How To Create A Lost Generation
A user's guide to maintaining a sports business monoculture
Covid is in danger of creating a generation who will be lost to the sports business
This was what Amanda Fone said in last week’s podcast. Amanda is a recruitment consultant specialising in sport and entertainment sectors, and co-founded BAME2020 four years ago. Now it’s actually 2020, we talked about the project and the impact of Covid on the diversity issue across the sports industry as a whole.
My working assumption is that the sports business is predominantly white, male and skews quite posh. Amanda made the excellent point that we don’t know for sure because nobody measures it. In other words, in an industry that talks ad nauseam about data and evidence based decision making, there’s no data breaking down the sports marketing industry by age, ethnicity and educational background. Whose job is that btw?
A handy cut out and keep guide to maintaining a monoculture
It’s easy when you know how:
1) Ignore the fact that everyone in your office looks and sounds like you
2) Give internships to the your mates’ kids
3) Use the phrase, ‘They’ll have to hit the ground running’.
This is code for ‘we’re not going to spend money on training them’, which in turn means they’ll need to have at least six months directly relevant experience, which means you’ll pick the ones who’ve done an internship somewhere else, on someone else’s dime. Which also means they’ll probably live in or near London. Which means they’ve probably got access to money. Or parents with friends with a room in London. Etc etc, yada yada yada.
4) Insist on a degree for entry level jobs
This is a handy way of ensuring that poorer people can’t get in to the office, unless they’re cleaning it.
5) If in doubt, hide behind Covid
It’s become a Covid cliche to say that the economic slowdown will exaggerate existing trends. But when it comes to recruitment, the opposite is probably true. Amanda Fone’s point is that the progress being made on recruiting from a broader talent pool is in danger of regressing fast. Fewer jobs and more applicants will lead to less diversity and the sports biz will become more of a monoculture than it is already. Another Covid cliche is ‘If you haven’t done the work yet, you’re too late’. In terms of diversity, this means that if you haven’t challenged the narrowly defined culture of your organisation over the last decade, you won’t choose this recession to do it. When recruiting or choosing who to keep post-furlough, you’ll likely go to what you know - take the Flight to Safety™️- which in this context means you’ll hire people who look and sound like you, aka square one.
6) Equate workplace diversity with social work
Lesa Ukman’s phrase remains my favourite.
Beyond the sports biz bubble
In April UN Secretary-General António Guterres spoke about the acute impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on young people.
“The world cannot afford a lost generation of youth, their lives set back by Covid-19 and their voices stifled by a lack of participation.”
If we frame the sports business as a strand of the entertainment and hospitality sector, then former Bank of England head Lord Mervyn King has bad news.
The risk is that we end the furlough scheme too early…particularly in the entertainment and hospitality industries, where there is no prospect of them being able to get back to normal and having an adequate revenue stream.
See his point from a recent Tortoise talk:
In the same session, social scientist Wim Van Lancker noted how quickly the change has altered people’s career trajectories.
“There is a group of people emerging who were doing fine before and are now desperately in need of material help,” he says. “Those are mostly young people who were at the beginning of their careers, and who were working in sectors that have been hit hardest and that will presumably not be in a fully-working state for presumably months to come.”
‘The only one in the room’
I really liked how Bloomberg collected views on the black experience in American banks over decades.
It might seem impossible to tell the history of Black people on Wall Street. That’s because the finance industry shut African Americans out of its executive suites and banking partnerships and off trading floors for decades. Even now, despite diversity programs and pledges to do better, Wall Street’s highest echelons lack Black faces, with rare exceptions.
Another challenge to telling the story of African Americans in finance is that the people who’ve lived it blazed wildly different paths. There is no one definitive experience.
But all their stories matter. What happens inside this industry ripples out into American wallets, homes, neighborhoods, corporations, and government. Outright racism and institutional failings on Wall Street have limited Black wealth and dreams. But African-American bankers have also sometimes helped pave the way for others to succeed.
Nice drive-by tweet from Tariq Panja, a former Bloomberg hack and now NYT sports news wizard.
He makes a very good point.
Got an idea?
If you’ve got ideas for podcasts and want to collaborate, get in touch with me, Richard Gillis, or my biz partner Sean Singleton, via unofficialpartner.com
Coming soon: we’re approaching our 100th Unofficial Partner podcast, with a suitably special guest. Till next time.