The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Thursday, April 8

Hey, everyone!

We’ve got defender Kerys Harrop at the top of the Hoddle today.

Ramble of the Day

The Soccer Collective on Racial Equality (SCORE) launched last year, immediately targeting the lack of diversity amongst technical staffs in the men’s game in the United States. Yesterday, the group announced a plan to combat it, involving men’s teams at the college level (per ESPN):

Dubbed the Clive Charles Diversity Hiring Initiative after the legendary University of Portland and U.S. men’s national team assistant coach, the effort is an opt-in pledge by Division I men’s soccer programs to include Black candidates in their pool for coaching vacancies. The initiative’s aim is to ensure equal opportunity in the hiring of coaches and to address the barriers that have faced underrepresented minority groups. ...

In a bid to increase access of Black coaches to job openings around the country, SCORE said it will maintain a “Ready List” of qualified Black men and women coaches. Collegiate programs that choose to enroll in the initiative pledge to interview at least one minority candidate which can come from the Ready List, though that isn’t required.

I’m pretty curious to see how this plan pans out, because it seems like a pretty strong model to get more Black people in coaching roles. The problem has generally been access to those roles (which inherently limits the pool of qualified candidates), and this addresses the need to bridge that particular gap.

The ESPN report says that SCORE hopes the initiative can be used at the professional level in the future. To me, the initiative seems like one that could be fairly easy to adapt to different leagues or sports, and perhaps even other places outside of sport. It addresses a very common problem — the problem SCORE identifies is a lack of diversity in technical staffs, but positions of power in most industries have a similar, if not identical, set of problems.

As always, it’s nice to see groups and individuals putting in the effort to make spaces more inclusive. To borrow a few words from SCORE executive board member Allen Hopkins, “actions mean everything.”

Links of the Day

Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold and Naby Keïta were racially abused on social media.

FIFA suspended the football federations of Chad and Pakistan for government interference and third party interference, respectively.

Arsenal’s Kieran Tierney will miss up to six weeks with a knee ligament injury.

The NWSL and the Players Association are officially negotiating the first CBA in league history.

American group Gamechanger 20 completed its takeover of Ipswich Town.

Portsmouth was kicked out of the women’s FA Cup for fielding an ineligible player against Cheltenham.

A longer read: Ben Fisher interviews Gillingham owner Paul Scally on being the only club in England’s top five men’s leagues to not spend money paying agents last year for the Guardian