Football clubs who pledged to improve their ethnic and gender diversity have collectively failed to hit any of their annual targets, the Football Association has revealed.
The third year of the Football Leadership Diversity Code (FLDC), a voluntary agreement established by the FA and signed up to by 56 clubs from the Premier League, English Football League, Women’s Super League and Women’s Championship, has shown “slower progress than hoped”, according to Mark Bullingham. The FA’s chief executive said he was disappointed and announced that, from next year, all clubs across the top four divisions of men’s football and the top two in the women’s game would be obliged to publish data on the make-up of their workforce.
The FLDC sets voluntary targets in four areas of football recruitment: senior leadership roles, team operations, coaching in the men’s game and coaching in the women’s. Figures for the previous 12 months show clubs failing to achieve success in any category, with a target for the recruitment of Black, Asian and mixed heritage candidates in men’s coaching missed by 9% (16% of recruits from a target of 25%).
Some clubs did perform well, with Fulham, Walsall and West Bromwich Albion achieving every target. For a second year, the governing bodies of the FA, English Football League and Premier League achieved the agreed goals. But big clubs such as Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Newcastle hit a maximum of one target.
Bullingham said the figures showed further changes were required. “The code was the beginning of professional football taking a more open and accountable approach to diversifying its workforce,” he said, “and we all agree that in order to increase the rate of progress, we need to evolve again.”
After discussions with competition organisers in the men’s and women’s game, the FA rulebook is to be adapted to require all clubs to report information twice a year on the ethnic and gender composition of their workforce. Mandatory reporting, long argued for by Kick It Out, is regarded as the next step in making recruitment in football more transparent.
“We also need sanctions for non-compliance and future diversity targets baked into FA, Premier League and EFL rules,” Kick It Out’s chief executive, Tony Burnett, said. “Without that commitment, we won’t know the true scale of the challenge nor be able to find solutions to make football more representative of the people who love the game.”
One of the co-founders of the FLDC, Paul Elliott, said he commended the game’s governing bodies for accepting the need to change. “We are shifting culture,” he said. “For years football has been working only from its black book. Transparency is critical and I credit football for accepting that. Mandatory reporting of employment data is a natural next step in what was always going to be a long-term process. Football is sensibly evolving and developing.”
