Support for black players quota in England team would have existed, claims former Commission for Racial Equality chairman

Exclusive: Lord Ouseley said that one senior FA official considered the Kick it Out organisation to be 'off the wall'

Lord Ouseley (left) said that the FA regarded the Kick it Out organisation as ‘off the wall’ (PA)

The Football Association dismissed racial equality campaigners as troublemakers in the early 1990s, and the idea of the then England manager Graham Taylor being told to limit the number of black players he picked was consistent with practices at that time, the man at the forefront of the long fight against discrimination in the sport has told The Independent.

Lord Ouseley – who observed that the prejudices of the 1990s are “not yet altogether extinct” today, though less prominent – said that one senior FA official considered the Kick it Out organisation to be “off the wall” and “trying to create a problem” at the time. He said that support for a quota of black players, “whether expressed overtly or kept privately, would have existed”.

The key FA board governing the England team during Taylor’s 1990 to 1993 tenure was the 12-man international committee, on which the late Sir Peter Swales, a former Manchester City chairman, sat with the late Sir Bert Millichip, the FA chairman, another influential member, although neither was specifically accused by Ouseley.

None of the surviving committee members or senior officials could be reached to discuss the contents of a new book which alleges two FA officials approached Taylor and told him to limit the number of black players he was picking for the national side. Taylor has denied he received such an approach, despite the former Birmingham City player Richie Moran insisting that Taylor disclosed it to him at a Kick it Out 10th anniversary lunch in December 2004. Moran will be asked to elaborate at the launch of the book – Pitch Black by the academic Emy Onuora – which chronicles the claim.

Onuora told The Independent that Taylor had named the FA members in his 2004 conversation with Moran but that this information had been deliberately excluded from the book. “My key point is you can put a lie detector [on Moran],” Onuora said. “He has told this story consistently over 10 years. OK, people can tell a 10-year lie but he has been consistent in this particular story. When he [Moran] was told the story [by Taylor] it wasn’t just to him. His then girlfriend was there and was party to the conversation. It is not as if Graham Taylor was in a smoke-filled room furtively divulging his information on ricepaper which he then expected Richie to eat! I am as confident as I can be that the story is a true one.”

Lord Ouseley’s belief that the football establishment was capable of wanting a limit on black players is based on a deep institutional reluctance to accept that racism existed in football at that time. He claims he was told by another leading football official that there was “no problem” when he tried to engage the organisation in the fight against racism players were experiencing. Chelsea players were even receiving racial abuse from their own fans at the time, Lord Ouseley – the former Commission for Racial Equality chairman – said. Yet he was made aware that security guards were on hand to escort him out of Stamford Bridge when he tried to tackle the issue with the senior management there.

“We were the little guys who had come off the street at that time,” he said. “It was: ‘Who are you Mr Nobody?’ We were tiptoeing around the edges. Sometimes you have to take it slowly, and just let them absorb the fact you’ve not just fallen out of the sky.”

Only years later, when Lord Ouseley met the same official at a disciplinary hearing, did he make complimentary comments about the work Kick it Out had done: “The work moved him to say that but we had to beat him up to change in the first place.”