World Crisis Online

Andy Gray, who was sacked this week by Sky Sports as its most highly paid football pundit, reached his pinnacle as a player in May 1985 with Everton when they became Division 1 champions and won the European Cup Winners’ Cup.

It was a wrenching month for football, containing both the Heysel stadium disaster and the Bradford fire. Four years on, the Hillsborough catastrophe deepened English football’s malaise. The game has not been quite the same since.

No one disputes the progress made in terms of its infrastructure and finances. But, as this week’s furore involving Mr Gray and his off-air remarks about women showed, questions remain about how progressive the people involved – players, fans, administrators, pundits – are.

Since Mr Gray hung up his boots 20 years ago, football has been preoccupied with deep-rooted structural problems.

The Taylor report heralded all-seater stadiums; the Premier League triggered an explosion in the value of television rights, which has allowed clubs to build more modern and welcoming grounds; and the arrival of foreign-born players improved the entertainment on the pitch.

But football people have never quite shaken off their negative image, as Mr Gray and his co-presenter Richard Keys, who resigned this week, have found out to their cost. Whether the pair were harshly or justly treated, the debate about sexism in football is timely for the government and backbench MPs as they embark on parallel missions to put pressure on football authorities to accelerate governance reform.

Hugh Robertson, sports minister, last week described football as “the worst-governed sport in this country”.

A government insider said: “It has always been quite clear that we want better representation and diversity within sport at all levels. That means ensuring that the voices of women, black and ethnic minorities and others are heard at the top.”

David Goldblatt, author of a soon-to-be-published cultural history of English football, says the closed-shop mentality among football administrators and players can be traced back to the 1920s, when the Football Association expelled any club that allowed women to play.

“It is not displayed among sportsmen in other fields,” he says. “It’s an attitude that says, ‘If you’re not white and working-class like me, get lost.’ They are so profoundly insecure and emotionally dysfunctional.”

The Premier League claims to be making headway. A survey showed that of spectators in the 2008-09 season, 19 per cent were women and 8 per cent were black or from ethnic minorities. The Premier League has a £13m fund for clubs to promote education, social inclusion, health and equality.

Notwithstanding this week’s embarrassing episode, insiders at Sky say its investment has made football and other sports more accessible for women and families, even if the broadcaster does not show women’s football.

There has been a branding shift away from the “hard-edged” approach that characterised Sky’s competitive zeal in earlier years, but that has nothing to do with the widely held belief that women are the main purchasers of TV subscription packages. “That’s a myth,” insists one insider.

Football is making some strides, Mr Goldblatt says, such as increasing women’s participation. “But the real issue is behaviour in the workplace and what the senior leadership does and what it says is OK and not OK.”

When it comes to getting women into football’s higher echelons, Karren Brady, vice-chairman at West Ham United, is “one woman in a sea of testosterone, with no evidence that it’s getting very much better”, Mr Goldblatt says.

Even though some see football grounds as being filled with the ranks of the unreconstructed, Mr Goldblatt says that if there is a progressive streak among football people, it is to be found in fans. Research last year by Staffordshire university suggested that homophobia may not be as entrenched on the terraces as is generally assumed.

“Crowds are fragmented and complex things. I think we can overestimate how unpleasant crowds are,” he says.