On the surface, Chelsea’s Champions League win against Rennes a few weeks ago was just one more of those check-boxing exercises available that litter the group stage of the competition. Chelsea, the strong favorite – the team with superior financial firepower, a deeper squad and broader ambitions – drove to victory.
Beyond the score, there seemed to be little to remember. And yet this game, like the second leg in France on Tuesday, was a rarity not only in the Champions League, but also in all of European elite football.
Amazingly, these are possibly the only two Champions League games this season that both teams have played against a black goalkeeper: Édouard Mendy, the 28-year-old who was taken over by Chelsea in September and Alfred Gomis, who replaced him in Rennes.
Few sports are as level playing field as they believe themselves to be. Black quarterbacks were once as rare in the NFL as black players in tennis championships and golf majors. Like so many other sports, football is still fighting for the representation of blacks in management positions: there are few black managers and even fewer black executives.
And there is certainly ample anecdotal evidence that the game – in Europe, if not the US or Africa – harbors a deeply ingrained skepticism about black goalkeepers that has festered from a lack of analysis and opportunity, and even a lack of recognition.
André Onana, the Ajax goalkeeper, has a story about the time when an Italian club informed him that their fans simply would not accept a move to sign a black goalkeeper. There’s another one about a former Premier League manager who, when introducing two potential new recruits, immediately fired the one who wasn’t white. He didn’t need to see him play, he said.
For most of his career in England, former goalkeeper Shaka Hislop was well aware of the unspoken stereotype that shadowed him and he still remembers those occasions when he was given a voice. Like the day he and his teammates waited at a New York airport for Trinidad and Tobago and an immigration officer – who didn’t know exactly who he was – explained to him in detail why black players weren’t good goalkeepers.
How deep the problem is rooted, the figures show. Of the five most important European leagues, the French Ligue 1 is an outlier with 20 teams, in which nine black goalkeepers appeared last season and eight were already played this year. The numbers elsewhere are strong.
Before last week’s international break, 77 goalkeepers had appeared for at least one minute in the Bundesliga, Serie A and La Liga. None of them were black. Last year, appearances by black goalkeepers were similarly rare: only two of the 92 men who scored goals in Italy and Spain, and only two of the 36 men who appeared in Germany.
The numbers in England are almost as striking. Only three black players have scored the goal in a Premier League game this year: Alphonse Areola from Fulham, Robert Sánchez from Brighton and Mendy from Chelsea. Five other players are currently registered in the Premier League, including US international Zack Steffen in Manchester City, but have yet to play in the league.
The contrast between the small number of black goalkeepers and the number of black field players in all European elite leagues is so great that it is difficult to write it off as a coincidence or an illusion of a momentary snapshot. Black goalkeepers are chronically under-represented in European football. African are even rarer.
In the traditional powerhouses of West Africa, for example, there are dozens of players in the most important European leagues on the roster every year. But first-choice goalkeepers from Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana are still playing in Africa. And while no African country has produced as many elite goalkeepers as Cameroon, which once sent Jacques Songo’o and Thomas N’Kono to Spain and Joseph-Antoine Bell to a long career in France, this is the nation’s current number one Goalkeeper Fabrice Ondoa has not yet left the top Belgian league for any of the European marquee leagues.
Ondoa’s cousin – and national teammate – Onana plays at least in the Champions League for Ajax. But only Senegal, where two goalkeepers – Mendy and Gomis – take part in the world’s largest club competition, can say with confidence that two goalkeepers compete against each other at the highest level of professional football.
Mendy has no explanation as to why that could be so. Perhaps, he said at his introduction as a Chelsea player, this had something to do with the ill-defined “profile” of the players coaches wanted. Others have different, ingrained explanations.
“There used to be a stigma attached to the idea of a black quarterback in the NFL,” said Tim Howard, former Everton and US goalkeeper. “There was the idea that they were not so cerebral.”
Howard sees an echo of this in the lack of black goalkeepers. Football has long viewed itself as a meritocracy – at least on the field – that has transcended old, harmful stereotypes. However, if you dig a little deeper, their harmful influence will persist. Statistically speaking, black players still play less often in the central or offensive midfield and are much more praised by commentators for physical qualities such as speed and strength than for intangible qualities such as “intelligence” and “leadership”. And very rarely, it seems, do they have the chance to play in goal at the European elite level.
Mendy accepts that it’s up to him to break the stereotype. All he can do, he said, is “show that I can really perform at this level and maybe change people’s mentality on these things.” For those who have endured the same prejudices and spent their careers hoping to be an agent for change, this is part of the problem.
Hislop, now ESPN commentator, takes a look at Jordan Pickford, the current goalkeeper of choice for Everton and England. Pickford has been scrutinized for perceived technical flaws in his game as well as a tendency to be reckless in recent years. “Everyone comes into the spotlight every now and then,” said Hislop.
The difference is that when Pickford makes a mistake, “no one uses his performances to proclaim that white players are not good goalkeepers,” said Hislop. If Pickford is wrong, only his own reputation will suffer.
Black goalkeepers, according to Hislop, don’t have the same privilege. Throughout his career, it has felt to him that every single mistake is taken as conclusive evidence that all “black goalkeepers make mistakes”. And that wasn’t just about him: he believed when David James, a goalkeeper for Liverpool, Manchester City and England, made mistakes, those mistakes were cited as evidence of the stereotype.
He sees a parallel to black representation in other areas of sport. Hislop quotes Les Ferdinand, the Queens Park Rangers football director who is currently playing in England’s second-rate championship. Once he was appointed, Hislop said, Ferdinand knew that more than just his reputation depends on his performance.
“If 80 percent of the white male football directors in the league are bad mistakes, it won’t stop anyone from appointing the next white man,” said Hislop. “But Les had to be excellent so that other black players could get a shot.”
The same applies to goalkeepers in Hislop’s eyes and creates a self-fulfilling cycle. Carlos Kameni, a former Cameroonian international who had spent most of his career with Espanyol in Spain, said he was confident that the lack of black goalkeepers was not a “form of racism”.
If a goalkeeper is good enough, Kameni said he will be signed by one of Europe’s biggest clubs and he uses Mendy’s arrival at Chelsea as evidence. For Kameni, the problem is much easier. “There aren’t enough black goalkeepers who are good enough,” he said over a series of WhatsApp messages.
However, these two things are not unrelated. The problem, Hislop said, is not only that coaches give aspiring black goalkeepers fewer opportunities to show off their talents, but that black players have fewer role models to prove they can be successful. “They have no example to follow,” he said.
At least he’s hopeful. He sees a number of promising black goalkeepers in the U.S., a country and football culture where Howard, Bill Hamid, Sean Johnson, and now Steffen have effectively broken the stereotype and where Philadelphia’s Andre Blake – a Jamaican international – has just been named The Goalkeeper Major League Soccer of the year.
Fittingly, Hislop cites Brazil as evidence that stereotypes can go away. For a long time – and despite convincing evidence to the contrary – it was considered gospel truth that Brazil did not produce highly skilled goalkeepers.
“Everyone in Trinidad and Tobago sees themselves as a Brazil fan,” said Hislop. “And they would always say that Brazil didn’t make goalkeepers. But now you have Alisson and Ederson who are two of the best in the world. Nobody will ever say that again. “
Prejudices, unspoken or unspoken, can be exposed. Vicious circles can be stopped in their tracks or even reversed. Mendy, Gomis, Onana and the rest can assist in this process. The shame, of course, is that they have to do this.
