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By Tony Attwood
In a weekend when the media are falling over themselves to praise Liverpool it is perhaps not surprising that little has been made of the fact that Manchester United and Liverpool have been flagrantly breaking theEquality Act by advertising jobs in which they openly say applicants have to come from certain ethnic groups. You probably don’t need to tell you that such advertisements and such procedures are completely against the Equality Act in England and Wales.
By way of example, it is reported that an advertisement from Manchester United said, applications “will only be accepted from individuals from those of specific backgrounds.”
An advertisement by Liverpool stated “We will only consider coaches who are currently under-represented within the English professional game – individuals from Black, Asian and Mixed Heritage backgrounds, including women from all backgrounds.” According to the Telegraph similar adverts have been placed Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United, and other clubs.
There is no suggestion that Arsenal has been engaged in such illegal advertising. Ipswich are reported to have dropped an advertisement along those lines – suggesting that it had been “badly worded.” That was not the case. It was illegal.
Meanwhile, there is a general move by those involved in the illegal advertising to push blame onto the Premier League for not giving the clubs proper guidance. The notion that large commercial institutions such as football clubs ought to have its own legal team ensuring that the club abided by the law seems to be completely foreign to these companies.
Indeed apart from the fact that I would have expected that most secondary school children would know by now that discrimination both in favour or against any ethnic or religious group is illegal, the fact that clubs in the Premier League don’t seem to have someone in their hierarchy that can spot an illegal advert when it jumps up and hits them in the fact is deeply shocking. These our major commercial operations. Of course they should know what the law says.
There might well be a drive to increase the number of females and men from minority ethnic backgrounds in coaching within professional clubs, but in the UK positive discrimination in favour of any ethnic or religious group is illegal. The law quite clearly says that each person applying for a job should be considered on her or his merits.
But those working for the Premier League itself as a body doesn’t seem to know what the law of the land says in that it has openly stated in an advertisement that “non-PFA members may … apply [for the jobs they are advertising ] as long as they are a coach from a Black, Asian or mixed-heritage background, they have achieved a minimum coaching qualification of the UEFA B licence and have no previous full-time coaching experience in English professional football”.
With such a gross level of incompetence, I’m surprised that Arsenal and other law-abiding clubs, don’t demand the sacking of the entire top tier of the organisation, and if they don’t get it, walk out and set up a League that does obey the law.
A five-second phone call to the Equality and Human Rights Commission would have told these people that this type of advertising is illegal. As the Commission points out to all employers, “If an employer wants to take positive action the advert should clearly state the employer is seeking applications from everyone but wishes to encourage applications from people with a particular protected characteristic on the basis that they are underrepresented or face disadvantage.”
The advice even goes on to say, “Positive action in recruitment can only be used to make people from protected characteristic groups aware of recruitment opportunities and encourage them to apply for a job.”
Of course there will be excuses – such as the “legislation was recently changed” and other cobblers. But this is not new legislation – it has been on the books since the Equality Act of 2010. Although in my final job before my retirement I was chair of a plc, and obviously had people within the company and consultants beyond the company who advised us on what was and what was not legal. We were a fraction of the size of a Premier League club, and yet we knew what was and what was no legal.
So the question arises how could Premier League clubs and indeed the Premier League, not know what the law says?
Now this point is worth making I think because at the moment we are still awaiting a result of the Manchester City case relating to 130 or more charges of breaking the rules. Now we know that when the charges were brought, in in February 2023 over four years had passed from the events. We also know that the hearings didn’t start until 16 September 2024, that is some 19 months later. We also know that we still not only have no idea of the outcome, but we have no idea when the outcome will be announced.
Now seeing the fact that clubs across the Premier League are going around flagrantly breaking one of the most well-known and clearly expressed employment and discrimination laws, it really makes one wonder how the League can consider themselves competent to take on the might of the ManC legal team. If the clubs can’t follow simple and basic legal rules, what chance is there of anything ever being sorted out?
The Premier League is, in short, simply wallowing in its own incompetence and chaos and the sooner those clubs that behave properly leave the League and set up an alternative competition (as they did when leaving the Football League) the better.
