Wolves criticised for failing to comply with EFL rules on BAME recruitment

The west Midlands club failed to interview a candidate from a black, Asian and minority ethnic background when searching for Kenny Jackett's successor

A general view of Molineux, Wolverhampton Wanderers' ground (Getty)

Wolverhampton Wanderers were under fire last night for failing to comply with the English Football League’s (EFL) recruitment code for black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) coaches, which the club had signed up to earlier this summer.

Wolves agreed in June to be one of 10 EFL clubs who pledged to interview at least one BAME candidate if they were to recruit a new first team coach. This new policy accompanied the EFL’s mandatory recruitment code for interviewing BAME candidates for academy coaching jobs.

But when Wolves interviewed for a replacement for Kenny Jackett in July, they did not interview a BAME candidate, contravening the code they had agreed to. Wolves were spoken to by the EFL, who recognised that the club were going through special circumstances owing to their takeover by Chinese group Fosun International just days before.

Walter Zenga, Jackett's successor, was dismissed last month after just 14 Championship games. When Wolves ran a process to find his replacement, which culminated in the appointment of Paul Lambert, they did interview a BAME candidate, thought to be Paul Ince.

Last night a new report into ethnic minorities and coaching in English football was released, written by the Sports People’s Think Tank, produced with the University of Loughborough and the Fare network. “Where there has been unprecedented progress in the EFL, we have seen issues that undermine the league’s much praised initiative,” the report said, describing Wolves’ failure to interview a BAME candidate in July as a “clear breakdown of the code”.

Zenga was dismissed after just 14 league fixtures in charge last month (Getty)

“The Wolves episode raises two questions,” the report continues. “The first is that if the voluntary code is being ignored for highly visible first team appointments then it is very easy for clubs to ignore the mandatory code at the much less public academy level. The second is to raise the question as to who is monitoring and evaluating progress on the codes adopted by the EFL, who are the clubs accountable to?”

In early June the EFL announced new plans to tackle the serious under-representation of the BAME coaches and managers in the English professional game. This meant a mandatory requirement at academy level for coaching roles to be advertised on club websites and on the EFL website, and also that clubs must interview at least one BAME candidate, providing an application has been received. Along with that there was the voluntary code for first-team coaching jobs, signed up to by 10 EFL clubs, with Wolves, Fulham, Birmingham City and Huddersfield Town from the Championship.

The EFL have been encouraged so far by the take-up for the voluntary recruitment code, and are hopeful that more than 10 of its 72 members will be signed up to it by the start of next season. The number of BAME first team managers in England remains stubbornly low with just one appointed during the year from 1 September 2015 to 1 September 2016, the period covered by the report. That was Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink at Queens Park Rangers, and while he was sacked this month, the appointment of Marcus Bignot at Grimsby Town means that there are still three BAME managers in the professional game.

That means that just 3.3 per cent of first team managers in the top 92 clubs are BAME. Of the 493 senior coaching positions at the top 92 clubs, 20 are BAME, a ratio of 4.1 per cent. The SPTT report said that levels of BAME coaches were still “depressingly low”, compared to BAME representation of professional footballers (25 per cent) and within the UK population (14 per cent). The report set a target of 20 per cent of coaches in professional football to come from BAME backgrounds and called on the football authorities to adopt this target themselves.