Showing racism the red card: The young footballers addressing racial exclusion in the game

When Yusuf Bamba signed for a League One team he knew he’d caught a lucky break. 

A talented striker, he’d had trials with a number of professional sides but none had ever worked out; getting the chance to come through the ranks with a semi-professional team presented the opportunity for his dreams to be realised.

It was during his time there that two things began to dawn on him, though. First, despite mixing socially with a large community of equally talented black players, he was the only one to have tasted anything close to professional success. Secondly, despite performing well in training he was rarely picked for the match-day team.

“I was playing in the youth academy and was the only black player in the team,” Bamba says. “I was doing really well in training but when it came to a game I’d be on the bench. I’m thinking, I’m doing everything I can to play but I’m getting overlooked. I was also the only one of my age that was playing at that level and I was asking why the other guys weren’t playing at that level too.”

Concluding that – for whatever reason – young black players simply weren’t being given the opportunities to showcase their skills, Bamba founded grassroots side Scoutable United in 2019. The project is designed to ensure talented players always have a team to play for and that that team is brought to the attention of talent scouts. The long-term vision is to normalise the presence of ethnic minority Scottish players in the game so no one has to feel excluded or marginalised in the same way he did.

Much of the work of Scoutables revolves around breaking down barriers, many of which go unnoticed by the people that have put them up. Bamba believes the exclusion he experienced was the result of cultural dissonance, with his team mates and managers not realising he was unfamiliar with many of the cues and references they took for granted and his own anxiety about being singled out as ‘the black player’ preventing him from voicing concerns.  

Yusuf Bamba

“I’m a quiet person,” he says. “You’re already at a place you’re not used to and they’re not used to you. I couldn’t be myself because they didn’t understand me. If I had [another black player] with me he could understand me and then they would have two to understand. They would start to accept us in the changing room and to understand our sense of humour and personalities.” 

The team’s manager Rob Webb, a university professor whose parents were both football scouts in his hometown of Sheffield, is more prosaic in his assessment.

“Football is working class and white working-class changing rooms are a thing of wonder,” he says. “The humour and the music are all built around the white working class and it perpetuates itself. The attitude is belt up and fit in or fuck off.”

Aside from challenging scouts to sit up and take note, one of the main aims of Scoutables is to help players of all backgrounds communicate and fit together without the choice between belting up or fucking off ever having to be made. It is a task of epic proportions.

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Scotland likes to think of itself as an exceptional place, somewhere “open, inclusive and outward-looking” (in First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s words), that may suffer from unhealthy football rivalries but where full-blown racism doesn’t exist. Such positioning explains the ease with which we collectively took the moral high ground in the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final, looking on as English players Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were subjected to torrents of racial abuse and telling ourselves the same thing would never happen here.

Certainly, the fact that Che Adams was the Scotland squad’s only black player at the time made it statistically far less likely that the Scottish team would have the same level of racist slurs directed at it. But the fact that Leicester-born Adams – an English Premier League player whose links to Scotland are through one of his grandparents – was the Scotland squad’s only black player at the time shows just how racially exclusive the Scottish game is.

At the time of the Euros, when the Scottish side was umming and ahing about whether to take the knee or not, Scotland’s anti-racist credentials were being trumpeted in stories about Andrew Watson, a Guyana-born Queen’s Park player who captained the national side to a series of victories in the 1880s. For a nation that is only now starting to acknowledge its slave-owning past, knowing we were so ahead of the racism game that we embraced black players just a few decades after slavery was abolished created quite the feel-good factor.

But if you can count on one hand the number of non-white players who have represented Scotland in the 140 years since – and if Adams, who debuted last March, was the first-ever non-white player to represent the country in the finals of a major tournament – is it really accurate to say Scottish football doesn’t have a problem with racism? Or is the fact there have been so few black and minority ethnic players for racism to be directed at a form of racism in and of itself?

Human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar believes the latter to be the case. He represents Rangers footballer Glen Kamara, who was thrust into the role of anti-racism campaigner after being racially abused by Slavia Prague defender Ondrej Kudela during a game at Ibrox last year. Anwar was highly critical of European governing body UEFA’s handling of the case – which resulted in a 10-match ban for Kudela and three-match suspension for Kamara – but says the way the Scottish Football Association (SFA) responded to the incident was just as telling.

Noting that the way Rangers dealt with the incident was “outstanding”, Anwar says that in keeping silent for days and then announcing a series of all-white appointments to its Equalities and Diversity Board (Livingston captain Marvin Bartley, who is black, was brought in as an adviser to the board) the SFA’s response was lacklustre at best and shameful at worst.

“The approach of Rangers and Glen’s team mates was outstanding – he had the immediate support of the board, the managers and the players,” Anwar says.

“The team is ethnically diverse and that always has an impact – if you’re the one player you’re scared to raise the issue because you don’t want to be dismissed as ‘playing the race card’ or having a chip on your shoulder. In modern football at Premiership level you can’t have a team now that’s all white because some of the best players in the world come from Africa or the Middle East. It doesn’t make good sense not to deal with racism.

“The SFA should feel sad that young players have to set up their own teams to get a game and feel protected, but they don’t get it. They do knee-jerk reactions – they react to problems when they occur, call conferences and say they are dealing with it, but a failure to actually take action , I believe, smacks of institutional racism. You can see that by looking at its lack of diversity. It doesn’t wash to put out a few photos with black faces; what they are doing doesn’t deliver.”

Although, as Anwar notes, there is now a reasonable level of ethnic diversity within Premiership teams, few of those players are homegrown. Kamara, for example, was born in Finland and began his career in England, initially with Southend United before moving to the Arsenal academy when he was 17; Bartley also got his start in the English system, playing for a number of non-league and professional sides before signing for Hibernian in 2015 and moving on to Livingston four years later. Research conducted by Scoutables estimates that of the 1,200 players in Scottish football’s top four leagues, just seven or eight are black players who have come through the Scottish youth ranks.

Kevin Harper. Picture: PA

Kevin Harper, who in the nineties was the first black player ever to be signed by Hibernian and who went on to manage League Two side Albion Rovers between 2018 and 2020, says that unless and until organisations such as the SFA take decisive action to ensure there are opportunities for young players at the bottom end as well as role models for them to look up to at the top those statistics are unlikely to change. 

“I was racially abused when I was 18 and playing for Hibs,” he says. “The SFA didn’t do anything about it and when I went back home I didn’t do anything about it because I felt like I shouldn’t. The team didn’t do anything – there was no support at that point in time.

“That was 30 years ago – 30 years ago was very different to what it is now, but I don’t think we’ve moved that far forward. If you look at Scottish football there are no black managers and only one black coach [Bartley at Livingston], but two Scottish managers have been outed for racial abuse [last year Cowdenbeath manager Maurice Ross was forced to resign as assistant head coach of Notts County after making a racial slur against player Enzio Boldewijn; Ross County manager Malky Mackay – who was performance director of the SFA between 2016 and 2020 – admitted sending racist texts while in the running to become Crystal Palace manager in 2014].

"There are more managers that have been called out for racism than there are from ethnic backgrounds. If you look at it in that sense it tells you everything you need to know – there’s no diversity, but there is institutional racism.”

Both the SFA – which as Scottish football’s governing body is responsible for the development of the game in Scotland – and the Scottish Professional Football League (SPFL) – which governs the country’s 42 league clubs – were given the opportunity to contribute to this article. In over a decade of reporting on diversity and inclusion I have always found it to be the one topic businesses and organisations will almost universally trip over themselves to engage on. Their track records may not be great, but they want it to be known they are keen to rectify that and have no end of initiatives to showcase as a result. Though the SFA emailed a link to an equality framework it described as “far reaching”, neither it nor the SPFL could find anyone with any time to discuss the issue of racism in Scottish football and neither engaged with the offer of an extended deadline – the SPFL even used an expensive PR and reputation management firm to deliver that news. 

Jordan Allison, campaign manager at educational charity Show Racism The Red Card, believes the reticence comes from the organisations choosing to bury their heads in the sand rather than face the reality that having no people of colour round their own decision-making tables means they are ill-equipped to understand, let alone deal with, racism or the insidious impact the exclusion of minorities – intentional or otherwise – has. 

“They don’t want to open that can of worms,” Allison says, “but it could turn into a positive. They could say ‘we have a problem with racism and want to be at the forefront of addressing it’. That’s what’s so sad for the thousands and thousands of young players who are feeling disengaged.”

Yet without the engagement of the organisations who sit at the very top of the game – proper, informed and inclusive engagement – the efforts being made by those such as Bamba at the bottom end are far less likely to achieve their full potential. Kash Taank, sports equalities manager at Glasgow City Council’s sport and culture charity Glasgow Life, has a long association with the Scottish Ethnic Minority Sports Association (SEMSA), which set up a team similar to Scoutables but for Asian players over two decades ago. He says the aim of that project was to address the false assumption that Asians are not interested in football and help players find a route into the professional game. The lack of enthusiasm from the organisations at the top means its success has been limited, he says.

“There was this perception that Asians don’t play football, only cricket, and there were also issues in terms of visibility,” he says. “What we hoped to do was create within the system, with the SFA and SPFL, not necessarily an academy, but to get that wider recognition within the Asian community.

"We didn’t succeed with that, for a number of reasons. There wasn’t enough that the SFA and SPFL did to encourage that environment. It was always a case of ‘we offer football as an activity and the doors are open’, but life doesn’t work like that – you have to recognise that certain cohorts have difficulty with access. They chose to not be proactive in dismantling those myths and stereotypes that eventually became barriers. Football as an institution in Scotland has a lot to answer for.”

Taank agrees with Allison that because there is no racial diversity at the top of these organisations the issues are misunderstood, the solutions they come up with are inadequate and the problem of racial exclusion is self-perpetuating. Indeed Allison, who was one of the people appointed to the SFA’s diversity board in the aftermath of the Kamara incident, says that any time racism is on the agenda at board meetings “no one has the lived experience to be able to discuss it or to articulate it”.

As a result the SFA has come up with initiatives such as the Football Equality Project, something Taank says “looks fantastic on paper” but in reality is “tokenistic at best”. Though its stated aim is to ensure “barriers, real and perceived, are removed, particularly in relation to under-represented groups”, Taank says the fact the SFA outsourced management of the project to ethnic minority organisation BEMIS rather than overseeing it itself, has resulted in it failing to create any meaningful pathways into the game.

“The SFA shouldn’t be looking to add things on – they should be mainstreaming it within their own culture, but their culture is not conducive to that because they are not inclusive in terms of thought processes,” he says. “They need to get more people of colour round the table. Their engagement needs to be wholesome, it needs to be proactive and it needs to recognise what the community looks like.”

Without that, he fears that, just like SEMSA’s Asian football team, Scoutables’ success could be limited. 

“Sport generally has become very, very lazy around issues of race,” he says. “The [Scottish] government [which provides funding for the SFA to use specifically on expanding participation] talks about hard to reach communities but they’re not hard to reach, they’re just easy to ignore. We’re just easy to ignore and that’s the bottom line.” 

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Bamba is not one for being ignored, though, and while those at the top of the game might be happy to act like racism isn’t an issue, those at the bottom are mobilising. When Scoutables was set up in 2019 its aim was to get one player signed to a professional contract. It has already far exceeded that ambition, with six players – including Julien Kouame, Alfie Robinson and Idrissa Sarr – signing for Albion Rovers and two – Aboubacar Karamoko and Daniel Martins – joining Gretna FC 2008.

With Scoutables making its mark, feeder teams are beginning to spring up, with Bamba’s friend Christian Kasongo setting up a squad of his own – Red Road – with the specific aim of developing players to the point they might become scoutable too.

Christian Kasongo

"I started Red Road because I grew up around the Red Road flats [a high-rise complex in the north east of Glasgow that was demolished in the years leading up to 2015] – it was all immigrants and we built a community ourselves,” Kasongo says.

“I spoke to Yusuf about Scoutables but then thought how about I start my own one. I’m trying to get my players who are good enough to go to Scoutables. When you’re young you need someone to give you a boost in confidence. I just wanted to create another opportunity for players to come on. You have to enjoy the game and that’s what we’re trying to do – and to normalise it.”

Bamba has also begun coaching a women’s side after being approached by a female player looking for her own start at the end of last year. He agreed to do it on the condition that she got enough players for a team together; she swiftly assembled a group of 14 and now Scoutables has its sights set on breaking into the women’s game too.

Ultimately, while it seems clear that the professional football organisations need to take serious and wide-reaching action to address racism and racial exclusion in the Scottish game, Bamba is determined to do his bit to ensure the next generation coming through is given the best chance possible to succeed.

“My aim is that I don’t want someone who is 13 right now having to go down the path we did,” he says. “We’re trying to change things for the next generation so that they can go into clubs and be confident. I don’t want their team mates to say this is a black football player, just this is a football player. It’s about integrating them into the conversation and banter.

"I don’t want them to go through what we went through because if that keeps going things will never change.”