Sports writer Alistair Mason applauds John Barnes for speaking up on an issue that’s becoming an embarrassment.
It’s become a depressingly familiar football trope: a prominent black player says the colour of his skin has held him back in the game, and people rush to mock him.
Nobody is more familiar with this cycle than John Barnes, an eloquent and outspoken critic of institutional racism in the game – and in society – who is again hitting the headlines for having his say.
The former Liverpool winger’s latest quotes come from a new show John Barnes: Sports Life Stories, to be broadcast on ITV4 on Tuesday. He said: “A white manager loses his job and gets another job, he loses his job, he gets another job. Very few black managers can lose their job and get another job.
“What I can judge it from is by looking at society. How many black people are there in the higher echelons of any industry? We can talk about journalism, we can talk about politics. So why should football be any different?”
And what does Barnes get for speaking out about an issue that shames the game? Mockery and abuse.
He gets told he’s playing the race card, that he has a chip on his shoulder – that the only reason he can’t get a job is that he’s not good enough.
I see John Barnes has now jumped on the bandwagon and started playing the race card. pic.twitter.com/S6N4dEYCIF
— Tony C (@TCofLondon) March 30, 2015
John Barnes – apparently he's saying he can't get a Managers job because he's black. He been hanging about with Sol Campbell? #TeamFA
— Footy Accumulators (@FootyAccums) March 30, 2015
Imagine being John Barnes and thinking it was the colour of your skin stopping you getting a managerial job and not your terrible record 😂😂
— Adam Webster (@adswebbo) March 30, 2015
It’s easy to mock Barnes for the failures in his short managerial career – he was in charge of Celtic for their infamous loss to Inverness and won just three out of 12 matches while boss of Tranmere.
But it’s wrong to say Barnes has a poor managerial record – to all intents and purposes he has no managerial record at all.
He’s taken charge of 29 matches in Scottish football and 12 in the English game. To suggest we can write him off as a bad manager on that evidence is ludicrous.
There’s an enormous list of white managers who were, or are, given chance after chance to prove themselves. Barnes was too polite to mention any by name, but we’re not: Iain Dowie, Graeme Souness, Paul Jewell, Billy Davies, Michael Appleton – all those and many, many more have been afforded the luxury of multiple failures, with a job waiting for them on the other side.
No doubt you can pick out many other examples from your own club’s history.
For Barnes, there has been no such luxury. To say Barnes didn’t do well in the scant chances he did get entirely misses the point – he didn’t claim otherwise. He just said that white managers get more chances.
Two opportunities at club management, he got – less than a season in total. A player would never be written off on such meagre evidence, and neither would the vast majority of white managers.
But it’s easy and comfortable to pounce on Barnes’ pronouncements, to mock them because he doesn’t have a sparkling record, and thereby write off his words as having no value.
Structural racism is raised, a painful debate follows. #JohnBarnes may not have great managerial record but does that make him wrong?
— Piara Powar (@PiaraPowar) March 30, 2015
Never mind that Barnes always tries to keep things general, and not make them about him – let’s just say he has a chip on his shoulder.
Never mind that Barnes is always at pains to point out this is a societal issues, not a football issue – let’s just call him a bad manager.
But to do so is wilfully to ignore what is an embarrassing issue.
A report in November carried out by the Sports People’s Think Tank found only 19 black and ethnic minority (BME) coaches held 552 “top” coaching positions at professional English clubs.
That’s 3.4%, despite the fact that 25% of players come from a BME background.
Are all aspiring black coaches just bad? Do all out-of-work black managers just have a chip on their shoulder?
Hopefully the answers to those questions are self-evident.
Barnes should get nothing but the utmost respect for repeatedly making this point, knowing full well he’ll get the same accusations and ridicule thrown at him every time.
To mock him is to deny the truth of his words. You’re kidding yourself if you think he’s wrong.
Source: SNAPPA
