Black, British, and playing in goal: How can England produce more non-white keepers?
Ava Arnold “At first, it didn’t bother me,” David James begins.
“But last year, BT Sport were doing a Black History Month comedy special and that was the first time it was mentioned.
“They introduced me as, ‘The only non-white goalkeeper to represent England’. Everyone applauded. It didn’t feel right.”
There has been an English national men’s team for just under 150 years. Viv Anderson broke the colour barrier in 1978. In June 2021, Everton’s Ben Godfrey became the 100th non-white player.
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Of those, there has been just one non-white goalkeeper: James, who retired in 2014. England Women are still awaiting their first.
“I’m not sure if something is consciously wrong with the system,” says James, who won 53 England caps between 1997 and 2010. “But just me? It doesn’t make sense.”
This is not just a problem at international level. Across the 92 Premier League and EFL first-team squads, there are only 15 British-born non-white keepers out of over 300 listed, a tally that lags far behind other positions.
The Premier League has five — Manchester United’s Lee Grant, Arsenal youngster Arthur Okonkwo, Brentford’s Ellery Balcombe (on loan at Bromley), and West Ham pair Nathan Trott and Joseph Anang (on loan at Nancy and St Patrick’s Athletic respectively). In the Women’s Super League, there are only two.
Black British-born goalkeepers in the 92
| NAME | CLUB | AGE |
|---|---|---|
Arthur Okonkwo | Arsenal | 20 |
Lee Grant | Manchester United | 38 |
Nathan Trott | West Ham (loan at Nancy) | 23 |
Joseph Anang | West Ham (on loan at St Patricks Athletic) | 21 |
Ellery Balcombe | Brentford (on loan at Bromley) | 22 |
Giosue Bellagambi | Huddersfield Town | 20 |
Dillon Barnes* | QPR (on loan at Yeovil Town) | 25 |
Jordan Archer | QPR | 28 |
Wes Foderingham | Sheffield United | 30 |
Coniah Boyce-Clarke | Reading | 18 |
Kai McKenzie-Lyle** | Cambridge United | 23 |
Aaron Chapman | Gillingham | 31 |
Shamal George | Colchester United | 23 |
Lawrence Vigoroux | Leyton Orient | 28 |
Joe Wollacott*** | Swindon Town | 25 |
* Dillon Barnes represents Jamaica, **Kai McKenzie-Lyle represents Guyana, ***Joe Wollacott represents Ghana
Senegal’s French-born goalkeeper Edouard Mendy represents black goalkeeping excellence in this season’s Premier League but Shaka Hislop, who founded Show Racism the Red Card and played in goal more than 300 times for Reading, Newcastle, Portsmouth, and West Ham, thinks that Mendy’s career highlights issues in the game.
“While we sing Mendy’s praises now, I can’t remember the transfer fee, and nobody recognised his talents before joining Chelsea,” says the former Trinidad and Tobago international.
“Call me a cynic but I don’t think it’s an accident that somebody as talented as him goes unrecognised for as long as he did.”
Why have black goalkeepers struggled to gain a foothold? For James, who identifies as non-white due to his mixed-race heritage, the reasons are manifold.
“We can’t take a simplistic view,” he says. “It’s so complex. It’s not even down to the system, but it’s this organic racial monster.”
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A monster that has been breathing for over 100 years. The FA consider Arthur Wharton the world’s first black professional footballer. Born in Ghana in 1865, Wharton played in goal for Darlington and Preston, as well as setting a 100-yard world record.
There is now a statue of Wharton at St George’s Park. However, while at Preston, he developed a reputation that has dogged non-white goalkeepers until the present day — that he was “eccentric”.
Manchester City’s Alex Williams was the first black goalkeeper of the modern era to play first division football in England. Though both James and Ian Wright refer to him as a role model, Williams did not recognise his significance at the time.
His debut, in 1981, came two years after the National Front recorded their highest vote tally at a general election, and with football hooliganism at its height.
“I remember the reaction of away fans in particular, playing at places like West Ham, Leeds and Liverpool. When I ran out for the first time, you could hear the gasps of the crowd. It was, ‘Look, look at him! A black goalkeeper!’,” says Williams.
“I found it quite humorous and challenging to win them over. I played for England under-18s and under-21s, so people got to know me. I became welcomed by fans as a good goalkeeper rather than a black person.”
But this was not always the case.
“I was running out for the second half at Everton,” Williams remembers. “A lad had climbed up on the metal fence, and was hanging over it with what must have been a programme, which he’d screwed up into a cross.
“As I reached him, he produced a match and lit it, and was waving it a la the Klu Klux Klan. And at the time, I was obviously shaken. Racism is racism.
“I looked for solace from my own players, and they were all laughing. I don’t think the players of today would react in that way; they would show support.”
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In the nineties, James and Hislop came to prominence competing for titles at Liverpool and Newcastle respectively.
“I was called mad or nuts,” states James. “There was this idea that we weren’t intelligent enough, at times. Going back to the 70s, 80s, 90s; there’s a very typical opinion of what a different race or culture would bring to a dressing room.”
“We were setting a standard but also breaking a lot of stereotypes, and having to deal with a lot of the rhetoric around that stereotyping,” says Hislop.
Twenty years later, no Premier League club has a British-born black starting goalkeeper. None even have one as their second choice.
The Athletic has identified six reasons why — with the hope of offering six solutions.
1. Emerging non-white goalkeepers face a shortage of role models
Role models are important. They offer exterior proof of an internal vision. They demonstrate possibility.
“I don’t think that in London estates, you ever see goalkeepers. I never had dreams of playing in goal, never thought of owning gloves,” says Lawrence Vigouroux.
Vigouroux grew up on an estate in Kentish Town, north west London. He only tried his hand at playing in goal so that a scheduled game could go ahead. Having come through the Tottenham and Liverpool academies, at 28, Vigouroux is now the starting goalkeeper for League Two Leyton Orient. He has made more than 200 EFL appearances and has had international call-ups for Chile.
“You see a kid coming through from a background quite similar to mine, Edouard Mendy, challenging for European titles,” he says. “People can see him and go, ‘If he can do that, then I can do the same thing with my upbringing’.”
Meeting with Mendy for a Black History Month event at Chelsea last year also gave the Orient goalie a chance to chat about why neither of them originally wanted to be a keeper.
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“We spoke about how of the greatest black players who have ever played, none of them have been a goalkeeper, apart from maybe Dida,” says Vigouroux.
“There were black goalkeepers when I was growing up but none at the level — without being disrespectful — that Mendy is actually playing at. It was very hard to have someone to look up to.”
Visibility will help prove that a pathway exists.
2. Cage football is not necessarily advantageous for goalkeepers
Jadon Sancho, Bukayo Saka, Raheem Sterling. Joe Gomez, Tammy Abraham, Aaron Wan-Bissaka. All of these Premier League players grew up playing cage football in inner-city London.
Dozens more talented black Premier League players were forged in this environment, in which small, intense spaces develop technical wizardry.
It is one reason English football has erased a perceived skill-deficit to other world-leading sides. But does it develop goalkeepers?
“Cage football was very tight,” says Vigouroux. “So for the keepers — if we could get any — there would be shots from close range, people blasting it. Why would you want to go in goal for that?”
But even if a promising cage footballer is tempted into goal, their skills may not be suited to the elite 11-a-side game.
James notes that the ball does not travel overhead height, that there are no goal kicks or set pieces, and reiterates that in cage football, the close-range save is the most important save.
“For that, you need to develop skills like the Kasper Schmeichel star jump, a handball thing he got from his Dad,” says the former England goalkeeper. “It requires a lot of upper-body strength.
“That weight is going to be something you’ve got to throw around the goal. It doesn’t work. David de Gea and Hugo Lloris aren’t big up top. The need in cage football to be strong and block everything low isn’t good if you’re trying to save shots in the top corner.
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But there is one thing. The demand for modern goalkeepers to be good with their feet is one area where Vigouroux believes a footballer moulded in the cage can retain an advantage.
“Football has evolved into something where a lot of the black goalkeepers are more comfortable with the ball at their feet,” says the Orient goalkeeper. “Not every single one but the vast majority, because of where they grew up, and what they were exposed to as a kid in terms of cage football.
“I think distribution is my best attribute. It helped me carve out a semi-decent career. It’s mainly there because I had the advantage of playing with very, very technical cage footballers.”
3. Non-white goalkeepers face unconscious bias when being coached at both the grassroots and professional level
“Unconscious bias is a very real thing,” says Hislop. “It affects us in so many ways — not just in football and not just in goalkeeping.
“With young black kids who are talented and athletic, they are played in some other position that coaches feel might have a greater impact, rather than in goal.”
This is the crux. If coaches do not give skilful, brave, and athletic non-white footballers the opportunity to play in goal, instead trialling them outfield, the talent base shrivels.
James agrees grassroots recruitment is the issue. “Rio Ferdinand, there’s a goalkeeper!” James laughs. “Not many people remember that except Portsmouth fans.
“A lot of potential England goalkeepers are playing up front, midfield, whatever it might be; but some of them are making good careers, so is that a bad thing?”
An issue arises when unconscious bias crosses into academy coaching.
Vigouroux believes the tarmac of Kentish Town endowed him with the ability to make “unorthodox saves”, a byproduct of environment, which certain coaches resented.
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“I wasn’t consistent as a kid, but who is?” he says. “It’s not an easy thing to say, but I would see other white keepers who wouldn’t get the same critique. They’d be told they were tidier. I always used to get told to be tidy with my hands, that the saves I made were unorthodox, but I still saved them, didn’t I?
“It’s something I really wanted to express but I couldn’t, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that these things need to leave the game.”
4. Non-white goalkeepers face extra criticism in a position already defined by mistakes
James started for England in two major tournaments: the 2004 European Championship and 2010 World Cup. By any metric, it makes him one of the best English goalkeepers of his era.
Yet despite being the first non-white goalkeeper in national team history, he ended up with a nickname — Calamity James.
“The Calamity James thing,” he sighs. “I struggled to get my head around it for a while. I was thinking, ‘Was it me?’ I never thought of it as racism at the time.
“But it was just too easy and it was seemingly too brutal. David Beckham got sent off in a World Cup. I never did that. I never got sent off in a World Cup final. There were some bad performances, granted, but it just went on and on.
“I started asking the question more after my career. I thought, ‘What if these guys didn’t like the way I played?’ or, ‘Was there a racist slant towards me?’
“Ashley Cole has won more trophies than pretty much anyone but was always referred to in a negative light. If he was treated that way, why wouldn’t I? I would be foolish to think it didn’t happen to me.”
That the mistakes of England’s non-white population are treated with less tolerance is not new or unique to football. It does not help that goalkeeping is unique. Nobody remembers a mistake by a striker. Everyone remembers a mistake from a goalkeeper — and if those errors are amplified by race, why would a talented young black player want to become a goalkeeper?
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Hislop remembers when, after an excellent game for Reading at Luton, a reporter at a national tabloid only asked him questions about his heating bill and whether he was cold, owing to his birth in Trinidad and Tobago.
“Our entire race is judged — more harshly than your white counterparts,” says Hislop. He brings up Les Ferdinand, the only black director of football in the EFL, working at Queens Park Rangers.
“We are representing every single kid who wants to be a director of football or goalkeeper. We feel that we have to be a success to take away the excuses of those who are inclined not to take a chance on that next black kid. We recognise our roles.”
5. Existing coaching structures fail to harness non-white goalkeeping talent
Despite the feeling that the odds are stacked against non-white players, Hislop has a strategy.
“There’s a lack of specialised coaches within these communities,” he says. “Goalkeeping is highly specialised, more so than the difference between defence, midfield, and attack. You can’t just send a generic scout.
“The FA needs to actively pursue former goalkeepers at every level, have them certified as coaches, as scouts, and give them opportunities to go to these places, and put on free sessions.”
More diversity within goalkeeper coaching could also help.
“There was obviously a barrier because I looked different,” says James. “Identifying quality isn’t influenced by ethnicity but the issue is being able to communicate. For someone like Tony Warner (the former Millwall goalkeeper), he could speak to anyone because he’s got the background to have those conversations.”
Warner, James’s former team-mate, is the only black British first-team goalkeeper coach in English professional football.
“When I warmed up against Bristol Rovers, I actually ran past Tony,” remembers Vigouroux. “We had this respect thing. I didn’t realise it but he’s the only black goalkeeper coach I’ve seen.”
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The FA told The Athletic that while they aim to increase the diversity of participants in football overall, rather than in a particular position, they have adopted four programmes aimed at underrepresented coaches. This includes launching a fully-funded places initiative for the 2021-22 season, covering the cost of FA training courses for a percentage of historically underrepresented coaches.
6. The cost of goalkeeping dissuades keepers from low-income backgrounds
“I had to shower with my gloves on so the grip wouldn’t go. Dry them where they would air dry. I never had two pairs, only one, and they had to be on the brink of my fingers popping out before I binned them”.
Life as an academy goalkeeper from a council estate was tough for Vigouroux.
“Gloves at the moment, they sometimes only last three or four games. A new pair can be £90. You could get £40 gloves but they might rip even sooner”.
Imagine a talented young footballer who could pursue playing outfield, or go in goal. Both require boots — expensive enough themselves — but one requires another significant outlay. If money was tight, which would you choose?
Aggravating this, goalkeeping’s specialist nature means that accessing expert training demands a steep price.
“Specific goalkeeper clinics tend to be commercial,” Williams says. “It’s an issue — BME (Black and mixed ethnicity) children tend to not have the funds that many mainstream children have.”
Vigouroux remembers being unable to access this kind of coaching for fear that the extra sessions would wear his gloves out faster.
“A lot of kids that come through academies; they’re seven or eight years old,” he says. They come as specialist goalkeepers, having got specialist coaching.
“But those from places that are not as wealthy, they don’t pick up a pair of gloves.”
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Football is a game that does not need equipment — or so the myth goes. Jumpers for goalposts and all that. One position is forgotten.
One thing united James, Hislop, Williams and Vigoroux — a belief that things were changing.
“Nobody wanted to become a goalkeeper,” Vigouroux says, leaning forwards. “But today, it makes me really proud to see that there are several in my league, a few in League One, more in the Championship, and then Mendy.”
They are also young. Of the 15 goalkeepers listed by The Athletic, eight are 23 or under. Things are changing.
Williams’ advice to them?
“You might make a mistake,” says the former Manchester City player. “Every goalkeeper makes a mistake. You’ve got to be strong; more so if you’re of black or mixed origin.
“Don’t let people blemish your opportunity to play at the highest level. You’re a part of the team; they rely on you. Keep up the work you do. That’s really important.”
It would be easy to read the reasons detailed above and be concerned, but non-white goalkeepers are slowly beginning to break through. British football can do more to ensure that more follow.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Tom Slator)
