A lot, if not most women will go for status if they can get it. High status males will mostly go for beauty.....at the high end ethnicity becomes tradable depending upon the individuals and the crowd they mix in.

Apparently, it's fine for black players to be massively over represented as football players...way way over their percentage in the population, but it's not fine for them to be under represented off the pitch.

Yep, I noticed the same thing...anyway, those of us who can remember the seventies will recall how few black players there were - Hillaire, Clyde Best, Ade Coker etc. and yet today we have a plethora of coloured players in the teams. It's a matter of time and natural progression - as today's players leave playing a certain percentage will be keen on managing and consequently in twenty years there will be more. But it won't happen overnight, which I get the impression is what the article wants.

i'm happy Sunak is in power to shove it at Labour. The Tories have always had a better record on 'inclusivity' to Labour. Labour who talk the talk and are mostly led by straight white men.

I think many people underestimate how important it is to see someone from your cultural background in positions of power. I can guarantee there will be black players who see Vieira's success and think, 'wait, I can be a manager?' It's easy to sit here and throw out right-wing tropes about 'wokeness' or 'political correctness' but speak to successful black people and people of colour and many, if not all, will tell you they were inspired by seeing other black people's achievements. It's the same way Britain's working class no longer see skilled jobs or University as 'not for the likes of us' because other working class folk have seen social mobility over the last 60 or 70 years. What we need is more positive role models like Vieira, not more quotas. How we achieve that is a more complicated question, but the more successful he is the wider the gap in the door becomes.

As a side note, I know most people on here seem to sit on the other side of the political wall to me, but I do have to say, while the majority just have a difference of opinion, there are a few who are quite clearly just racist. They're the only reason I'm happy Sunak is in power, just to pi$$ them off

This article is fairly standard stuff as far as the BBC sports desk is concerned nowadays; disproportionate attention to the same old subject matter, covered to a fairly low intellectual standard and exclusively through the prism of identity politics.

As others have said, if you're determined to categorise people only by their race (a preoccupation that used to be the exclusive domain of racists, but which now underpins the 'woke' philosophy) then you could just as easily point out the disproportionate number of black players, and even managers, in relation to the population, or take the same stats as evidence of a failure to launch within the 'black community' (whatever the hell that phrase even means), but of course that's not how the BBC present it.

Notwithstanding, I do take the point that as most managers are former players, the ratio of black players to managers is noticeable. What I can't abide, however, is the practice of starting with a conclusion (it's all down to racism) rather than investigating the matter objectively. We get nowhere like that, in football or wider society.

Regarding football management vacancies, my instinct is that football is too competitive and valuable an industry to deliberately restrict its own access to talent by discounting people based on race. Clubs hire and fire people from all over the world at a rate of knots in pursuit of even the slightest advantage in management, coaching, technical and support staff. Club owners come from all over the world, from lots of cultures and industries, and the idea they would all, despite their different backgrounds and fierce competition with each other nevertheless conspire to restrict opportunities for black candidates, even when those candidates might add value and give them an advantage worth tens of millions, just doesn't stack up.

Ultimately however, as with any aspect of life, we can only understand whether there is a problem if the matter is properly and scientifically investigated. How many black applicants were there for vacancies in management? What were thier scores at interview compared to other candidates? Is there a correlation showing high scores at interview but failure to get job offers? If you don't have this information then you can only guess, or worse, presume. Which leads back to the BBC.

The tragedy here is that the BBC doesn't need to be an ideological echo chamber. It doesn't have to pander to a particular political mindset, because it doesn't have to sell its product, and is still read by a range of people, if only because we've all paid for it already anyway. It could be head and shoulders above the rest of the mainstream media just because of that freedom, be the place we all go to and trust to set out not only the facts, but the contrasting ways one could assess those facts. It could raise the general standards of public discussion.

Instead we get this same old fixed-position bollocks, and more sadly still, people like Vieira, who are willing and able to articulate their thoughts, are denied access to the reasonable counter arguments that might develop thought and understanding, as are we in turn. The conversation just never happens, and we all miss out.

Excellently put.

It would be great if instead of the player vs manager percentages. We could understand where and what the barriers are.

There are countless black players who were fantastic leaders on the pitch, no reason they wouldn't make great managers. But as the big toe Punt said we need to interrogate where the issues are.

I remember a similar article from Hayden Mullins, saying the 'ratios didn't feel right'. But also not offering any insight as to how he manged to go from a player to a coach to a manager. WAs it harder because he was black, what doors were closed to him, and how to open them etc.