FA chairman Greg Clarke forced to apologise after using the term ‘coloured’
Greg Clarke #GregClarke
The FA chairman, Greg Clarke, has been forced to apologise after using the phrase “coloured players” in an address to MPs.
Clarke was speaking at a DCMS select committee hearing, set up to discuss the current crisis of funding and governance within football.
Asked by the Labour MP Alex Davies-Jones about the absence of prominent gay footballers within the game, Clarke suggested that a concern about online abuse could prevent someone from coming out.
Clarke said: “If I look at what happens to high-profile female footballers, high-profile coloured footballers and the abuse they take on social media … they take absolutely terrible abuse. Why would you voluntarily sign up for that kind of abuse. As soon as you put your hand up the dark corners of social media come for you.”
Clarke was later asked to retract his remarks by the committee member Kevin Brennan and did so, saying: “If I said it I deeply apologise for it.”
An FA spokesperson subsequently issued an expanded statement. “Greg Clarke is deeply apologetic for the language he used to reference members of the ethnic minority community during the select committee hearing today. He acknowledged that using the term ‘coloured’ is not appropriate and wholeheartedly apologised during the hearing.”
In other remarks, over the challenges faced with making football more inclusive, Clarke said that South Asians and Afro-Caribbean people have “different career interests” and pointed to the FA’s IT department as evidence. “BAME communities are not an amorphous mass,” he said. “If you look at top level football the Afro-Caribbean community is overrepresented compared to the south asian community. If you go to the IT department of the FA there’s a lot more South Asians than there are Afro-Caribbeans. They have different career interests.
“So what we have to do is treat each individual on their merits, but make sure we are inclusive and have programmes that don’t cross the line into positive discrimination but encourage those communities to participate.”