In 2019, should there really be such a thing as an all-white football team? (2024)

Take a walk along the promenade in Fleetwood and it still retains a certain kind of candy floss charm, even if it is fair to say the old place, in common with a lot of England’s seaside towns, has not aged quite as beautifully as it would have liked.

Bill Bryson might have been exaggerating a touch when he said the view across the Wyre estuary was “easily one of the most beautiful in the world” but it is still pretty decent on a clear day. The Marine Hall, where The Beatles played in 1962 (bringing John Lennon back to the town where he spent his childhood holidays), is still by the seafront, even if it hosts a different kind of musical event these days. Monday: an afternoon tea dance with Reg Rawlings on the organ.

Fleetwood gave the world the Fisherman’s Friend lozenge. It is the town of Syd Little, Frank Searle (the photographer who gained notoriety in the 1960s as the Loch Ness hoaxer) and the actor Stephen Hibbert — or, as you might know him better, The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.

Yes, it is not a place for the posh or pretentious and it is true that a survey in Which? magazine earlier this year named Fleetwood as the fifth-worst seaside resort in the UK. But don’t knock it too easily. There are still plenty of people who come here every summer to play in the amusem*nt arcades and buy a cone of fish and chips. It is the only place I have ever visited where there is a “happy-to-chat” bench, with the invitation to “sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello”. And, besides, how can you not like a town where the annual music festival is known as “Fleetwoodstock”?

They can be proud of their football club, too, bearing in mind Fleetwood Town were playing among the puddles and potholes of the North West Counties League Division One, the ninth tier of the English football pyramid, as recently as 2005. The level, to put it another way, that feels about right for a town with a population under 26,000 and no real football heritage.

Six promotions later, the Cod Army are holding their own in League One, a point outside the play-offs with games in hand. They have certainly come a long way since the chairman, Andy Pilley, took his first look at their Highbury Stadium in 2004 and walked across a pitch he remembers being “like the surface of the Moon”.

Pilley likes to tell a story of opening a window and the entire window-frame falling out. Today, his club are one of the success stories of modern football, particularly as their upward trajectory comes at a time when the town has been going through all the hardships associated with the decline of the fishing industry.

All of which makes it unfortunate, to say the least, that there is another reason why Fleetwood stand out from every other club in English football’s top four divisions right now.

Fleetwood have used 23 different players so far this season in the league, EFL Cup and FA Cup and every single one has been white. Three more players have been unused substitutes and, again, they are all white. Fleetwood have signed or loaned 27 senior players since the summer of 2018 (excluding scholars) and they all have been white. And, frankly, it is all a bit weird. In 2019, should there really be such a thing as an all-white football team?

It seems unusual, to put it mildly, when about 40 per cent of the professional footballers in England’s four leagues are BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic).

And last season?

Fleetwood used 36 players during 2018-19 for 46 matches in League One, two in the EFL Cup and one in the FA Cup.

Thirty-five of those players were white.

Or to put it another way, Fleetwood have played 66 first-team matches in the three major competitions over the past 15 months and there has been only one occasion when a BAME player has featured in the starting XI.

The exception was James Hill, a 17-year-old centre-half, who was promoted from the club’s academy to make his League One debut in a game against Blackpool on Easter Monday when the team were short of defenders. Hill also made two substitute appearances but has not figured this season in the same three competitions.

The difficult part is to know what to make of it. Can it just be written off as one of those strange anomalies? A moment in time? A coincidence?

Fleetwood say that is exactly what it is: an unfortunate coincidence caused by a myriad of reasons, and that it would be unfair for anybody to suggest anything else.

They have provided a long and detailed explanation to The Athletic and, in fairness to Pilley and his colleagues, they acknowledge it leaves the club facing some legitimate questions.There is no attempt on Fleetwood’s part to argue that it can be considered the norm, just that it would be wrong to think there might be something sinister in it. And they have even invited this correspondent to visit the club to see how they work behind the scenes.

“As a football club, we are more than aware of the importance of diversity and also the lack of it in our first-team squad at present,” Pilley says. “What I must stress is this is not by design or intentional in any way. In all my time in football, we have never taken the ethnicity of a player into consideration in our recruitment process. We always attempt to recruit the best player we possibly can within our budget, regardless of background.

“In my time as chairman, we have always had a positive mix of ethnicities, backgrounds and nationalities in both the playing side and backroom staff side of the club. It is something which is important to me and the club as a whole.”

All of which can be reassuring to hear when The Athletic has gauged opinion from a number of highly-placed people within the sport and been told on almost every occasion that it is both unusual and worrying.

One administrator has described it as an “extraordinary statistical anomaly that requires explanation”.

The matter has been discussed at Kick it Out, as well as the Professional Footballers’ Association, and it goes in Fleetwood’s favour that they have been frank and open in their response when, plainly, this is not the kind of publicity any club would necessarily want.

In Fleetwood’s case, the club can point out that Jay Matete, a teenage BAME player, was promoted from the club’s development squad to play in the Leasing.com Trophy Northern Section (Group B) tie against Oldham Athletic last week. Hill and Shayden Morris, another BAME youngster from their under-18s, featured as substitutes when Fleetwood played Liverpool’s under-21s in an earlier group game. Strictly speaking, that counts as a senior match, even if the nature of the Football League Trophy — open to League One and League Two clubs plus 16 invited under-21 sides from Premier League and Championship clubs with Category One academies — makes it something of a grey area. Fleetwood beat Oldham 5-2 in a game watched by 535 people.

Overall, though, there is an acceptance at boardroom level that the current position is out of tandem with the rest of football.

The club signed 11 senior players in the summer, either on permanent deals or loan arrangements, and all of them were white. Throughout the previous season, 17 joined the club and the same applied again.

As for the four senior BAME players who were on the club’s books, they all left from May 19 to July 18 last year. There is no suggestion, though, of that being for anything but football reasons.

Victor Nirennold, a French centre-half, had spent the previous three months on loan at Guiseley, of the National League, before Fleetwood cancelled his contract and he moved to FK Senica in Slovenia. Toumani Diagouraga, another Frenchman, moved to Swindon Town after failing to make a positive impact in League One. Alex Reid also dropped into League Two to join Stevenage Town, having previously been on loan at Wrexham and Solihull Moors, and Nathan Pond ended his 15-year stay at Fleetwood by moving to Salford City. Pond had the option within his contract of a one-year extension to stay where he was. He decided instead to accept a two-year deal from Salford that reunited him with Graham Alexander, a former Fleetwood manager.

All of which has left Fleetwood in a position where there have been some challenging conversations behind the scenes at Highbury over the past few days.

Fleetwood have calculated that 26 per cent of the players in their academy’s professional development phase are from BAME backgrounds. Out of the 143 players who have represented Fleetwood in the Football League, 37 have been BAME. The club haveopened an international academy within the town and all 16 players are BAME. There is plenty of solid evidence to support their argument that the issue — and perhaps this is an unfortunate turn of phrase — is not as black and white as it seems.

It is just the first team where the issue appears to lie.

A statement from Kick It Out read: “In 2019, the lack of diversity in a first team of any professional club is not a true reflection of the industry in which it operates. We would advise clubs to seek support from the relevant organisations to identify the development of player pathways to redress such under-representation, and to educate clubs on the benefits of a diverse squad.”

One of the interesting parts is that Fleetwood do not appear to have received any feedback about this issue from the people who watch their games. The Athletic asked Bernard Noble, chairman of the official supporters’ club, if he had heard any concerns within the fanbase. “I’m not making any comment about that at all,” he said.

It is also worth mentioning there is a strong working relationship between Joey Barton, Fleetwood’s manager, andShow Racism the Red Card, which was due to host an educational event for school children at the club on Thursday (an annual event).Matete was in the 20-man travelling party (though not on the bench) for their FA Cup tie at Barnet two weekends ago.The club’s head of sports science, Youl Mawene, is a Frenchman born to a Congolese father and it is understood Fleetwood tried to sign Jonson Clarke-Harris, a mixed-race player, from Coventry City in January. The player chose instead to join Bristol Rovers.

“The demographic of the town of Fleetwood is 98.8 per cent white ethnicity and for that reason, our community trust and academy support a number of schemes encouraging diversity,” Pilley says. “Our international academy in particular is a fine example of the work we are doing to bring diversity to the community.

“At present, I acknowledge the lack of diversity within the first-team squad but I am pleased to say we have a number of promising BAME players who we have high hopes for in the future, three of whom have featured in the EFL Trophy this season.

“In the past, we have fielded sides with a high percentage of BAME players and I am sure we will again in the future. It goes without saying our record appearance-holder, Nathan Pond, who captained the side for all our six promotions, is of black Caribbean origin. Diversity and inclusion are issues we take very seriously as a club and it is important Fleetwood Town is not judged on a snapshot at the present time.”

(Photo: Rob Newell – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Daniel Taylor is a senior writer for The Athletic and a four-time Football Journalist of the Year, as well as being named Sports Feature Writer of the Year in 2022. He was previously the chief football writer for The Guardian and The Observer and spent nearly 20 years working for the two titles. Daniel has written five books on the sport. Follow Daniel on Twitter @DTathletic