Viv Anderson insists there is “absolutely no chance” that he will see a black England men’s manager in his lifetime. The 68-year-old points out that there remains a dearth of BAME head coaches in the EFL.

Nottingham Forest’s Nuno Espirito Santo and Port Vale’s Darren Moore are the only BAME bosses in the top four divisions of English football. There have been just 11 black Premier League managers. The senior England men’s team have never had a black manager and Anderson does not expect that to change any time soon, having seen Thomas Tuchel replace Gareth Southgate.

“A black England manager?” repeated Anderson when the notion was put to him in an interview with the Mirror. “If we do, it won’t be in my lifetime. There’s absolutely no chance.

“In fact, it’s not really worth talking about until we see a few black managers in the Premier League. It’s over 30 years since I was player-manager at Barnsley. I think Keith Alexander at Lincoln was the only other black manager in the English game.

“One newspaper article said it was the start of a new generation. But nothing has changed. The only English-born black manager in all four divisions is Darren Moore. How can that be, when so many black players have played the game at the highest level over the last 50 years?

“When I was a kid kicking a ball about in Nottingham, I wanted to be Clyde Best, the West Ham striker, because he was the only black face I saw on TV playing football. Who's the managerial equivalent of Clyde?”

Anderson believes the reason behind the lack of BAME representation in football management is the lack of diversity in boardrooms. In 2018, the Football Association introduced a version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which stated that teams must interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) candidate for each head coach. Anderson wonders if it has made a difference.

He continued: “Most football clubs are owned by millionaires and billionaires. How many of them are black? How many of them will even have black friends? Name an executive who's black. I can only think of Les Ferdinand, who spent a few years as QPR’s director of football.

“I’ve been invited to England’s game against Latvia. I’ll watch [Jude] Bellingham, [Kyle] Walker and [Marcus] Rashford - and when I walk into the lounge at half-time I’ll be surrounded by white men, most of them aged 65 and over. These people run the game.

“Every team has black players. But the people in charge, the ones who hold the power, are all white. Until that changes then nothing changes.

“I remember the Football League implementing a version of the NFL’s ‘Rooney Rule’ a few years ago so that clubs were forced to interview black candidates for coaching roles. Is it still in place? I’m being serious. I honestly don’t know if it’s still a thing. If it is, then it isn’t working.”

The Football Association has a target of making 30 per cent of the England men’s coaching staff - from the senior team to the Under-17s - BAME by 2028. As part of the scheme, Justin Cochrane was added to Tuchel’s staff at the start of the year.