The sacking of two American football head coaches in 2001 – Dennis Green of the Minnesota Vikings and Tony Dungy of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – left only two black NFL head coaches out of 32, and prompted black and ethnic minority voices within the sport to demand change. This led to the establishment of the widely admired “Rooney Rule” in 2003.

Named after the late Dan Rooney, former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the US’s ambassador to Ireland during Barack Obama’s presidency, the regulation requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority candidate for all head coach and general manager roles. Its impact has been one of the defining features of the NFL over the last 15 years.

Since 2007, 10 Super Bowl finalists have had a minority head coach or general manager. Two years after the rule was adopted, the number of BAME head coaches in the NFL had risen from two to six, and now roughly 25% of the head coaches are from minority backgrounds.

Last February, the NFL announced the rule was being extended to include women for certain roles, building on the success of a policy that has been imitated in organisations around the world.

However, English football’s Premier League – which currently has one BAME manager, Chris Hughton at Brighton, out of 20 teams – has repeatedly denied the need for such a rule, with its chief-executive Peter Scudamore observing: “In America, it is a different sport and a different country.”

Last June, the English Football League did approve proposals to introduce a Rooney Rule for academy jobs, with 10 clubs voluntarily extending the policy to include first-team management roles. But in the eight times a manager has subsequently been recruited, the rule was only applied twice, with none leading to a BAME appointment. There are currently only two BAME managers out of 72 clubs in the EFL, despite more than a quarter of players being from minority backgrounds.

In France in 2011, an illegal and unofficial quota was alleged to have been attempted to reduce minority numbers in the national football teams. A French Football Federation official secretly recorded a meeting the year before, where officials appeared to suggest limiting the proportion of black players and those of north African origin to 30% in younger age groups.

The crisis sparked by the allegations was heightened by quotes from the then-French coach, Laurent Blanc describing black players in stereotypical terms. He suggested other criteria should be used to bring in players “with our culture, our history”. An investigation found that no such quota existed, but to many the comments highlighted racial prejudices in French football and society.



Brighton’s Chris Hughton is the only BAME manager in the Premier League. Photograph: John Sibley/Action Images via Reuters

Education flashpoint

In the United States, “race quotas” are illegal – but using race as a factor in enrolment or recruitment is not. In 1996, however, the California state government introduced a ban on affirmative action policies, Proposition 209, which remains a profound flashpoint in the US. At the University of California, Berkeley, black and Hispanic enrolment fell from 24% to 13% within two years, prompting protests with hundreds of students staging walkouts and holding rallies.

Across the US, legal challenges to affirmative action programs have persisted. In 2015, Abigail Fisher took a legal case against the University of Texas to the Supreme Court, arguing that as a white woman she had lost out on a place due to preferential treatment given to black and minority students. Like numerous cases before hers, the Supreme Court upheld UT’s policies, judging that affirmative action that considers race is constitutional.

France’s most elite university, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (commonly known as Sciences Po), introduced affirmative action in admission in 2001. The policy, the first by a French university, ensures the best students from roughly 100 of the country’s worst-performing public schools are assessed without requiring the standard entrance examination. A study by the university in 2011, tracking 860 of these “priority” students and graduates who had left between 2006 and 2011, found they performed on a par with their peers academically.

In August 2012, Brazil adopted sweeping quotas reserving 50% of student places in all 59 state universities for students of African or Indigenous descent. The policy sought to reverse inequalities of access to university in a country with a complex racial history and identity. While university access is virtually free, the majority of students admitted had been from private schools dominated by white students.

The full impact of the policy is not yet conclusive – but it has sparked controversy. Last year the prestigious Federal University of Pelotas expelled a group of 24 white students who were accused of “defrauding the affirmative action system”.

World’s oldest affirmative action policy

India’s “reservation” policy is acknowledged as the world’s oldest affirmative action policy. Adopted officially in 1950, it was designed to address the prejudices of India’s caste system, setting quotas for in education, the workplace and positions of governance. The policy was initially aimed at “scheduled tribes”, castes who live in remote areas, and particularly Dalits, the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system.

The quotas, which vary across India, have been partly successful. In 1965, Dalits occupied 1.6% of the most senior positions in the civil service. By 2011, that had risen to almost 12%, just 4% lower than their 16% population share in India. Despite this progress, oppression of Dalits remains a defining feature of India’s social structure.

The application of the reservation policy has broadened to include low and middle castes over time, with ethnic politics playing a part in who benefits across the country. In the north east, home to so-called “backward classes”, over 80% of government jobs come under the quota system, far more than the initial target of 50%.

Race quotas have also been woven into Malaysian society since 1971, when ethnic Chinese and Indians dominated the upper classes as a legacy of British rule. Sweeping changes were introduced under the New Economic Policy, designed to ensure the majority Malays would no longer be discriminated against.



These quotas still persist across the public sector, in NGOs and elements of the business sector, but have become contentious. While the policy has boosted the number of Malays getting places in universities or on company boards, many suggest only the financial elite have benefited, with the poor majority and ethnic minorities missing out. Ethnic quotas in government-funded universities officially ended in 2002, but minority groups claim the policy still exists in practice.