Leroy Rosenior: Dealing With Racism As A Footballer

The issue of racism is at the forefront of global thinking.

Football has seen players uniting to ‘take a knee’ and call for change in society as a whole and in the sport itself.

As part of our Black History Month coverage, we invited Fulham favourite Leroy Rosenior MBE to speak with our Academy players about his experiences growing up as a young black footballer.

Leroy made over 100 appearances for Fulham, winning the Club’s Young Player and Player of the Year awards in 1982 and 1987, respectively.

He enjoyed a sparkling career and, in amongst his three stints at Fulham, he had spells at Queens Park Rangers, West Ham United, Charlton Athletic and Bristol City.

Leroy hopes that his experiences within the game can help our future potential stars.

“Hopefully I can give them some insight based on my experiences being a young player which might help them moving forward. What I have found is that when I’ve spoken to groups before, my words have resonated with someone and as a result they open up about some experiences that have happened to them and they share.

“It’s made them feel better and sometimes they’re able to move on from those negative experiences.

“I’m a South London boy. My parents lived very near to Brixton prison and I’m the only boy, with four older sisters. When I was growing up, I used to walk through the prison to get to secondary school. My dad always used to say to me, if you ever do anything wrong that’s where you’ll end up.”

From growing up in the shadow of Brixton Prison, Leroy’s route into professional football came when he least expected it.

“I was playing for London Schoolboys in Kingston and that was how I got into football. We played a Chelsea team, I finished playing the game and a guy called Derek Quigley, who’s sadly no longer with us, came up to me and asked if I’d like to go for a trial.

“I was 17 at the time and in the space of three months I had become a professional footballer. It all happened very quickly for me.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t take the striker long to be reminded that the issue of racism wasn’t just a societal problem, but also existed on the pitch.

“We played in an FA Cup game and Fulham at that time were a really young side. It was all about developing young players like Paul Parker who went on to play at Man United and Tony Gale who was later at Blackburn.

"I was playing in this FA Cup tie and as soon as I walked onto the pitch, the two-centre halves in this top flight side started racially abusing me. They were like a tag-team, one would do it and then the other one would do it.

“This was the first time I had experienced it in that setting. I’d already experienced it at school and out and about in South London, but not while playing football. I can tell you now, I don’t remember one minute of that football match.

“At the end of the game, as I was coming off the pitch, one of the centre-halves came to shake my hand. In all honesty, I told him to f*** off. I was so upset. We lost 2-0 and I took no part in the game whatsoever because of the abuse I was getting. I realised then that if I wanted to have a professional football career, I would have to deal with it.”

Leroy faced further abuse during a trip to another First Division club, but this time it was coming from the stands.

“When I used to play, there were big 10-foot fences around the edge of the pitch. Leeds was one of the worst places to play at the time for players. Towards the end of the game, I remember running over to the corner flag to pick the ball up for a corner and, as I looked around, a crowd of about 15,000 were giving me and Paul Parker the Nazi salute while chanting, ‘Sieg Heil’.

“Paul was 18 and I was 17. It was directly towards us and we just wanted to get out of there. I spoke to my dad and told him that I wasn’t sure I could do this anymore.”

Leroy’s father shared some words of wisdom with him which went on to shape how he would confront this issue then and to this day.

“My dad always used to say to me, keep your powder dry. If you blow up at the time, nobody’s listening. You have to take a backwards step, a deep breath and if you want to express yourself, express it at the right time when you’re going to get a positive outcome.

“That one experience taught me that, if I wanted to be successful, there were certain things that I needed to keep my powder dry about. If somebody abused me from then on, there were other ways that I could deal with that by scoring goals, by being aggressive and also by, when the time was right, sharing those experiences with people.

“One incident that always stood out to me happened at Fratton Park when we faced Portsmouth. I was walking off the pitch and a young boy, probably about 10 or 11, spat at me.

“The person stood next to him, who I assume was his father, started laughing at me. Then eventually everybody in that stand just started laughing at me. The rest of my team went absolutely ballistic.

“We went in the dressing room and they said ‘what was that all about?’ I actually got angry with them and pointed out to them that the weeks before when those supporters were doing the Nazi salute, they didn’t think anything of it. A couple of weeks before that, somebody was throwing bananas at me. Again, they didn’t think anything of that.

“It was only once they saw something physical happen to me that they reacted. I just pointed out to them that I felt the same when that boy spat at me as I did when fans were making monkey noises at me.

“I had great relationships with those players and they started to understand what I had to go through as a black man. It was a totally different experience to them. That’s why my book is called ‘It’s Only Banter’. Because people always used to tell me that, but it wasn’t. Racism is different.”

Leroy has been at the forefront of anti-racism campaigning within British football and was subsequently awarded an MBE in 2018.

“I’ve been with ‘Show Racism The Red Card’ for about 16/17 years. Shaka Hislop, who used to play for Newcastle and West Ham, suffered racism a lot. He was a goalkeeper and so it was worse for him. I was able to run around the pitch whereas he had to stay in his box and receive abuse from behind him all the time.

“Shaka started the campaign 25 years ago. He was once driving home with his family and he stopped at a petrol station. As he was filling up his car, four or five men started shouting racist abuse and he was concerned to say the least. The four guys started coming towards him, and he thought they were going to attack him. They recognised who he was and they ended up asking for his autograph.

“He realised then that it wasn’t about him. He was more frightened about what would have happened to his family in the car. He realised he had a responsibility to not only them, but to everybody else.”

Leroy believes that educating people is key in our battle to eliminate racism.

“I once did a talk and a lady came up to me and said, ‘you’re a really lovely coloured chap’. I told her that I prefer to be called black. Nobody had ever told her about any of this and she explained that she didn’t like the word black because when she was growing up, black was an awful word.

“You had black and white minstrels, you had black Monday etcetera. I explained to her why it was actually a positive word but no one had ever had that conversation with her. The point I’m trying to make is that sometimes people label other people as being racist, but sometimes it's a lack of education.

“You can still turn that around. Some are just racist and you cannot waste your time with those people. I want to focus on the people that might be ignorant, might read the wrong newspapers, might get the wrong messages and when you challenge them, they’re open to listening.

“That’s what I found at a lot of football clubs in all honesty."