Lack of opportunity for black bosses is showing few signs of improving

Patrick Vieira’s sacking by Crystal Palace last month leaves both the Premier League and Women's Super League without a single black manager, while Paul Ince's dismissal by Championship club Reading yesterday means there are just four across 92 clubs in the Football League.

In the top two divisions, only Burnley's Vincent Kompany, Cardiff boss Sabri Lamouchi and Liam Rosenior, of Hull, now hold managerial posts, despite black players making up 43 per cent of Premier League squads and 34 per cent in the Championship.

Even before Vieira and Ince lost their jobs, a report commissioned by the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), released last month, found that just 4.4 per cent of management positions in English football were held by black employees. The report concluded that there has "barely been a shift" in the professional game between 2021 and 2023, despite the introduction of measures such as the FA's leadership diversity code in 2020 and the EFL's recruitment code a year earlier.

The second annual report into the FA's diversity code, published in October, showed some positives, but English clubs largely failing to meet its targets.

The problem is two-fold. Black coaches are chronically under-represented, given they hold 14 per cent of known UEFA Pro licences and 23 per cent of other licences earned between 2004 and 2020, according to the report, but there is also a lost generation deterred from going into coaching by what QPR director of football Les Ferdinand has described as "the glass ceiling".

England boss Gareth Southgate admitted last month that he would "like to have an English staff across the board" after hiring Dutchman Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, but added that "there aren't a huge number of black coaches who have the UEFA Pro Licence and the experience" for the job.

Clearly, one of English football's biggest travesties is showing few signs of significant improvement, but the conversation has lost the urgency of a year or two ago.

The likes of Vieira and Jermain Defoe, now a youth coach at Tottenham, remain powerful voices, but many black coaches believe they are past the point of making an impact with words, and Ferdinand is among those to have stopped talking about the issue until something changes.

Vieira believes the voices that really need to be heard are decision-makers at the highest levels of the game: executives at UEFA, FIFA, the Premier League and EFL, as well as club chairmen.

Notwithstanding the game's chronic accountability problem, any attempts to challenge decision-makers on their commitment to diversity and whether the current measures in place go far enough should be welcomed.

If progress remains slow, forcing the game to be more diverse is an option, albeit one which might feel uncomfortable. The Government has effectively concluded that English football cannot govern itself by announcing the introduction of an independent regulator, and if clubs do not manage to increase diversity themselves, they could be made to.