Chelsea manager Frank Lampard has dismissed Manchester City‘s Raheem Sterling‘s claim that white managers have an easier path in the Premier League as too “casual” to be accurate.
Sterling appeared on BBC’s Newsnight in June and questioned how Lampard and Steven Gerrard secured top coaching jobs while contemporaries such as Ashley Cole and Sol Campbell did not.
– Insider Notebook: Top clubs face scramble to renew contacts
– Stream ESPN FC Daily on ESPN+ (U.S. only)
“There’s something like 500 players in the Premier League and a third of them are black and we have no representation in the hierarchy, no representation of us in the coaching staffs,” Sterling said.
“There’s Steven Gerrard, your Frank Lampards, you have your Sol Campbells and you have your Ashley Coles.
“All had great careers, all played for England. At the same time, they’ve all respectfully done their coaching badges to coach at the highest level and the two that haven’t been given the right opportunities are the two black former players.”
Responding to these comments, Lampard was quick to point out that Sterling was “brave” to address racism in football over the last two years and deserves credit for using his voice.
However, Lampard said that the midfielder’s comments on Newsnight were too simplistic a look at how the managers came to their roles.
“I think in the actual case of managers, I think he got it, from my point of view, slightly wrong, because it felt like a very casual comparison,” Lampard said.
“Because if you compare opportunities and pathways of individual managers, you can compare myself, you can compare Steven, you can compare Sol, who by the way did an incredible job at Macclesfield and the job now at Southend is tough, it’s one all of us would find difficult to do.
“Then you can compare Ashley Cole who finished his career last year with me at Derby, and is working away here [as Chelsea academy coach] with me and doing a great job, and I think he’s going to be successful whatever he wants to do.
“So I think it’s very hard to make that comparison from the outside.”