'There's an arrogance about democracies, we think we are better'

 

English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT

Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.

Will India remain a democracy?

 

The yoga industry is booming – but does it make you a better person?

Brigid Delaney in The Guardian

It was 2010 and the newspaper I worked for in Sydney commissioned me to interview yoga entrepreneur Bikram Choudhury.

He was in town to open the first of a chain of hot yoga studios. Choudhury’s brand of yoga – which he had trademarked and franchised – involved 26 poses in a humid, heated room with mirrors and carpets. When I visited the studio and caught the stench and the robotic instructions from a mic’d-up teacher, I thought: Yeah, this won’t take off.

I had been doing yoga for a decade by the time I met Choudhury. Once or twice a week, I’d go to nice, easy hatha classes, wearing whatever old tracksuit was to hand – just like everyone else in the room. Yet my progress was slow; I had never managed to get beyond beginners’ level. I was always at the back of the class, struggling to get my arm behind my calf to touch my other hand. I just assumed that this pace was my natural limit.




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In his suite with harbour views, Choudhury told me about all the famous people who did his yoga – people such as Madonna and Jennifer Aniston. Then he looked me up and down.

“You,” he said. “You need to do some Bikram. You are overweight.”

“What? Huh?” I said, shocked at this breach in interview etiquette.

“Do my yoga,” he said, indicating a pair of lithe Bikram yoga instructors seated at his feet, “and you could look like them.”

For years after meeting him, I would walk past the fogged-up, vile-smelling Bikram yoga studios and think: screw you, Bikram.

But part of me also wondered if he had a point – could you completely change your body shape by doing his yoga? Should this even be an aspiration when you do yoga?


FacebookTwitterPinterest Yoga has morphed into a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Choudhury is now in the sin bin. In 2016, he lost a lawsuit in which a former employee had claimed sexual harassment and wrongful termination – and he was ordered to pay $7m in damages.

But yoga – hot, cold – and all sorts of novelty yoga (including nude yoga, beer yoga and goat yoga) is booming. In the past decade, it has morphed from being an exercise you might do once a week at your local gym to a lifestyle – and a physical and spiritual ideal to which you aspire.

According to a 2016 Yoga Journal report, 36.7 million people practise yoga in the US, up from 20.4 million in 2012. The yoga market is now worth $16bn (£12bn) in the US and $80bn (£74bn) globally. In the UK, “yoga” was one of Google’s most searched-for words in 2016, while the yoga and pilates business brings in £812m a year, and rising.

People are packed into classes, which cost north of £10 a pop, yoga teacher training costs thousands (fees start at around £1,500 and can go to £5,000) and yoga retreats are pricey.

It is not just the studios. Take a look at the market for yoga mats. According to market research company Technavio, the US yoga and exercise mat business is expected to climb from $11bn (£8bn) now to $14bn (£10bn) in 2020. Sales of athleisure clothing, generated $35bn (£25bn) in 2015 – an all-time high – making up 17% of the entire US clothing market, according to market research firm NPD Group. Yoga pants by Lorna Jane cost $110, while GQ magazine has described Lululemon’s yoga pants as a cult obsession among “a certain set of gym-minded women and busy moms across the country”. You can even buy Lululemon prayer beads for $108 (£80).

In my local area of Sydney, upmarket yogis have colonised the high street. Most people I see walking around the city’s Bondi suburb have stopped wearing proper clothes. Unless you are around the bus stops in time for the morning commute, people dress almost exclusively in exercise gear – yoga pants, vest top and hoodie, flip flops in the summer, trainers in winter. They loiter in the aisles of the organic fruit and vegetable shop, their yoga mats hitting me in the face when they turn around. They zip around the narrow streets by the beach on mopeds or bicycles and, after class, gather around the large communal tables of cafes, sipping $10 juice in mason jars or almond milk chai.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘After class they gather around sipping $10 juice.’ Photograph: Alamy

Secretly I wanted to be them. But it was more than just a look. Every yoga class I tried out in Bondi had a semi-spiritual element that I found enticing. At the start of class, the teacher might read some Sanskrit verse, or play sitar music while reading from a spiritual book – such as Eckhart Tolle. In increasingly non-religious countries such as the UK and Australia, this is where a lot of young people receive their moral or spiritual teachings.

In many respects, yoga is the perfect pastime for our age – the meditative elements give us the opportunity to find peace and stillness in a time of increasingly hectic and crowded information, the instructional bits give us moral lessons in the absence of traditional religion, while the stretchy, bendy, sweaty physical stuff is a great way of countering eight or more hours a day spent hunched over a computer. But is any of this yoga making us more enlightened or more compassionate? Or is it just another wellness industry trend that only the rich and idle can afford to properly indulge in?

One day last year, after my usual weekly class in a studio full of part-time models, I came across a flyer. It promised that in six weeks I could become a “modern yogi”. All I had to do was to attend classes six times a week, meditate daily, keep a journal and take part in weekly meetings that are part tutorial on mindfulness and part group therapy. The programme promised that “an exciting transformation will occur”. Could I become one of those people I saw walking around Bondi – yoga mat strapped to my back, my Instagram feed full of downward dogs on the cliffs, with a Pacific Ocean sunset in the background?

I started the $600 programme, stuck with it and found things started to shift. After doing yoga and meditation every day for six weeks, my body felt looser, more pliable. Getting up during cold winter mornings and bending down to pick a sock up off the floor became a lot easier. Physically it was tough, and it took a month to really get my fitness level moving, but gradually I was able to keep up with the more athletic Vinyasa classes. At the end of 90 minutes, I would be covered in sweat and felt a curious mix of exhausted and blank. The repetitive sequences became a routine that I did robotically, without thinking. I was bored in class, but I also turned off my mind and the classes themselves became like a moving meditation.

As for the spiritual aspect, occasionally the weird speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home. On Friday in my first week, in a move that shocked just about everyone, Britain voted to leave the European Union. The teacher, an Irishman, referenced Brexit in his sermon about 45 minutes into the class. “You might not like change. You may resist change,” he said, walking around the heated room. “You may not agree with it. You may think the change is a bad thing. A very bad thing. But change has happened. It has happened and you can’t do anything about it. To resist it is pointless.” His voice was heavy, sorrowful, and he sighed. “It is what it is.”

There was a feeling in the class that we needed to hear things like this – but afterwards, I thought: Is this going to be the extent of our resistance and our protest against political situations that we don’t like? We stretch and get a sermon, go and have a juice – and that’s it?


FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘Occasionally the weird spiritual speeches the yoga instructors gave hit home.’ Photograph: Getty Images/Topic Images

I started thinking a lot about yoga and so many activities that are part of the wellness industry, and how so many people pour energy into their bodies when perhaps they should be trying to pour energy into the people and politics around them. Self care is great – but what if there’s no energy left to care about anyone else?

In the New York Times, American writer Judith Warner noted a disturbing social trend. Just as the women of the mid-70s took flight into consciousness-raising groups, the workforce, divorce and casual sex, their daughters are also taking flight, but that flight is inwards. “They’re fleeing to yoga,” she writes in the Times, “imitating flight in the downward-gazing contortion called the crow position. They’re striving, through exquisite new adventures in internal fine-tuning, to feel more deeply, live more meaningfully, better inhabit each and every moment of each and every day.”

Warner glumly, but correctly, concluded: “There is no sense that personal liberation is to be found by taking a more active role in the public world.” In fact, “such interiority seems to be a way to manage an unbearable sort of existential anxiety: a way to narrow the scope of life’s challenges and demands … to the more manageable range of the in-and-out of your own breath.”

The more yoga I did, the more compliments I received. My hair was shiny – people commented – and my skin glowed, my clothes were looser, and, like so many others, I began wearing athleisure gear to work. After all, work was just a pit stop on the way to another yoga class. Maybe Choudhury was right after all – maybe I could look different if I did a lot of yoga.

I wrote in my journal, I went to the Monday-night tutorials, I meditated, I drank cold-press juices, I did all the right things to become a modern yogi. I was on the way to achieving the ideal of the glowy person in the organic shop. I was almost there before I started wondering – is this really what I wanted to be?

The answer was, of course, no. I was a yogi for about two months before the narcissism of the whole enterprise got to me. There were other things, it turned out, that I had to do.

Brexit is about to get real. Yet we are nowhere near ready for it

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian


In the coming days, perhaps as soon as Wednesday, Brexit will turn from abstract to concrete. A near-theological argument that raged in one form or another for nearly three decades will become hard and material, with a fixed deadline. Theresa May is about to trigger article 50, starting the clock on a two-year journey towards the exit from the European Union. And yet those in charge of this fateful, epochal process – and especially those who most loudly demanded it happen – seem utterly unprepared for it.


In four words, the European strategy for the Brexit talks has to be: pour décourager les autres (Discouraging the others)

Philip Hammond’s budget on Wednesday illustrated the point neatly. The country is about to leave its largest export market, a decision with enormous economic implications. The chancellor had the floor for nearly an hour, his obligation to provide an assessment of the present and future prospects of the British economy. Did he so much as mention the imminent exit from the single market? No. Incredibly, he made just two fleeting references to the EU in the entire address.

Instead the stand-out measure, the one that has dominated political discussion since, was Hammond’s decision to take more tax from a core Tory constituency: the self-employed. Important for those individuals, most certainly; a political unforced error, no doubt. But for this to be the focus following a major economic statement on the eve of Brexit is displacement activity of the most heroic kind.

It’s as if the crew of the Titanic eyed the iceberg ahead and promptly decided to have a big squabble over whether to serve white or red.

This failure to wrestle with what’s coming goes wider. The public conversation since 23 June 2016 has barely differed from the debate before that date, each side – leave and remain – still refighting the EU referendum campaign, uncertain how to get out of the old groove.

That failing is most obvious among the Brexiteers, characterised by a refusal to own their victory and take responsibility for it. So when a voice of experience or authority dares point out the possible dangers ahead, they are either sacked, as was the fate of Michael Heseltine, attacked personally, like John Major, or else branded an “enemy of the people” who refuses to bow to the “popular will”.

Those with concerns are accused of “talking down the country” or lacking sufficient faith – as if, should Brexit make us poorer, the fault will belong to those who didn’t screw their eyes tight enough and believe. Credit to Jonn Elledge for calling this what it is: the Tinkerbell delusion.

This surely has to end with the triggering of article 50. From this moment on, the focus must be intensely practical. No more baggy rhetoric about sovereignty and “taking back control”. From now on, those who got us into this situation have to show they can get us out intact by March 2019.

That will require a major shift among the Brexiteer ministers and in Downing Street. Those close to the pre-negotiations between Britain and the remaining 27 EU states report an unwarranted hubris on the UK side that augurs ill. Too many Brexiteers cling to the campaign’s wishful thinking that we go into these talks as the stronger party, that “they need us more than we need them”, and that so long as we hang tough, the Europeans will buckle and hand us a dream deal.

Such arrogance is likely to be exposed soon. For one thing, it ignores the key structural fact that makes Britain’s negotiating prospects bleak from the start: namely, it is imperative for the EU’s own survival that the UK be left in a visibly, materially worse situation after leaving the EU than it enjoyed before. The logic is not vindictive. If the EU is to hold together it must prevent a Brexit contagion. Any divorce settlement must be ugly enough to ensure the remaining 27 stay with their spouse, no matter how loveless that marriage might feel. In four words, the European strategy for the Brexit talks has to be: pour décourager les autres.

But if British politicians are insufficiently mindful of that built-in obstacle, they are far too blithe about the sheer complexity of the undertaking that is about to begin. They are aiming to unpick 40 years of arrangements, seeking to annul them in a pact that will require the blessing of 27 other sovereign states.

To call it 27-dimensional chess understates the geometry: the final divorce settlement will have to be ratified by 38 different national and regional parliaments. To say nothing of the European parliament, commission and council. Each of these bodies has its own interests, pressures and red lines.

May will have to craft a document that satisfies every one of those competing forces, as well as both chambers of the UK parliament. She will have to do it without pushing Scotland towards a second, more winnable independence referendum or recreating a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish republic. And she has to get it done in roughly 18 months. Not for nothing did Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of the Vote Leave campaign, tweet with a candour rare among Brexiteers that leaving the EU was the “hardest job since beating Nazis”.

Or reflect on the supposed aces Britain is confidently looking forward to playing in the upcoming game of Brexit poker. Charles Grant, the sage director of the Centre for European Reform who predicted the leave vote, patiently explains how each one of these assets – which Brexiteers believe will make the Europeans putty in our hands – could create as much angst as advantage.

It’s true, says Grant, that the City of London is valued for the financial services it provides to the EU. But it’s also true that Paris, Madrid, Milan, Frankfurt, Dublin and others are circling, ready to feast on the City’s carcass: they want some of that business for themselves.

No 10 refuses to budge on Brexit bill, despite heavy defeat in Lords



The Brexiteers reckon the Europeans won’t want to give up London’s special relationship with Washington. But, says Grant, British “fawning” over Donald Trump alienates many Europeans, making them doubt we share their basic values. As for Britain’s contribution to European security – via its UN seat, Nato and its fabled military – that’s much admired. But not if it’s used as a threat: give us a free trade deal or we’ll pull out the 1,000 British troops recently deployed in the Polish-Baltic area. Talk like that will backfire.

Leavers should be approaching this gargantuan task with a special humility, because it was they who needlessly inflicted it upon us.

Remainers need to adjust to the new reality too. Many may be hoping that, as the price and consequences of exit become ever clearer through these talks, some among the 52% will gradually switch sides. But remainers should contemplate the less cheery prospect that the most ardent Brexiteers, and especially the anti-EU newspapers, will double down in their loathing of Brussels. When the EU 27 demand, say, serious cash for single market access, the Mail and Sun will dip their pen into an even deeper well of venom.

So remainers will need to handle these next two years carefully, readying themselves for the day when the deal is done, and ensuring they have already placed two key questions in the front of the public mind: is this deal better than the set-up we had on 22 June 2016? And if it isn’t, why are we doing it?