Wembley is so often described as the spiritual home of football – but the stadium hasn’t always reflected the heart and soul of the town.
Take the 182 bus and you’ll see cages filled with culturally diverse dreamers playing in view of the famous arch, just like Raheem Sterling did. In such a place, how could anyone not fall in love with football?
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Of course, it was the Twin Towers back when Luton Town legend Ricky Hill grew up in Brent.
And that’s not the only thing which has changed since the iconic midfielder became England’s fourth-ever black player in the eighties and – as a new book penned in collaboration with talkSPORT’s very own Adrian Durham revealed – the first of South Asian heritage to represent the Three Lions at senior level.
“When you look at the time, there were very few black players before me who had the opportunity,” Hill told talkSPORT.com.
“The borough of Brent was saturated with quality players who were older than me, that I grew up admiring and trying to emulate, but they were never invited to trials in that era.
“After myself, Cyrille Regis and Brian Stein, who all came from Brent, managed to ascend to the England side in the early eighties, Raheem has come along 25 years later, but during that period I’m sure there were other fantastic black and Asian players.
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“From the Asian perspective, there has always been difficulty whereby the system doesn’t seem to trust them at senior level. I know they play the game at grass roots and they love it equally as much as anyone.
“My parents were both from Jamaica, my great-grandparents are Indian and my grandfather was first-generation Jamaican. In Jamaica, we have a saying: out of many, one people. Yes, everyone’s aware of their culture, but we all class ourselves as Jamaican.
“So I was never brought up to think that was going to be a difference between my Indian heritage or my Jamaican heritage.
“But from a football perspective, it has proven to be very difficult for Asian people to have sustained careers.”
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Hill had a talent which couldn’t be ignored, a footballing brain and technical gift which questioned the very rhetoric surrounding black footballers at the time.
While many of football’s first black generation in the UK were only trusted to produce flair in forward areas, Hill became a trailblazer for dictating games under the likes of Sir Bobby Robson and David Pleat, exposing the stereotype for what it was: absurd.
And he did it while abuse came raining down from the terraces.
His new book, ‘Love of the Game’, describes in shocking detail what Hill and his black contemporaries had to endure in order to create a pathway for today’s footballers.
“It was a shocking issue,” Hill continues. “You come to the game to fall in love with the game. You want to be like all the greats that we see on television.
“I just wanted to play football and be seen as a good football player, I didn’t see all the other connotations that went with that.
“I only realised when my dream unravelled and I got on the pitch, that I was going to be a target or a victim for racial abuse.
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“When you’re suddenly thrust into this environment and there are thousands in one stadium and three-quarters of them are singing a song about you because you’re different to everyone else on the field, yeah, at 17 years old it was one of those gut-check moments.
“The resolve has always been that I lived my dream, for my dream, and I’m not allowing anyone to deter me from the fact that I wanted to be a professional footballer and prove how good I was, now that I’m here, let me show these people why their booing won’t make any difference to me.”
Thanks to the likes of Hill, Viv Anderson, Luther Blissett, John Barnes, and numerous others doing exactly that, black players are noticed now. They get invited to trials. They play for England’s top clubs and represent their country.
The overt racism of the eighties continues to plague the game through a handful of fans, rather than thousands every week. But football still exercises the same unconscious, racial bias in 2021.
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A recent report by RunRepeat revealed that players with lighter skin are more likely to be praised for their intelligence, while ‘God-given’ physical and athletic attributes are more likely to be mentioned if a player has darker skin.
“It had been stated [in the eighties] that black players were great for skill and flair, but white players were needed for footballing intelligence,” Hill continued. “That bias still pervades and permeates through the system and the rhetoric hasn’t really changed.
“I’ve never really heard someone say that a black person has football running through their veins, or talk about what they know about the game.”
Football is one of life’s great levellers. From the poverty-stricken streets of Rio de Janeiro to those cages in Brent, anyone with two t-shirts and a ball can make it.
But what about coaches?
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Why aren’t those diverse Wembley streets, or the 30 per cent of black players who make up professional football in the UK, reflected in football’s hierarchy? For Hill, it turned out proving people wrong as a player was only half the job – and the next part still wasn’t available.
Hill made more than 400 appearances for Luton, won a Football League Cup and Second Division title, but was granted just four months as the Hatters’ manager in 2000, and opportunities since then have been non-existent.
It’s a story that will sound familiar to so many, not least Paul Ince and Sol Campbell.
“That repeat opportunity is not there for many, as opposed to our white contemporaries, who seem to get back on the horse a lot quicker than a black person would’ve done,” Hill added.
“The powers that be, generally in the UK, are of the white persuasion. They will sit there and consider the candidates, and without a network where they get a knowledge of black people and mix with black people and have conversations, they’re coming from a very uninformed position in terms of a black person’s capability.”
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Hill, now 62, has been pushing for something like the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule’ for nearly two decades, as his fight for equality in football continues.
When the Football League backed plans for a pilot of the ‘Rooney Rule’ in June 2015, the deputy chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Bobby Barnes, said: “Acknowledgement must go to former Luton Town and England player Ricky Hill, who first brought the NFL’s Rooney Rule to our attention at the PFA’s inaugural Black Players’ Steering Committee, back in 2004.”
The Football Association and EFL have gone on to adopt versions of the rule, but it’s simply not working.
Hill – as he has made clear in his book – is disappointed in the football authorities in England. He doesn’t believe they have gone anywhere near far enough to bring about real change.
At the beginning of the 2020/21 campaign, there were only six ethnic minority coaches in the top 92 clubs of the English professional leagues. You don’t need statistics to know that isn’t proportionate to the number of qualified, capable ethnic minority coaches in the game, or the 14 per cent of the population they represent.
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Football’s obsession with managerial merry-go-rounds and its continued insistence on linking lighter skin with footballing brains means that, like black players weren’t invited to trials before the eighties, they don’t get the interviews today.
Targets have been set by football’s governing bodies, but as recently as June 2020, Middlesbrough sacked Jonathan Woodgate and appointed Neil Warnock on the same morning, announcing both moves in the same press statement. That didn’t break any rules, but why wasn’t a black candidate given the chance to explain their vision for the football club?
Those arguments are often met with cries of positive discrimination and the classic rebuttal that ‘the best person should get the job’ – and Hill agrees with that. But failure to change historical, unconscious attitudes means the best person might not be considered.
“Hence my wish for a ruling akin to the ‘Rooney Rule’ in America, which would introduce the decision-makers to people that they wouldn’t have the experience of meeting in an interview situation,” Hill added.
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“It lets an ethnic minority put their best foot forward, talk about their philosophy or vision, their reputation and how they would lead. There’s no obligation to give them the job, it’s not a tokenistic scenario, it’s something that will help the powers that be to step outside of their historical network, which they’ve relied on for the last 40 years.
“There has to be an appetite from above to look within themselves and ask whether it’s a true reflection on society. There are a lot of different coloured people in the world, is that all in front of them when these interviews take place? No.
“They restrict it to a predominantly white environment so they miss out on the possibility of other capable candidates just because of their naivety or a potential racial bias.
“You cannot sit there and say football is for all and we operate on an equal basis if you exclude certain demographics, who are prepared, qualified and sacrificed a lot to go out and get their badges.”
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It’s the lack of attention these issues get which has seen the likes of QPR, Brentford, and more recently Crystal Palace star Wilfired Zaha, stop taking the knee before matches.
While many still consider the gesture a powerful message to emphasise there is no room for racism in football, which it does, it simultaneously begs the question: what action are we actually taking to make things better?
“It’s a performative empathy that is being shown,” Hill said. “Everyone is empathising with the cause, but nobody is actually making transformative actions to change it for the better and eradicate the cause.
“From my perspective, I’m with Zaha and QPR and the others who have stopped. That was then at the time, we are now aware of it and everyone is aware of the injustices, but now we need to have some actionable plans, not just sadness about people feeling this way.”
‘Love of the Game: The Man Who Brought the Rooney Rule to the UK’ is available now. You can buy a copy here.
Adrian Durham
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