Black goalkeepers and uneven playing field in Europe

On the surface, Chelsea’s Champions League victory over Rennes a few weeks ago was just another one of those throwaway, checkbox drills that litter the group stages of the competition. The overwhelming Chelsea – the team with superior financial firepower, a deeper squad and broader ambitions – sailed to victory.

Beyond the score, it didn’t seem like much to remember. And yet this game, like Tuesday’s second leg in France, was a rarity not only in the Champions League, but in elite European football as a whole.

Surprisingly, unsettlingly, these are perhaps the only two Champions League games this season where both teams have played a black keeper: Édouard Mendy, the 28-year-old acquired by Chelsea in September, and Alfred Gomis, the man who replaced him. reindeer.

Few sports are as fair as they think they are. Black quarterbacks were once as rare in the NFL as black competitors were at tennis championships and golf majors. Football, like so many other sports, still struggles for the representation of blacks in leadership roles: there are few black managers, let alone black managers.

And, certainly, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that the game – in Europe, if not the United States or Africa – harbors a deeply rooted skepticism towards black goalkeepers, a skepticism that has been allowed to deteriorate for lack of analysis, lack of opportunities. and even the lack of recognition.

Ajax goalkeeper André Onana has a story about when an Italian club informed him that his fans would simply not agree to sign a black goalkeeper. There’s another about a former Premier League manager who, when presented with two potential new hires, squarely sacked the one who wasn’t white. He didn’t need to see him play, he said.

For most of his England career, former goalkeeper Shaka Hislop was aware of the unspoken stereotype that watched him, and he still remembers those occasions when he was voiced. Like the day he and his Trinidad and Tobago teammates were waiting at a New York airport and an immigration officer – not quite realizing who he was – gave him a long explanation as to why black players don’t do good. goalkeepers.

The figures confirm, however, how deeply rooted the problem remains. Of Europe’s five major leagues, the 20-team Ligue 1 of France – where nine black goalkeepers featured last season and eight have already had playing time this year – is an outlier. The figures elsewhere are striking.

Before the international break last week, 77 goalkeepers had appeared for at least a minute across the Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga. None of them were black. Last year, black goalkeeper appearances were also rare: only two of the 92 men who played on goal in Italy and Spain, and only two of 36 who appeared in Germany.

The figures in England are almost as striking. Only three black players have played on goal in a Premier League game this year: Alphonse Areola of Fulham, Robert Sánchez of Brighton and Mendy of Chelsea. Five others are currently signed up for Premier League squads, including US international Zack Steffen at Manchester City, but have yet to play in the league.

The contrast between the paltry number of black goalkeepers and the number of Black Outfield players in all of Europe’s elite leagues is such that it is difficult to take it as a coincidence or the illusion of a snapshot. Black goalkeepers are chronically under-represented in European football. Africans are even rarer.

Each year, for example, the traditional powers of West Africa have dozens of players on the lists of the main European leagues. But the first-choice goalies from Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are still playing in Africa. And although no African country has produced as many elite goalkeepers as Cameroon, which has already sent Jacques Songo’o and Thomas N’Kono to play in Spain and Joseph-Antoine Bell to a long career in France, the current number 1 in this country. Goalkeeper Fabrice Ondoa has not yet left the Belgian first division for one of Europe’s flagship leagues.

Ondoa’s cousin – and national teammate – Onana plays at least in the Champions League for Ajax. But only Senegal, with two goalkeepers – Mendy and Gomis – playing in the world’s biggest club competition, can confidently say that they have two goalkeepers competing at the highest level of professional football.

Mendy doesn’t have a ready-made explanation for why this could be. Perhaps, he said on his introduction as a Chelsea player, it was something to do with the ill-defined ‘profile’ of players the coaches wanted. Others have different and deeper explanations.

“There was a stigma attached to the idea of ​​a black quarterback in the NFL,” said Tim Howard, the former Everton and United States guard. “There was this idea that they weren’t so cerebral.”

Howard sees an echo of this in the shortage of black goalies. Football has long seen itself as a meritocracy – at least on the pitch – that has transcended old damaging stereotypes. Dig a little deeper, however, and their pernicious influence remains. Black players are still statistically less likely to play in the central or attacking midfield, for example, and are much more likely to be praised by commentators for physical attributes like pace and power than for more intangible qualities like “Intelligence” and “leadership”. And very rarely, it seems, are they given a chance at European elite level to play in goal.

Mendy accepts that it is his responsibility to help overturn the stereotype. All he can do, he says, is “show that I can really play at this level, and maybe change people’s minds about these things. But for those who have had to endure the same prejudices, who have spent their careers hoping to be an agent of change, this is part of the problem.

Hislop, now a commentator for ESPN, takes a look at the case of Jordan Pickford, the current top goalkeeper for Everton and the England national team. Pickford has come under intense scrutiny over the past few years both for perceived technical flaws in his playing and for a tendency to recklessness. “Everyone is in the spotlight from time to time,” Hislop said.

The difference is, every time Pickford makes a mistake, “no one is using their performance to proclaim that white players don’t make good goalies,” Hislop said. If Pickford is wrong, the only reputation that suffers is his.

Black goalkeepers, Hislop argues, don’t have the same privilege. It seemed to him over the course of his career, he said, as if every individual mistake was being used as conclusive evidence that all “black goalies make mistakes.” And that didn’t just apply to him: he believed that when David James, a goalkeeper for Liverpool, Manchester City and England, made mistakes, those mistakes were presented as supporting evidence. of the stereotype.

He also sees a parallel with the representation of blacks in other areas of sport. Hislop quotes Les Ferdinand, the director of football for Queens Park Rangers, currently in the second tier league in England. From the moment he was appointed, Hislop said, Ferdinand knew his performance was not limited to his reputation.

“If 80% of white football managers in the league are abject failures, that won’t stop anyone from nominating the next white,” Hislop said. “But Les had to be exceptional so other black players could try their luck.”

The same applies to goalkeepers, in Hislop’s eyes, and creates a self-fulfilling cycle. Carlos Kameni, a former Cameroon international who has spent most of his career at Espanyol in Spain, said he was convinced that the shortage of black goalkeepers was not “a form of racism”.

If a goalkeeper is good enough, Kameni said, one of Europe’s main clubs will sign him and he uses Mendy’s arrival at Chelsea as evidence to back it up. For Kameni, the problem is much simpler. “There aren’t enough black goalies who are good enough,” he said in a series of WhatsApp messages.

These two things, however, are not unrelated. The problem, Hislop said, isn’t just that coaches are less likely to give aspiring black goaltenders a chance to show off their talents, but black players have fewer role models offering proof that they can be successful. . “They have no example to follow,” he said.

At least he has hope. He sees a string of promising black goalkeepers in the United States, a country and football culture where Howard, Bill Hamid, Sean Johnson and now Steffen have effectively killed the stereotype, and where Andre Blake of Philadelphia – a Jamaican international – has just been named Major League Soccer Goalkeeper of the Year.

More aptly, Hislop cites Brazil as proof that stereotypes can disappear. For a long time – and despite convincing evidence to the contrary – it was considered gospel truth that Brazil did not produce high quality goalkeepers.

“Everyone in Trinidad and Tobago also considers themselves a fan of Brazil,” said Hislop. “And they always said Brazil didn’t make a goalie. But now you have Alisson and Ederson, who are two of the best in the world. No one will ever say it again.

Prejudices, tacit or not, can be exposed. Vicious cycles can be stopped in their tracks, or even reversed. Mendy, Gomis, Onana and the others can help in this process. The shame, of course, is that they have to.