ABSTRACT

Since the turn of the millennium there have been some signifi cant policy developments aimed at tackling racial inequalities in English football, perhaps most notably in 2002 when the Football Association (FA) approved its own Ethics and Sports Equity Strategy (hereafter E&SES). High on the agenda of this new strategy was a range of statements about race equality and encouraging the involvement of minority ethnic participants in all aspects of the English game. Despite the longer standing anti-racist campaigns in football such as Kick It Out, this was the FA’s fi rst internal commitment to equality, and the fi rst to directly cover the grass-roots level of English football.1