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On the surface, Chelsea’s win over Rennes in the Champions League a few weeks ago was just another one of those throwaway exercises that fill the competition’s group stages. Chelsea, the big favorite – the team with superior financial firepower, deeper team and wider ambitions – have achieved victory.
Beyond the score, there seemed to be little to remember. Yet that match, like Tuesday’s return match in France, was a rarity not only in the Champions League, but in elite European football as a whole.
Surprisingly, worryingly, these may be the only two Champions League games this season in which both teams have played a black goalkeeper: Édouard Mendy, the 28-year-old who joined Chelsea in September, and Alfred Gomis, the man who replaced him. . in Rennes.
Few sports are the equal they think they are. Black quarterbacks were once as rare in the NFL as blacks in tennis championships and golf majors. Football, like so many other sports, still struggles for black representation in leadership roles: there are few black managers and even fewer black executives.
And, of course, there is abundant anecdotal evidence that the game – in Europe, if not the US or Africa – harbors a deep skepticism of black goalkeepers, one that has been allowed to rot for lack of analysis, lack of opportunity. . and even lack of recognition.
André Onana, the Ajax goalkeeper, recounts when an Italian club informed him that his fans simply would not accept a move to sign a black goalkeeper. There’s another about a former Premier League manager who, when he showed up with two potential new recruits, completely fired the one who wasn’t white. He didn’t need to see him play, he said.
For most of his career in England, former goalkeeper Shaka Hislop was aware of the unspoken stereotype that followed him and still remembers those occasions when he was given a voice. Like the day he and his Trinidad and Tobago teammates were waiting in a New York airport and an immigration officer – not realizing who he was – finally explained to him why the black players didn’t they were good goalkeepers.
However, how deeply rooted the problem is is confirmed by the figures. Of the five major European leagues, Ligue 1 with 20 teams from France – where nine black goalkeepers played last season and eight already played this year – is definitely an exception. The numbers elsewhere are stark.
Prior to last week’s national team break, 77 goalkeepers had appeared for at least a minute between Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga. None of them were black. Last year, black goalkeepers were just as rare: only two of the 92 men who scored in Italy and Spain, and only two of the 36 in Germany.
The figures in England are almost as surprising. Only three black players have scored goals in a Premier League match this year: Fulham’s Alphonse Areola, Brighton’s Robert Sánchez and Chelsea’s Mendy. Five others are currently enrolled in Premier League teams, including US international Zack Steffen at Manchester City, but have yet to play in the league.
The contrast between the negligible number of black goalkeepers and the number of black outside players in all of Europe’s elite leagues is such that it is difficult to consider it a coincidence or the illusion of a momentary snapshot. Black goalkeepers are chronically underrepresented in European football. African ones are even rarer.
Each year, for example, the traditional powerful nations of West Africa have dozens of players in the squad in major European leagues. But top-choice goalkeepers from Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana still play in Africa. And while no African country has produced as many elite goalkeepers as Cameroon, which once sent Jacques Songo’o and Thomas N’Kono to play in Spain and Joseph-Antoine Bell on a long career in France, the current number 1 of that nation. Goalkeeper Fabrice Ondoa has not yet left the Belgian top division for one of the top European championships.
Ondoa’s cousin – and national teammate – Onana, at least, plays in the Champions League for Ajax. But only Senegal, with two goalkeepers – Mendy and Gomis – playing in the biggest club competition in the world, can confidently say they have two goalkeepers competing at the highest level of professional football.
Mendy doesn’t have a ready explanation as to why that might be. Perhaps, he said at his presentation as a Chelsea player, it was something to do with the ill-defined “profile” of the players the coaches wanted. Others have different and more ingrained explanations.
“There was a stigma attached to the idea of a black quarterback in the NFL,” said Tim Howard, the former Everton and US goalkeeper. “There was this idea that they weren’t so cerebral.”
Howard sees an echo of this in the shortage of black goalkeepers. Football has long been considered a meritocracy – at least on the pitch – that has moved beyond the old and harmful stereotypes. Dig a little deeper, however, and their pernicious influence remains. Black players are still statistically less likely to play central or attacking midfield, for example, and are much more likely to be praised by commentators for physical attributes such as pace and power than for more intangible qualities such as “intelligence” and “leadership” . And very rarely, it seems, do they have the chance at an elite European level to play on goal.
Mendy accepts that it is up to him to help reverse the stereotype. All it can do, he said, is “show that I can really perform at this level, and maybe change people’s mindsets about those things.” For those who have had to endure the same prejudices, though, who have spent their careers hoping to be a change agent, that’s part of the problem.
Hislop, now a commentator for ESPN, zooms in on the case of Jordan Pickford, the current first-choice goalkeeper of both Everton and England. Pickford has been scrutinized in recent years for both perceived technical flaws in his game and a tendency to recklessness. “Everyone comes into the spotlight once in a while,” Hislop said.
The difference is that whenever Pickford makes a mistake, “nobody uses his performance to proclaim that white players aren’t good goalkeepers,” Hislop said. If Pickford is wrong, the only reputation he suffers is his.
Black goalkeepers, Hislop argues, are not given the same privilege. It felt to him throughout his career, he said, as if every single mistake was used as conclusive proof that all “black goalkeepers make mistakes”. And it didn’t just apply to him: he believed that when David James, a Liverpool, Manchester City and England goalkeeper, made mistakes, those mistakes were held up as evidence to support the stereotype.
He sees a parallel with black representation in other areas of sport as well. Hislop quotes Les Ferdinand, the football director at Queens Park Rangers, currently in the English second division league. As soon as he was nominated, Hislop said, Ferdinand knew there was a lot more to his reputation about his performance.
“If 80 percent of the league’s white male soccer directors are abject failures, that won’t stop anyone from naming the next white boy,” Hislop said. “But Les had to be great for other black players to have a chance.”
The same goes for goalkeepers, in Hislop’s eyes, and creates a self-fulfilling cycle. Carlos Kameni, a former Cameroon international who spent most of his career at Espanyol in Spain, said he was confident the shortage of black goalkeepers was “not a form of racism”.
If a goalkeeper is good enough, Kameni said, a major European club will sign him and use Mendy’s arrival at Chelsea as supporting evidence. For Kameni, the problem is much simpler. “There aren’t enough black goalkeepers who are good enough,” he said in a series of WhatsApp messages.
These two things, however, are not alien. The problem, Hislop said, is not just that coaches are less likely to give aspiring black goalkeepers a chance to show off their talents, but that black players have fewer role models that offer proof that they can succeed. “They don’t have an example to follow,” he said.
At least he’s confident. 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 eliminated the stereotype and where Andre Blake of Philadelphia, a Jamaican international, has just been named. Major League Soccer Goalkeeper of the Year.
More pertinently, Hislop cites Brazil as proof that stereotypes can disappear. For a long time – and despite compelling evidence to the contrary – it was regarded as evangelical truth that Brazil did not produce high quality goalkeepers.
“Everyone in Trinidad and Tobago also considers themselves a fan of Brazil,” Hislop said. “And they always said that Brazil didn’t make goalkeepers. But now there are Alisson and Ederson, who are two of the best in the world. Nobody will ever say that again. “
Prejudices, unspoken or not, can be exposed. Vicious cycles can be stopped or even reversed. Mendy, Gomis, Onana and the others can help this process. The shame, of course, is that they have to.
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