England's Black and Minority Ethnic Players - Index
Page Last Updated 15 November 2016
     
England's 80 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Players
 
80 BME players have appeared for England through to the match against  Spain on 15 November 2016.  The first BME player at senior level, Viv  Anderson, was the 936th player to appear for England since their first match in  1872.  The most recent BME player to make his England debut, Jesse Lingard, was the 1217th player to appear for England.  Thus, since the  "colour barrier" 38 years ago, in         November 1978, roughly one in every three and a half players making an England debut has         been BME.
It may have been possible to have seen the    first BME footballer playing for England back in October 1925 with London-born Jack Leslie, a prolific striker          for Plymouth Argyle between 1920 & 1935, scoring over 400 goals.  Leslie had been          informed by his manager Bob Jack that he had been selected to play for          England.  He later received communication cancelling his call up to the          England team stating that they didn't realise he was 'a man of colour'.  Jack Leslie later remarked in 1982 to Brian Woolnough: "They must have forgotten I was a coloured boy."
A decade later saw the          emergence of another great - Hong Y Frank Soo, although born in Buxton,          Derbyshire in 1914, he had a Chinese father.  If it          had not been for the outbreak of war, he would certainly have gained          full international honours for England, as he was rated as one of the          best inside forwards of the pre-war era.  He gained nine wartime and          victory caps. - Football fine art
Even before the time of Anderson, now relatively          dubbed 'The First BME Player to Play for England', there is another          candidate, and maybe if their was not the racism problems that blighted          English football throughout the 1960's, then maybe a loud shout would          have come from the Leeds United camp.  Paul Reaney, allegedly of          mixed-race.  But without further evidence, other than a few          objective photographs.... then if Reaney, why not Alf Ramsey?  We          are not ruling out Reaney, we just require more evidence.- CG
Perhaps race will be irrelevant one day, but         that time has not yet arrived.  While         racism remains a problem in English football, these numbers indicate         great strides forward have been taken at the level of national team         selection.  We have not made         a count, but we doubt any other European national side, with the         possible exception of France, comes close to England in number of BME         players.
That is not to say racial considerations have         not influenced England squad and team selections.  We have no way         of knowing whether or not they have.  But we do know that,         according to a former England manager, Football Association officials on         at least one occasion tried to make race a consideration in England team selection.
Vivek Chaudhary reported in The Guardian of 24 January 2004 that a former England manager had "alleged that    during his tenure he was told by senior FA officials not to pick too    many black players."  The         manager, Chaudhary wrote,"claims that he was called into an office where    two senior FA officials were present and they told him that his England    team should be made up of predominantly white footballers."
Chaudhary's story said the manager, who "has         a long history of closely working with some of England's leading    black         players over the past 25 years, privately spoke about the incident at         the lunch" marking the 10th anniversary of Kick It         Out , the football         anti-racism group, but "refused to go public with his allegation."  Disappointingly, but not         surprisingly , the rest of the English media         ignored Chaudhary's report.  
The manager in question is plainly Graham         Taylor .  On several occasions during his three-year managerial         tenure from 1990 to late 1993, Taylor fielded England teams  featuring a comparatively large number of BME players and was         the one England manager most likely to have been the recipient of such a         proposal for a racial quota on the England team.  He also fits the         description Chaudhary gave the manager in the story.  He         was known for working closely with England's leading BME players,         beginning at Watford  in the late 1970s, 25 years before the story         was written.   Finally, he also happened to be in London at the time of the         Kick It Out lunch in connection with the London Marathon, in which he         was participating. 
[ed- Taylor once more denied these allegations in mid-2015].
Racism, of course, often takes more subtle forms         than racial epithets and explicit exclusion on racial grounds, both of         which have been widely condemned for some time.  Far more threatening than overt racism in more recent times has         been hidden racism--racism effected through discretionary decisions, where its influence is         concealed precisely because these         decisions are discretionary and thus readily rationalised on other         grounds.  Squad and team selections         reflect discretionary determinations in which racism may play a covert role.  This more subtle         form of racism may also play a part in journalistic and fan support for         and criticism of certain players, or at least the level of that         support and criticism. 
We hope that no England manager or head         coach has ever been influenced by racial considerations in team or squad         selections and that none ever yielded to pressure to pick more         white and fewer BME players.  We also hope the incident Chaudhary describes would not be repeated within the F.A., which,         in a refreshing burst of candour when declaring in 2001 its all-out         commitment to ridding football of racism, confessed it could have done more to battle racism in the game during         earlier times . 
In Clarke Carlisle's 2012 documentary 'Is Football   Racist?', Carlisle, who had received a solitary England under-21 cap,   revealed that in an attempt to understand the depth of racism in the game, a   current England internationalist refused to comment, because he believed   that his place in the squad could be at risk from the Football Association.   Consequently, no names were revealed.
Selection should, of course, be         made on the basis of football considerations alone, regardless of the         racial balance that produces in the squad or the team.  That is         imperative as a moral matter as well as from the standpoint of         assembling the best football side possible.
In the interest of clarity, the first BME player   to represent England at any level was in fact John Charles, West Ham United   FC defender. He earned three Youth Caps for England in May 1962, twice   against Israel, another a year later against USSR. It was another decade   that the Schoolboy level would get their first representation, by two players in   fact, Ben Odeje and Cliff Marshall. They played for the schoolboys against   Northern Ireland schoolboys at Wembley Stadium, 6 March 1971, the first of   five appearances for Odeje, the first of four for Marshall.
The 80 BME Players