Honest question: I’m a longtime premier league fan from the US. In my over 10 years of watching English football, I’ve never seen a person of color as the center referee in a premier league match. Does anyone know why this is? A significant percentage (majority) of premier league players are not white, and given research around subconscious bias, you have to imagine the league and refereeing body would have an interest in having their game officials be representative of the players they officiate? With the quality of officiating being in the news so much recently, increasing diversity in the ranks of game officials could be one idea. I imagine it’s just a big old boys club though…
Difficult to encourage people to become referees in the first place because of the abuse, I can’t imagine that’s made any easier when it becomes racist abuse.
It is surprising that Uriah Rennie is the only high profile black referee from this country that I can think of considering that was about 15/20 years ago.