Stormzy has won three British awards, headlined Glastonbury, persuaded Usain Bolt and Jose Mourinho to appear in a music video, and appeared alongside former Crystal Palace player Wilfried Zaha at AFC Croydon. Acquired Athletic.
However, his skills on the pitch are not that great. “I’m bad at football. I never intended to be a football player,” he said. “But if I knew how to be a critic, [I’d have gone down that road]. Data He might have known how to become an analyst and all the complicated behind-the-scenes work that people don’t know about. ”
Britain’s biggest rapper’s new mission is to provide people with this information – shine a spotlight on football’s employment off the pitch and address the racial inequalities plaguing the industry. .
To follow in the footsteps of his #Merky music label and book, he founded #Merky FC (FC stands for Football Career. Last week, he #MerkyFC Headquarters A soccer field, recording studio and games center in Croydon, south London, was built with the help of Adidas. Adidas’ Steve Marks said it would allow young people across London to take part in football or “explore their creative passions in music, content creation, esports and more”.
Last year’s report found that while 43% of Premier League players were black, only 4.4% of managers and backroom staff were black. black soccer player partnership (BFP) warned that progress had been “glacial”.
Stormzy said: observer He said addressing this disparity was “the whole reason” for the project.
“You might see a black player, but you might not see a black referee or a black commentator. All other jobs are quote-unquote ‘talent,'” he said. . “I’ve always thought, no, we’re so much more than that. If we had a way to be everything else, surely we could do it.”
It’s about “encouraging young people”, Stormzy added. He said there were “many” reasons why black people had not succeeded behind the scenes in the football industry. “I think people don’t have that information, they don’t have that knowledge, they don’t have that education, they don’t see inside, they don’t see the route to get there.
“Even the fact that those routes are invisible to people is a big deal. So I thought if we could make these things more visible and actually deliver information to people, we could do that.” It was. [the solution]”
The Football Association created the Football Leadership Diversity Code to address this issue, but only 56 of 92 Football League clubs have signed up, and the BFP believes there are greater barriers to promotion in lower leagues, In other words, there is a “glass ceiling,” he said.
Only two black referees have ever refereed a Premier League match, and only two of the commentators used by ITV and the BBC for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar were black, but experts There was a diversity of participants and co-commentators.
The new #MerkyFC headquarters comes two years after its founding. It has helped 60 young people find training and jobs at Fulham, Manchester United, Arsenal, the Scottish Football Association, Sky Sports, ITV and other media, games and data companies.
In 2018, Stormzy (real name Michael Omari Owuo Jr.) launched the Stormzy Scholarship with the University of Cambridge, which will pay tuition fees and maintenance grants for two students a year. He initially had no plans to meet with the students who received the grant.
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“I was adamant that I didn’t want to meet them in real life,” he said. “I didn’t want you to feel any pressure to meet them.” [me] – Just don’t face them, let them breathe and do their own thing.
“But I was confident that I would meet them, and it was well deserved. I think it taught me that scholarships are actually needed. They just don’t have these flipping diversity quotas or fancy It’s not just buzzwords and things that feel very superficial. It’s real people who really get a chance to show their potential at the end of this situation.”
He is also currently meeting with young people who have benefited from MerkyFC. “I have a kid who is one of his graduates from his first year at MerkyFC and he was able to get a job on his Versus. [a football news site] And in the second year, it became permanent. So yesterday we met him at the recital, and he was working on Versus. It was like a full circle moment.
“There were a lot of kids there. I go to Old Trafford for a Man United game and some of them are working that day and come up to say hello. It’s a beautiful story. We have a lot.
“I hope that in five years I’ll meet someone – maybe do something on Sky Sports, or go to a game at Old Trafford or go to the Champions League final – and someone will tap me on the shoulder. I hope they say ‘I do.'” It was my second year at MerkyFC.
“That’s all I want. To see the ripple effect, the domino effect, to make sure it’s real and not just something that looks good and sounds good.”
