HHere it comes again: what used to be called the English problem. English football fans are being arrested in Munich for making Nazi salutes and damaging a hotel room ahead of Tuesday’s Nations League game against Germany. Ahead of the game, manager Gareth Southgate reveals that his job of preparing his players for penalties is now being complicated by the racist slurs inflicted on them after missed penalties in the European Championship final.
With that in mind, the notion that sport could play a leading role in pulling a reluctant world into a truly non-racist future might seem like a ridiculous fantasy. And yet it is happening. In the two years since the assassination of George Floyd, sport has taken more significant strides down that long and arduous journey than any other sector of society.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the sports world’s reactions to Floyd’s killing were among the most dramatic in society. Ebony Rainford-Brent, England’s first black cricketer-turned-Sky commentator, told me: ‘I felt absolutely ill for two to three weeks. I was fed up with racism being a giant elephant in the room.”
Before Floyd’s killing, she hadn’t felt brave enough to speak out about racism – and who could blame her? Her full name is Ebony-Jewel Cora-Lee Camellia Rosamond Rainford-Brent, and at one of her first cricket trials, a white trialist said, ‘Oh, you’re from Brixton, aren’t you? I bet your mom doesn’t know who your dad is so she just gives you one name for everyone.”
But after Floyd’s murder, Rainford-Brent attended three Black Lives Matter marches. She later broke down during a Sky meeting, telling her white peers that she never expected to work with a black director or black producer “because I know how the world works.” The company was so shocked that she and fellow commentator Michael Holding, who had also never spoken out about racism, were asked to produce a documentary about race.
“In the beginning, the squat met resistance, but it’s now become an integral part of the game.” Liverpool FC Women ahead of the FA Women’s Continental Tires League Cup, October 2021.
The result was an important film that argued that the only way to eradicate racism was to educate society about the achievements of people of color, which were erased from history by white writers. This was sensational for British broadcasters, which have traditionally been reluctant to address racism in sport, and emboldened Nasser Hussain, the former England cricket captain whose father is of Indian descent, to admit that he too had been silent about the racism he had had suffered. “We’ve all looked the other way for too long.”
Three weeks earlier, footballers in the Premier League made waves when they began taking the knee. Initially, the anti-racist gesture met with resistance, but has now become an integral part of the game and is supported by white players. This is in stark contrast to previous generations who stood by and sometimes even complied as their Black teammates were racially abused. As John Barnes, who played for England in the 1980s, told me: “When I first started playing, your own team-mates would call you ‘nigger’.”
And the changes are taking place at all levels. Mark Bullingham, the FA chief executive, who was also shaken when he saw footage of Floyd shouting “I can’t breathe,” quickly introduced a football diversity code aimed at making the game more inclusive. When I asked Bullingham about white privilege, he admitted with remarkable frankness, “I think every white person has benefited from white privilege.”
Some sports have even gone so far as to accept their mistake of denying racism. In November 2009 Pat Cash, the Australian winner of Wimbledon men’s singles in 1987, told me that tennis in England was a “white middle class sport”. When the interview appeared, the Lawn Tennis Association immediately contacted the newspaper and refuted it. Now Scott Lloyd, the LTA’s chief executive officer, tells me he agreed with Cash and within days of Floyd’s killing issued an open letter admitting: “Racism and discrimination more broadly are structurally ingrained in our society, and by extension, so is our society Impact Racism is still very blatant and pervasive in our sport.” Rugby has never apologized for its shameful support for apartheid, but Sue Day, its chief operating and financial officer, told me: “Every body that we belong to in this country , was built on racist structures.”
The examples above demonstrate the unique power of sport. It has always had many almost spiritual benefits compared to other popular pastimes. It has echoes of religious observance in its theatre, ritual and beauty. A visit with comrades-in-arms to an important place far away, particularly overseas, is reminiscent of a medieval pilgrimage. In some ways, belief in a team or athlete is a “safer” investment than religious belief. And it’s easier to sack the England football manager than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In today’s post-truth world, sports scores are a rare source of trustworthy news. Not even Donald Trump could claim that a sports score was fake. Sport is also a global language and a marker of personal and local identity. You don’t have to know Portuguese to appreciate Brazilian football. Sport has the unique ability to stimulate the collective and initiate societal change.
This public reckoning with historic racism could not be more different from the smug conclusion of the government-backed Sewell Report on Race, which downplayed the truth of institutional racism: a conclusion that so pleased Government ministers.
It should not have taken the murder of a black American by a white police officer for British sport to make racism clear. And there is a long way to go. But seeing people at all levels of sport – from players to CEOs – asking themselves tough questions suggests a desire for change, something that isn’t as evident in the rest of society.
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