Introduction
Leon Mann was told, over and over, for fifteen years, that he was doing too much. Spread too thin. Trying to change the world instead of picking one thing and building it properly. He kept going anyway, because he had worked out something most people never test: if nobody funds you, you can still do the work, on your own terms, with your own money, at your own pace. That single decision, to control what he could control rather than wait for permission or a budget, is how the Football Black List and BCOMS (Black Collective of Media in Sport) got built, and how they are still standing today.
The maths nobody wants to say out loud
Mann's starting point is simple and uncomfortable. Roughly 42% of Premier League players are Black. Across more than twenty clubs, there was, at the time of this conversation, one Black boardroom member and one Black club owner \[CHECK: verify current figures, names given were Daisy Davis at Brentford and Ben Robinson at Burton Albion since around 1987\]. The Football Association has since appointed a Black board member, former player Rio Ferdinand \[CHECK: name heard as "Joby McKenna" in the transcript, likely garbled ASR, verify actual name\], which Mann calls a genuinely significant step.
His point is not that the culture around football is not diverse. Black culture is visibly celebrated, Black fans attend games, Black players are wealthy and well known. His point is narrower and harder to argue with: who manages the power and the money? By his estimate the Black community contributes more than a billion pounds to the football industry, and almost none of that translates into boardroom or ownership representation. That gap, not the visible culture, is what he calls the real measure of progress.
Why a Black-led organisation, and why that was ever controversial
When Mann was building the Football Black List, well-meaning corporates suggested he soften the name. Call it something about diversity instead, they said, because "Black" might invite the British Asian community, the Jewish community, and others to also expect attention, and that felt complicated for them to manage. Mann's answer was straightforward: these are Black-led things, proudly so, built from a Black lens and a Black perspective, and there is no reason a Black-led organisation cannot also work on wider underrepresentation, which is exactly what has happened since. The insistence on renaming or diluting the focus was, in his account, more about other people's discomfort than about the actual goal.
Funding yourself so nobody else can slow you down
The hardest years were the years without institutional backing. Free consultations, coffees with major businesses who would ultimately say they had no budget to contribute, years of being told the ideas were good but the money was not there. What kept Mann going was reframing the problem: if you do not fund me, I still control my own time, and I am still going to do this. He kept convening senior leaders, kept mentoring young Black and Asian men and women, kept raising difficult questions, kept talking to politicians, on his own terms and, increasingly, on his own money, funded by success in his consultancy work.
That changed abruptly after Raheem Sterling's Instagram posts about the media's treatment of young Black players, and again during the Black Lives Matter moment. People who had never returned his emails were suddenly calling. Mann was clear-eyed rather than bitter about it: the industry arrived five, six, seven years later than it should have, but he had already built the thing they now wanted to be part of.
BCOMS: built in response to a whispering culture
A year after founding the Football Black List, Mann founded BCOMS, the Black Collective of Media in Sport, in response to what he describes as a whispering culture around race inside institutions like the BBC, where issues were discussed quietly rather than addressed directly. Rather than only raising complaints, his approach ahead of London 2012 was to bring senior leaders solutions, concrete, actionable ideas for what could actually change, rather than simply naming what was wrong.
An obvious recruitment pipeline that nobody had tried
Mann makes a pointed observation about how football boards actually recruit. When clubs look for new board members, they tend to look toward business and the City, often toward senior lawyers and professionals from a small pool of universities, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Bristol, and similar. He asked, reasonably, why nobody had built a pipeline that looked for Black professionals coming through those same institutions, since that is evidently where recruiters already look for everyone else. One senior leader told him that would be cheating. Mann still does not understand the objection: if that is genuinely how the industry finds its next leaders, deliberately looking for Black candidates through the same channel is not favouritism, it is just doing the same thing properly.
Seeing people as athletes and nothing else
Underneath the statistics, Mann's deeper argument is about how institutions actually see Black communities. Money gets spent identifying Black athletes. Money gets spent on initiatives aimed at keeping Black communities out of knife crime and trouble in inner cities. Almost no money gets spent developing Black leaders. That pattern, he argues, is not neutral, it reveals how organisations actually relate to Black people: as talent to extract, or as a problem to manage, rarely as leadership to invest in.
What good leadership actually requires
Asked to define leadership, Mann lands on responsibility and impact: a leader is assessed by what they make happen, not by how many things they personally do well. The leaders who impress him are the ones who admit what they do not know, who say plainly that they do not have the lived experience of a Black person in Britain but understand it matters to the business, and who then pay for real expertise rather than treating diversity as an occasional favour called in over a coffee. Too many leaders, in his experience, quietly decide that what they do not understand is not important, and starve it of attention and investment as a result.
Slowing down without stopping
Mann is candid about a tension he is only starting to sit with. He has spent two decades working at a pace he calls unsustainable, proud of being able to do everything himself, uneasy at the idea of working four days instead of five. But he is also honest that he does not expect to reach the end of his life wishing he had worked more, and does expect to wish he had spent more time with his children. He is beginning, hesitantly, to ask what it would look like to build enough around him, in BCOMS and the Football Black List, that they no longer depend entirely on him, so that stepping back does not mean the work disappears.
