Have been having a domestic nightmare, so haven't managed to see much so far, just a few highlights. Am just catching up on the Germany Denmark game - no spoilers please - and it seems, from my limited watching, that the players are almost all white. Is there a reason for this, that can apply across Europe? Is it class-based?
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It's certainly not every team
France for example appear to be as diverse as the men's team -
Even Iceland had a forward of colourComment
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Thanks, maybe it's just the ones I've seen.Comment
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we thought England were remarkably whiteComment
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It doesn't help that England alienated or froze out a cohort of Black players. Anita Asante, Lianne Sanderson, Eni Aluko and Drew Spence all had their careers with England ended prematurely for reasons that had nothing to do with football.
The other reason for England's whiteness is an explicit restructuring decision which meant centres of excellence were only accessible to those with access to a car.
https://shekicks.net/she-kicks-inves...n-footballers/Comment
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I thought this thread would be about the all-white kits, which women aren’t always fond of.
Credit to ESPN for covering this. I figured Nike/Adidas has solved this issue somehow. I guess not.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/england-...r-white-shortsComment
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Very good article that you've linked to.Originally posted by Bizarre Löw Triangle View PostComment
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England have now used 15 out of the 19 available outfield players in the squad (one other being out with Covid). Those unused so far are: Jess Carter, Demi Stokes, Nikita Parris and Beth England.
The latter must be feeling aggrieved [/sarcasm].Comment
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Give BBC their due, Alex Scott docu addressing this issue was trailed at halftime in the Fin-Den gameComment
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I wrote a thing about this yesterday, and have been getting a dog's abuse all day on Twitter as a result, including a fair few people who believe that you can't be English if you're not white. Five seconds checking found that the account had been retweeted by a Brexit account with 35k followers which never tweets itself but just retweets 'culture war' stuff to its army of absolute weapons.Last edited by My Name Is Ian; 13-07-2022, 17:37.Comment
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I'm so sorryComment
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It's fine, I couldn't give a damn. If I start getting bullshit from people like that, I'm doing my job properly. I'd be 10,000 times more bothered if I wrote something on that subject and they were all sharing it approvingly. That would be truly mortifying. So far as I'm concerned, the only person whose opinion matters is my editor, and she's perfectly happy with my output on anything like this, so I'm all good.Comment
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Have you got a link to the article Ian, I follow you on Twitter but I'll be damned if I can find itComment
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Thank you.
I should maybe not have scrolled down to the comments, that's quite an incredible responseComment
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I've been there 11 months and I don't think I've read a single comment yet.Comment
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Yes, those comments are something. Looks like you triggered a few fragile white men.Comment
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You should see the stuff that doesn't make it on there.
It's going off on social media this morning, I saw Alex Scott trending this morning and that, regrettably, is seldom a good sign. But I dunno, it all seems pretty straightforward to me. I think there are elements to this caucasity that are obviously racist. The Sampson business that was breathtakingly badly dealt with, for example, was about explicit racism.
But the business about training centres seems to me to be classism more than anything else. I used to work in London Colney overlooking what became the Arsenal training ground and knocked it on the head because it was too much of a ball ache to get to without a car... from St Albans, which is about four miles away. For someone coming out from London by public transport, the only way of doing it would have been the 84 bus from Barnet, which was 45 minutes or so and has now been axed, anyway. I'm not sure there'd be a way of doing it now that wouldn't require getting a train to St Albans City and then a bus down to Colney (and not even the centre of the village).
From, say, Camden or Islington you've got to look at that being a minimum two hour journey, possibly nearer three, depending on connections. No one's going want to or be able to do that anything like regularly, if at all, least of all those who can't afford it or can't make that time commitment if they're working 60 hour weeks, two jobs, or whatever. The Arsenal Women Training Hub at Colney opened in 2016. There's currently *one* black Arsenal player in the England squad. A third of people in Islington and a quarter in Camden are non-white.
They'll move heaven and high water in the case of young male players because they're seen as valuable assets to a club, but the women players aren't treated like that because they're in a different league of financial value. As I'm typing all that stuff about Colney I'm thinking, 'And this is perennial WSL title challengers Arsenal we're talking about, who do take women's about as seriously as anyone.' Step down a level or two from there and there'll be even fewer resources available. I've occasionally wondered how much the Brighton women's team suffers for playing their home matches at Crawley, which is another pain in the arse journey to get to which I'm not prepared to make every other weekend for a home match. It was certainly enough to stop me getting a season ticket there (it's two trains and a hike from Brighton).
The racism is structural, obviously. Much as I'd like to, I can't blame Arsenal for the fact that people of colour are more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods and/or in big urban areas. But it's clear that there's huge pool of potential players that are just being overlooked, disregarded, or aren't even coming into women's football.
My younger niece passed through Chelsea's youth system and that was a mincing machine. She quit because she stopped enjoying playing and just wanted to get back to playing with her mates. (I allowed myself a small chuckle at the comments about their blondeness - my niece has blonde hair in a ponytail; watching the Austria match, I thought to myself how she could blend in to such extent that I could even consider her look as Generic England Women's Footballer 2022 Edition.)
But none of this is even disputed. There's no debate to be had there, it's already been identified as a major problem, as is that issue with the dropout rate being so high during teenage years. The biggest problem - other than the explicitly racist response - is that there's no quick fix. It would take a few years to get the numbers of BAME players up to where we'd expect them to be. And I said above, this isn't only in England. The Belgian and Dutch teams, for example, are extremely white.
But this is ultimately the sort of problem that demonstrates why there's still so much work to do with regard to the development of women's football. The structures that allow all players to be found, coached and to flourish still evidently don't exist.Last edited by My Name Is Ian; 14-07-2022, 10:56.Comment
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Right... but there are only three Arsenal players in total in this England squad (Mead, Parris, Williamson). If one of those three is black, well that is proportionate to the local populations you are talking about.Originally posted by My Name Is Ian View Post
Across the whole country 6-7% are black. That is 1 in 14 English people. 3 out of 23 of the current England Women's squad are black. Disproportionality many.
The issue here is we are using men's Football as a comparator, as if this was somehow a pure reflective selection and unaffected by social pressures. The 'very good' She Kicks article above dives head first into this fallacy in it's opening logic. With such a shaky start, the argument that follows is thoroughly undermined.
We can ask why Men's Football has such a disproportionality high number of black players involved. It is, in fact, a really good question. Our answers are unlikely to be that Football is some kind of shining beacon of inclusivity (see parenthesis in the sentence coming). So why would that England Men's team have around 5 times as many black faces as the population of England would have one predict (and infinitely fewer South Asian ones...). How about that it benefits accidentally from significantly reduced opportunity for young black males to make successful, impactful careers in other areas of society, so they focus much more on making it as Footballers than their white peers? If that is the driver then that diverse (and unrepresentative of the make-up of the nation) England Men's team is actually an outcome of structural racism in action.
As with so many things to do with Women's Football, we really should deal with it on it's own merits and not expect it to be a mirror image of the Men's game.Comment
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I've been thinking along the same lines.
There are two additional things worth thinking about
- first, that the demographics of young people are going to skew more to minorities than the demographics of the country as a whole, I would think. So the percentages perhaps should be higher.
- second, that both the mens and womens teams massively under-represent Asian minorities. While you'd expect 1 or 2 black players in the womens 23 man squad, you'd expect something around 3 or 4 of Asian descent rather than zero. If you were randomly sampling from the general population of 18-35 year olds, you'd be unlikely to end up with a team as white as the England team even if there might be zero or one black players. Which is another reason the whiteness of the current team is so stark.
(Also, I think the fact that they almost all dye their hair blonde makes the visual appearance even starker).Last edited by San Bernardhinault; 14-07-2022, 14:56.Comment
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Surely the appropriate comparative group is women under 35. I suspect that the proportions are a lot higher in that age group than the population as a whole.Originally posted by Janik View PostComment
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