The Football Association (The FA) has today published its annual report on the Football Leadership Diversity Code for the 2021/22 season.

The landmark Code was introduced in October 2020 to ensure English football better represents our modern society, focusing on increasing equality of opportunity to encourage recruitment of diverse talent across senior leadership teams, team operations and coaching set-ups.

The Code now has over 60 signatories, including all Premier League clubs, 32 EFL clubs, The FA, Premier League, EFL, Barclays Women’s Super League and Barclays Women’s Championship, which are all committed to tackling inequality and embedding greater diversity in the long term.

During the second season of the Code, progress was made within Brentford FC, with positive increases made across almost all targets. In this period, 33 per cent of senior leaders, 31 per cent of team operations staff, 33 per cent of coaches for our men’s teams and 100 per cent of our senior coaches hired by Brentford are Black, Asian or Mixed-Heritage.

We fell short however, for our targets to hire females into senior leadership positions and in team operations roles. However, this is an area we continue to focus on and with the number of females hired since this recent sent of data, we are confident and optimistic that next year’s results will paint a different picture.

The full report can be read here.

Jon Varney, chief executive of Brentford FC, said: “Since the last report, we have completed our first-ever season in the Premier League. This, alongside the growth of the Club has given us opportunities to invest in, and expand, our staff and to attract talent from across the country.

“During this reporting period, we feel that we have made positive steps to diversify our shortlists, which has led to us meeting almost all of the targets. We remain committed to casting our net as wide as possible in the future to build an even more diverse workforce, while we will continue to always hire the best person for each job.

“As well as implementing a new HR system which has improved our EDI application monitoring, we have also piloted an anonymous recruitment process for a number of executive roles within the Club. This involves us focusing purely on applicants’ responses to work-related questions in the application stage, stripping bias which may typically be present when reviewing CVs and educational backgrounds.

“This trial has yielded positive results to date and has enabled several candidates from underrepresented groups to make the final stages and in some cases, secure a full-time contract with us.

“Importantly, during this time we achieved the preliminary level accreditation in the Premier League EDI Standard – a significant landmark for us as we endeavour to put inclusivity at the heart of everything we do.”

FA chief executive, Mark Bullingham, added: "I would like to thank everybody involved for supporting the Football Leadership Diversity Code, as part of a collective desire to create meaningful change.

“This year shows some signs of progress, with a shift in recruitment processes that will start to change the game and the three governing bodies exceeding seven out of eight targets.

“However, while we saw clubs exceeding diversity targets for senior coaches in the men’s game and coaches in the women’s game, there is still a huge amount of work to be done across the game.

“We understand that substantive change will take time, but a number of clubs have already made progress, and we expect to see more clubs follow that lead in years to come."