English football, even though it is a practice recommended by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, to ensure that a sport with a large Bame player representation does not allow itself to have so few Bame managers.
To put the above into some kind of context, while Bame managers have been appointed 14 times since the Premier League began, Sam Allardyce has been appointed seven times. Mark Hughes six.
Alan Pardew, Steve Bruce and Harry Redknapp, five each. So five white managers have been appointed 28 times – twice as many times as all the Bame managers in league history.
That is, to be clear, to say nothing against those white managers. It is not their fault that when club owners and executives get together and decide that the current manager is not working, the same faces, mostly the same colour, spring to mind.
Therein lies a major barrier: the top of the pyramid, in the boardrooms – the owners, the executives, the decision-makers.
I interviewed Jason Roberts in October 2018 after he had started as director of development at Concacaf. The former Blackburn Rovers striker said that in his view the best way to effect change was to become one of the power-brokers, to change diversity at the top so that change filters down.
“When people discuss this point they take it back to we’re not getting opportunities so that means people are that dreaded word everybody hates – racist,” Roberts said. “It’s groupthink. It’s people picking people who remind them of themselves. It’s people picking people from a certain social class they feel more comfortable with. It’s not the ‘r’ word. It’s about challenging perceptions we all have, about challenging the systems we have in place and asking ourselves if they’re the right systems.”
It is an invisible problem, a problem nobody can see that spreads from person to person, infecting everyone within the group. A bit like a coronavirus.
It is club owners and their inner circles picking the faces which fit comfortably with them, who pick the faces which fit comfortably with them, and so on and so on.
Who, then, must take responsibility to tackle that problem?
The individual clubs? It seems unrealistic to expect organisations who have for so long ignored the problem to get their own house in order.
Some would argue the Football Association, as governors of the game in England, should take the lead, but they have no plans to enforce change. “We’re not looking where we would ever try to force anything, and I don’t think we’d have the power to do that,” Mark Bullingham, their chief executive, said recently, when Premier League players first started taking the knee before games.
So the Premier League and English Football League? Or are we ignoring who really holds the power here? The TV companies. One thing the coronavirus has revealed is just quite how much power they yield. In the next round of TV broadcast negotiations could they not introduce financial penalties if the make-up of Premier League boardrooms is not transformed by a certain date?
This is not merely a “football problem”, it is an issue with businesses and organisations across the country. But if football wants to enjoy the special benefit of being the pastime to lift the nation’s spirits, then football has to lead by example and sort out its diversity crisis that has been around for far longer than Covid-19.
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