We thought it would also be interesting to explore how the English game itself has evolved in it’s attitudes to ethnicity and diversity. In this excellently researched piece by Chris Hunt we take a look at the issues around ethnicities in English football and how attitudes have evolved to embrace diversity in the game and what challenges still lie ahead.
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It seems a long time since the memorable night in November 1978 when Nottingham Forest defender Viv Anderson became the first black player to wear the three lions of England in a senior international.
In the build up to that friendly against Czechoslovakia there had been much feverish speculation about the team line-up, leading England manager Ron Greenwood to declare, “Yellow, purple or black – if they’re good enough, I’ll pick them.” Greenwood’s successor in the job was similarly minded in the face of heavy media interest in the number of black players he was calling up to his squads. “If the 11 best players in the country were black, that would be my England team,” announced Bobby Robson in 1983. The following year, when John Barnes waltzed through the entire Brazil defence at the Maracanã Stadium to score a magnificent individual goal, many people were left wondering what heights England could scale with another ten players like ‘Barnsey’. Others, more set in their ways and still harbouring outdated opinions and stereotypes, remained unconvinced, so much so that Barnes believes that his wonder goal had no impact on the breaking down of barriers. “None at all,” he says today, “because we still had lots of racial abuse going on. If you went down the leagues I don’t think that just because I scored that goal it would mean that a black footballer playing for Rotherham or Grimsby was not going to get racial abuse. I think that it was the emergence of black players generally that had a lot to do with changing things.” That day in the Maracanã England’s black players numbered just Barnes and Stoke City’s Mark Chamberlain, but 18 years later, when the two countries faced each other again in the World Cup quarter-final in Japan, seven of the 14 England players who earned a cap were either black or of mixed race.
The England team may have come a long way since Viv Anderson’s historic debut, but the Football Association were very nearly a century off the pace of home nation rivals Scotland, who had first fielded the outstanding British Guiana-born fullback Andrew Watson in 1881. Wales, too, had chosen mixed race winger Eddie Parris of Second Division Bradford Park Avenue for one international in 1931, but the England selectors proved a little more resistant in football’s developing years.
Jack Leslie, a competitive forward who racked up 131 goals for Plymouth Argyle between 1921 and 1935, would later recall being unexpectedly congratulated by Argyle manager Bob Jack for being selected to play for England. The call-up never came, however, with the much whiter England regular Billy Walker of Aston Villa ultimately securing the place in the team. “They must have forgotten I was a coloured boy,” said Leslie in the early Eighties, just prior to ending his lifetime’s career in the game in the West Ham boot room.
In the days when black players were a rare sight in the Football League, Stoke City’s Roy Brown was another player of colour who was tipped for an England cap. The son of a Nigerian father and an English mother, he was praised as a “dashing centre-forward” by the post-war England stalwart Neil Franklin, but he was never to earn the recognition of an England call-up, having lost the formative years of his career to the Second World War.
The coming of the war also proved incredibly hard luck for Brown’s Stoke City team-mate Frank Soo, who by rights should have become the first non-white footballer to represent England. Born Hong Ying Soo in Derbyshire to a Chinese father and an English mother, ‘Frankie’ was one of the most talented players of his generation, playing nine times for England in wartime internationals, but the Football Association did not consider these games to be ‘official’, so no caps were awarded. Soo also played for various FA representative sides and, in the summer of 1945, he was a member of a Combined Services team to play Switzerland that legendary England keeper Frank Swift would refer to as “very nearly England’s best at that time”. However, Frankie Soo would never get his full England cap, playing his final ‘victory international’ in October 1945; three months later the young Billy Wright had taken his place in the England line-up and Soo’s best years were deemed to be behind him.
It wasn’t really until the Seventies that black and mixed race footballers once again challenged for that elusive first England cap (although stories persist that one mixed race footballer gained his first England cap with no fanfare in the late Sixties). Many suspected that West Brom’s Laurie Cunningham might be the player who would finally make the acknowledged breakthrough. A quick and immensely skillful winger, he had become the first black player to wear an England shirt at youth level, scoring on his debut for the Under-21s against Scotland in April 1977, but although he would go on to win six full England caps, it would be Viv Anderson and not Cunningham who would become England’s first black international with his debut in 1978.
There were other players too, waiting for their opportunity, such as Cyrille Regis, Luther Blissett and Ricky Hill (remember them?), all of whom would get their chance in the coming years. John Barnes, meanwhile, was a 15-year-old schoolboy, three years away from his Watford debut, but he still remembers the impact that Viv Anderson’s first international appearance had on his generation of players. “It was hugely important because it gave black players the belief that they could actually play for England,” he says. “I also felt that the fact that Viv Anderson wasn’t a winger or a centre-forward was even more significant, because at that particular time we were all told that black players could only play on the wing or at centre-forward, not in so-called positions of responsibility. The fact that Viv was a fullback really brought it home, not just to the black players that we too could one day play for England, but also to the white football fraternity that not all black players were flair players.”
Anderson may have impressed on his debut and played a part in England’s only goal of the game, but he didn’t gain his second England cap until the next friendly six months later. In the meantime Laurie Cunningham became the first black player to be capped in a competitive international, selected to face Wales in the Home International Championship in May 1979. But for those anticipating the much touted ‘black explosion’, progress was slow. By the time Cyrille Regis became the third black player to represent England, coming on as a substitute against Northern Ireland in February 1982, Anderson had made just eight of his 30 international appearances, while Laurie Cunningham had long since won the last of his six caps, despite playing his club football for Real Madrid.
Born in French Guiana before moving to England as a young child, Regis was a big and burly centre-forward who had been one of Ron Atkinson’s so-called ‘Three Degrees’ at West Brom, but although he would go on to become the first black captain of England’s Under-21s later in 1982, he would only win five senior caps in as many years, never playing a full 90 minutes of football for his country. The remaining ‘Three Degree’, after Regis and Cunningham, was Brendon Batson, but despite making three appearances for England’s B team, his career was ended prematurely by injury in the same year that Regis made his international debut.
After Regis came Luton Town midfielder Ricky Hill, the second of four black players to debut for England in 1982. He was followed by Luther Blissett, who that year became the first black player to score for England, when he hit a hat-trick in the 9-0 victory over Luxembourg, a match that also saw the debut of Stoke City’s 20-year-old winger Mark Chamberlain. Despite the hat-trick, Blissett found some barriers were harder to break down than others, as praise for his achievement was not universal. “The media started panning me, saying I could have had six goals instead of three,” he would later recall.
Of England’s first six black players, only Anderson (30 caps) and Blissett (14 caps) would make it into double figures, but it was England’s magnificent seventh black debutant who would make the most lasting impression on the nation. Watford’s Jamaican-born rising star John Barnes moved to the UK when he was 12 years old and he was just 19 when he made his full international debut in a scoreless draw against Northern Ireland in 1983. He would go on to win 79 caps, still a record for a black England player (although Rio Ferdinand is fast closing the gap), but for Barnes, who remains an outspoken critic of racism in football, when he made his debut it was never about colour, it was always about the best man for the job.
“I happened to be a black player but I felt that I was worthy to be in the team regardless of whether I was black, white or Chinese,” he says today. “It’s about putting the best people out there, and if the best people happen to be seven black and four white players, that’s what it should be.”
Between 1978 and 1990, 15 black players had made their debuts for England, but under newly installed manager Graham Taylor, another eight would follow in 1991, although of these only Ian Wright would gain more than a handful of caps. Two years later Taylor would make Paul Ince the first black England captain, when ‘the Guv’nor’ stood in for Tony Adams and David Platt on a tour of the USA. Ince would go on to wear the armband on a further six occasions, an honour that has also been bestowed on both Sol Campbell and Rio Ferdinand.
Today, when black and mixed race players regularly make up at least half of the England team, (the record stands at nine of the 15 players fielded against the USA in Chicago in 2005), there are still other targets to aim for. Obviously, despite the progress at youth level for England with players like Michael Chopra and Zesh Rehman, the senior team has yet to field its first Asian player, with some of the few English Asians to have plied their trade in the Premiership and the Football League complaining about having to battle against the same kind of racial stereotypes that faced John Barnes and black players of his generation.
For his part, Barnes still believes that quality will eventually win out and that every player, if they’re given the breaks early in their career, can go on to play for England if they’re good enough. He has, however, got one remaining target for English football: to increase the number of black managers. But in an era when Paul Ince remains the only black Englishman to have managed in the Premier League, it seems there are still a few more stereotypes to overcome before the England team will be led by a black manager. “We’ve had black captains, black goalkeepers, black centre-backs, but look at how many black managers there are in the country,” says Barnes, currently pursuing his managerial ambitions with Jamaica. “That really is where we still have a big mountain to climb.”
The highly respected coach Chris Ramsey did briefly lead England’s Under-20 squad at the World Youth Championship in Nigeria in 1999, announcing on his appointment how thrilled he was “to be the first black coach to lead out an England side… hopefully I can open the door and a lot of others will come flooding in.” While the flood has yet to have appeared, at least in the women’s game England have been able to claim progress, with the dreadlocked Hope Powell having coached the team since 1998.
While once the heated debate that surrounded England’s national football team was about race and colour, in recent times it has shifted to ethnicity and nationality, and no-one can now be certain of what the future holds for the racial and ethnic make-up of the England team. FIFA has relaxed its eligibility regulations in recent years so that anyone who qualifies for a national passport can play for that country, provided he has not represented another national side in an official competition. Under current UK law, anyone born abroad becomes eligible for a British passport after just five years of residence in the country, and thus could become eligible to play for one of the home countries.
At this point it is only a gentleman’s agreement between the football associations of the four home nations that has ensured that England continue to select players based primarily on bloodline rather than residence. While it has been reported that the FA would not be keen to select non-English players, the Scottish Football Association are lobbying hard for a relaxation of the rules. If the rules are relaxed in the years ahead we could be looking at national teams of a completely different complexion, one that even more closely mirrors the complex melting pot of nationalities and ethnicities that make up the country in the 21st Century.
Then there’s this one from the previous week:
