Lord Ouseley’s exit highlights need for game to get fully behind Kick It Out

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Flashpoint: Raheem Sterling suffered abuse at the hands of Chelsea fans on Saturday
Rex Features
James Olley13 December 2018

So, when does the whip-round for Herman Ouseley begin? The £5million parting gift for outgoing Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore was always going to prompt awkward questions for the wider game at some stage, and this week offers a particular apt example.

Days after Manchester City winger Raheem Sterling bravely triggered a debate about the prevalence of racism in football and the media’s role in it, one of the country’s foremost anti-discrimination campaigners announced he was stepping down from his role as Kick It Out chair after 25 years.

On the face of it, the timing of the announcement could suggest frustration over the regression that recent high-profile events involving Sterling and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang point to, but this column understands the organisation’s trustees were told of Lord Ouseley’s decision around two months ago.

Ouseley has received more hate mail this week in speaking out to support Sterling, but that is nothing new to a man who received bullets in the post and bottles through the windows of his family home in Peckham, having moved from Guyana during the 1950s.

Now aged 73, he simply felt the time had come to take a step back, but those close to Ouseley insist he will continue to play an active role in campaigning and tackling racial prejudice. He knows nothing different. He has dedicated his life to such a noble endeavour and should there not be some reward for that?

Scudamore’s payment — working out at £250,000 per club — was pushed through by the League’s audit and remuneration committee on the basis it was more than commensurate with the billions he has helped generate in television income by marketing English football’s top flight as the best in the world.

Yet, should we not place a significant value on the work Ouseley has done for decades in standing on the front line of the fight against discrimination?

The importance of that work has been highlighted by Sterling and many others this week, including Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles, who at the tender age of 21 and previously shy in talking to the media, felt compelled to speak out about the abuse he suffered at a youth team game in Germany when he was just 12.

Ouseley founded Kick It Out in 1993 and has never taken a penny out of the organisation. He would, no doubt, plough any windfall back into Kick It Out, whose funding struggles further highlight the misallocation of resources that the game’s powerbrokers should seek to address if they are serious about tackling discrimination.

Kick It Out operates on a three-year funding cycle and it is understood their current annual budget stands at less than £900,000-a-year. Of that overall figure, £650,000 core funding comes from the Premier League, Football Association, the Football League and the Professional Footballers’ Association, although not in equal splits.

Further sums are provided for specific events, including Kick It Out’s annual ‘Raise Your Game’ conference, an annual mentoring and leadership programme I have participated in before and seen first-hand the good work it does.

The absence of FA and Premier League figureheads fronting up in a week of navel-gazing and introspection across football only underlines the vital role Kick It Out plays, yet their operating budget is wholly insufficient to continue leading the progress that has been made in tackling what, sadly, remains a widespread and ongoing problem.

Who would want to replace Ouseley? He has thought about stepping down for years, but said in Tuesday’s resignation statement: “No one else has stuck their head above the parapet to lead the organisation”.

Were the game to give Ouseley and Kick It Out the recognition they wholeheartedly deserve, possible successors may view the role as more than the relentless uphill struggle it so often appears.

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