On Thursday 22 October 1992, I attended an event in Crewe to hear Simon Armitage, a newly published poet, read his work. I remember the date because I still have the ticket and poetry recitals were not a normal night out for those of us who grew up in the pubs and clubs of Grimsby in that era. It was a night that changed my life as I glimpsed a possible world that could coexist alongside the heavy-drinking, sometimes scrapping, football-loving culture and the constraints men set themselves back then.
Some constraints were self-imposed, others were rooted in the ignorance and prejudice of the time. This was typified when, years later, my mum found out I liked the creative arts and her response was to ask if I was gay. A bizarre conclusion, unthinking and uneducated, but not unusual then. Simon was one of the first poets I saw – a cool young Yorkshireman who wrote about relatable issues and spoke in an accent I recognised.
I reread Simon’s version of Homer’s The Odyssey on holiday in Corfu recently while Euro 2024 played out in the background. Odysseus embodies the archetype of the heroic leader through his physical courage, cleverness, bravery and charisma while contemporary figures such as Gareth Southgate represent a transformation in our view of what masculinity can be. Southgate is a quieter, caring and intellectually curious coach who, while comfortable leading, focuses on amplifying collective voices. This upgrade is recent but long overdue.
Despite the hyperbolic scrutiny often placed on individual leaders, the success of a team is always a collective effort. The tendency to overestimate the causality between results and the person doing the media interviews is often an attribution error or an attempt to look for a simple explanation when things go right or wrong. Leadership certainly matters, but it has boundaries and limitations and the higher up the football pyramid we go in terms of talent, the more important culture becomes. The leader is primarily a cultural architect who creates the psychological safety for players to express their talent without fear.
It seems self-evident that one way to update the view and range of leadership is to make it more inclusive and have more women in leadership roles. While I am aware that bias and prejudice can exist along many characteristics, I have seen how men and women are treated differently throughout my career. This has hit home as a father of a daughter and a son, seeing how things are different for each of them.
The past three years at Grimsby Town have added another perspective on where we, as a society, are failing to create leadership role models for all. To understand the status quo, I think the issue of transparency in data and reporting is the starting point. Researching this article was surprisingly difficult; getting accurate numbers of female board members and executives in football was challenging. The Unofficial Partner Podcast, through a WhatsApp group of sports professionals, provided the best responses. It seems there are only seven female chief executives of 92 across the Premier League and English Football League, or 7.6%. Female representation on boards is 10% in the Premier League and 13% in the EFL.
The Code for Sports Governance, published by UK Sport in 2016, outlines what needs to be done, including recommendations for board representation. The question remains: why is progress so slow? My last business was in financial services, and in 2010 we supported the 30% Club, which aimed to increase female representation on boards from 12% to 30%. Today, the campaign is global, and in the UK, FTSE companies have reached 40%. Studies from McKinsey, Credit Suisse, Deloitte and Harvard Business Review show that diverse businesses outperform their non-diverse counterparts. While the moral argument is clear, the pragmatic argument about performance is clearer. From personal experience, I’ve always found recruiting people with broad and diverse backgrounds just makes workplaces more interesting and enjoyable.
The pipeline of available female or diverse candidates being limited is often used as an excuse for not hiring or arguing that “we just hire the best candidate”, but these are lazy tropes to avoid addressing bias. Creating an environment where every candidate gets seen and can envision themselves in senior roles is important. Women in Football has put 600 women through its leadership course to prepare candidates for roles. Polly Bancroft was one of them.
When in February we appointed Polly to succeed Debbie Cook as the CEO at Grimsby, we discussed the importance of role models in our personal lives and careers. Polly said: “I heard Debbie Cook speak at the Women in Football conference just over a year ago. Prior to that, I hadn’t realised that being a CEO of a football club could be a potential role for me. It sowed a seed and I started exploring what it might take. If I hadn’t gone to the conference, or attended her talk, or been impressed with how she spoke, I might not be here today.
“Visibility of female role models is key, and I hope that by the time I’ve completed my role, the number of women in executive positions across the professional game will have increased. In the words of Billie Jean King: ‘You have to see it to be it.’”
When we think about a major tournament, people seldom think rationally that the probability of winning is always remote, even for the best teams. According to Twenty First Group data, England were the favourites for Euro 2024 but with only a 17% chance of becoming champions. Fans forget that the most likely outcome for any team is failure and that unpredictability is embedded into the nature of the game. It’s the reason we love it.
We cannot do much better than Southgate unless we try something obviously different, and so I hope the Football Association is seriously considering leaders such as Sarina Wiegman or Emma Hayes as the head coach and cultural architect of the men’s team. Drawing from the widest pool of talent makes sense and Wiegman and Hayes are world-class leaders. Whether they would see the role as a step up or down is debatable but someone like them would have the added benefit of inspiring a whole generation to see that leadership is much broader and more interesting than in Homer’s time.
• Jason Stockwood is the vice-chair of Grimsby Town
