‘Kick It Out’ the Organisation for equality and inclusion in football released findings of a survey they conducted between August 2013 and December 2013. As reported here on Football.co.uk.
As that report shows, the findings are clear that there is still a problem in the English game with racial and homophobic abuse. Many of the percentages are striking and having half of the players who answered the survey said had witnessed such abuse.
‘Kick It Out’ said to Sky Sports News that they would have liked more (replies) but at least players had a chance to respond.
I understand that some replies are better than no replies. ‘Kick It Out’ have also emphasised on their website this information now allows them to work on a strategy and to build on their work.
But personally how can they and we as sporting people not be totally ashamed by this, and be extremely bemused by how poor the outcome has been. Only, and I will repeat it, Only 200 players from BOTH the Premier League and the Football League chose to take the time to do the survey. How can this not be disappointing and bring shame to the English game.
Why wouldn’t players be willing to answer the consultation, and the fact that it is only 200 out of how many thousands of players in the game, surely this means those percentages could be interpreted as very weak statistics.
Kick It Out has come under a lot of criticism over the past year or so with high profile players such as Jason Roberts and Rio Ferdinand making a point that they haven’t moved and progressed forward enough as they could have over the past couple of years. I will note I don’t want this to seem I’m as it were, kicking the organisation in the privates and running away. I respect Kick It Out enormously and the work they do, and obviously, it isn’t that easy to get players involved in these significant investigations.
I’m just trying to highlight the issue on the players that didn’t choose to join in the consultation on discrimination in the game and really want to see Kick It Out push harder to investigate further into the English game to expose these cracks even more and to take football out of its bubble. When I last checked we were in 2014. We have moved forward in society with gay marriage being legalised, but we seem to have less of an issue in sport to want to work on the next step with discrimination, getting people to comply to help what should be an agreeable act to do. It’s time to be aware of these issues and to take responsibility.
Source: DSG
