Football is getting an easy ride of it right now. During the committee yesterday they even seemed to frame football as being more diverse and what’s it getting right in comparison to cricket but Im not willing to agree. Britain Asian representation in English football is almost non existent, it’s even worse than cricket. By all means look at cricket and rightly force it do much, much better but other sports should be quaking because their time in the spotlight will be coming and I doubt it’s a pile more pleasant.
There was a series of reports on the BBC a couple of years on this. There were 9 year old kids being abused by opposition players. Coaches have a stereotype of asian footballers being physically weak or not committed enough and aren't taken seriously.
Apart from the obvious overt racism, negative perceptions and stereotyping is what often holds back people of colour in many situations.
Think how many muslim footballers we have playing in England and how many are actually British? Probably a handful, and even less from an Asian background.
Apparently there's been over 1000 calls to the helpline already. Hoping this actually starts changing things at the top. I'm still a little sceptical when you still get the canned statements of "we oppose all racism" and "zero tolarance" when all the evidences points to the contrary.
Perhaps when they mean zero tolerance, they mean zero tolerance to other cultures.
