Patrick Vieira celebrates his African identity while criticizing football’s lack of diversity in management, media and in the country he belongs to
In a column published in the Daily Telegraph, ex-Sunderland manager Steve Bruce criticizes “Africans” in football as “a lazy, lazy, lazy lot” who “come nowhere near to appreciating the opportunities available to them.” In the same Telegraph piece, Bruce accuses the “racist” former England manager Glenn Hoddler of “being a foreigner” and of being in “total command” of the team he led to Premier League title in 1996.
“Glenn Hoddler would have told me where to go to and how to behave,” Bruce tells how England “got a chance” in the 1990s and why he wants England to “get something like that for as long as I’m able to be here [as] a black man in football’s middle.”
These comments, coming from a man who once won the World Cup with the Nigeria national team – the first black man to ever win the competition – and who was recently appointed as the first black manager in Premier League history, are in stark contrast to the public discussion around race in sport, and in particular around issues around the lack of diversity at the top of the game.
For over a year, the former chairman of the Football Association, Lord Triesman, has waged war on his successor, Kit Carrington – in a private battle that has been dubbed “The Triesman Review” – accusing him of being one of the “most dangerous men in British sport.”
In a letter he wrote in January, he described Carrington as a “shallow, uneducated, self-centred individual” who was “a man without a future in the game,” who was only “worth having” because of his race and ethnicity, the Guardian reported. “Triesman went on to accuse the England coach, Fabio Capello, of favouritism
