Why are football crowds so white? - a discussion
The Athletic FC Podcast
The Athletic
4.0 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2020
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Athletic's Carl Anka, Ryan Conway, Roshane Thomas and Dan Barnes discuss their article that asked 'Why are football crowds so white?'. They share personal experiences as black journalists at football grounds, consider whether the game is too quick to pat itself on the back over racism and what meaningful change will look like.
You can read the articles discussed on this podcast in full here:
Why are football crowds so white? – The Athletic
Football is too quick to pat itself on the back over racism
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, listener. |
| 0:15.2 | I'm Carl Anker, football writer at The Athletic, and today we have a special podcast. Last Sunday we published an article |
| 0:23.4 | with a headline why are football crowds so white. The AP's called a strong reaction with numerous |
| 0:28.6 | comments from subscribers and people on social media. This is a big topic. It was a collaborative work. |
| 0:34.9 | I did it with Ryan Conway, our Derby County writer, Shane Thomas, our must ham writer, and Dan Barnes, who is one of the senior editors at The Athletic as well. |
| 0:44.1 | And this piece took us the best part of 90 days to go over the life, talking to academics, |
| 0:52.0 | football fans, stewards, ex-players and football agents. |
| 0:56.9 | We managed to start what we thought was a very, very valuable conversation. |
| 1:00.6 | And on this podcast, we're going to explore that just a little bit more. |
| 1:10.6 | Hi, Rashane. Could you just tell me a little bit about your football in history and your background? |
| 1:15.4 | I studied sports journalism at the University for the Creative Arts. My final year at uni, I had about 10 work placements. I went from everywhere from Peterbury United, Brighton. I even had a workplace workplace like Hello magazine. I mean, that's how serious I've taken it. And yeah, I had loads of work experience, talk sport in particular. And we offered me a job before I graduated, which was great. Also volunteered for the voice newspaper. That was great. I were to attend a lot of Premier League games. And then after that, I went to freelance at the Sunday Times. |
| 1:47.0 | And now I'm here at the Athletic. |
| 1:48.3 | And Rishane is our West Ham writer. |
| 1:49.7 | Also found in press boxes up and down the country, |
| 1:51.5 | we have Ryan Conway, our Derby County correspondent. |
| 1:53.8 | Ryan, could you tell us a little bit like your background as well? |
| 1:57.2 | Yeah, so graduated from the University of Huddersfield with a degree in sports journalism. |
| 2:06.6 | Then pretty much before I got this job was found doing work experience. |
| 2:12.6 | If there was a news desk that needed a hand on it. I was normally there. |
| 2:23.9 | And then got this job about a year ago now, and we move. |
| 2:26.1 | We also have Dan Barnes, who's one of our amazing editors, |
| 2:27.4 | Adiathletic. |
... |
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