FA says professional English clubs failing to meet diversity targets

LONDON – English football clubs have collectively failed to hit annual targets to improve their ethnic and gender diversity, the Football Association (FA) said on Nov 22, in a report on the Football Leadership Diversity Code for the 2022-23 season.

A total of 53 clubs from the Premier League and English Football League (EFL) have signed up to the code. It was introduced in 2020 to focus on increasing equality of opportunity to encourage recruitment of diverse talent across senior leadership teams, team operations and coaching set-ups.

“Progress is being made in some areas; however, the workforce across the professional game in England is falling short of reflecting the levels of diversity amongst the playing population,” the FA said.

“Hiring rates are currently not high enough to drive the rapid change needed.”

Figures for the previous 12 months, according to an article from The Guardian, show that clubs have failed to achieve success in any category.

For instance, a target for the recruitment of black, Asian and mixed heritage candidates in men’s coaching missed by 9 per cent (16 per cent of recruits from a target of 25 per cent).

The FA added that it plans to make it mandatory for professional clubs in the English leagues “to report data on age, sex, gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation within their organisations”.

Anti-discriminatory body Kick It Out’s chief executive officer Tony Burnett also urged the Premier League and the EFL to implement sanctions for non-compliance.

“Without that commitment, we won’t know the true scale of the challenge nor be able to find solutions to make football more representative of the people who love the game,” he said.

The English game has also consistently been against racism or abuse of any sort.

Related to that, Manchester United defender Harry Maguire has

accepted the apology of a Ghanaian MP who mocked him

during a parliamentary debate on the budget in 2022.

Opposition lawmaker Isaac Adongo compared Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia’s economic management of the embattled West African nation to Maguire’s performance on the pitch.

In an address shared widely on social media in 2022, Adongo described Maguire as “the biggest threat at the centre of the Manchester United defence”.

The reference was part of a wider speech accusing Mr Bawumia of mismanaging the country’s economy and inflicting hardship on its citizens.

Ghana is grappling with its worst economic crisis in a generation brought on by spiralling public debt, which has triggered rampant inflation and weakened the local currency.

In a similar debate on the 2024 budget on Nov 21, Adongo said Maguire had “turned the corner” and took back his analogy. He added: “I now apologise to Harry Maguire. He is a transformational footballer... now scoring goals for Manchester United and a key player.”

Maguire accepted the apology in a post on X a day later.

“Apology accepted. See you at Old Trafford soon,” he wrote, referring to the home of United. REUTERS