- Tuesday, February 25, 2025
Asad Farooq claimed the club chose a candidate less experienced than him despite telling him that his experience was not ‘strong’.
By: Shubham Ghosh
ASAD Farooq, a 25-year-old British Asian man, is suing Liverpool Football Club, alleging racial discrimination in job application.
Despite his degree in stadium and event management, and experience at Tottenham Hotspur and the Qatar World Cup in 2022, Liverpool rejected his application for an administrative role in November last year without an interview, he claimed, according to The Guardian.
The advertisement for the position said the candidate would ideally “have experience of working in an elite sporting environment”, which made Farooq believe he had a decent chance of grabbing it.
But he was left disappointed when told through a message, which was seen by the Guardian, that “the level of experience you demonstrated in your application was not as strong as the candidates that were taken forward for interview”.
Farooq was even more annoyed when he saw on LinkedIn that the person who eventually got the job had zero experience in football and did just one full-time job since becoming a graduate. The former then spoke to Yunus Lunat, a lawyer who was also the first Muslim to sit on the Football Association (FA) council and an ethnic minority representative on Liverpool’s official supporters’ committee.
Farooq, who lives in Birmingham, told the Guardian that as a south Asian, he had worked “really hard” to get his foot into the door and alleged that nobody cared to give him an opportunity.
“I’m more than capable of doing the [Liverpool] job. I’m not going to drop this, because they’re claiming that they are all about diversity, they’re claiming that they want south Asians to come into the football industry, but then they do these bad recruitment practices and don’t give us these opportunities,” he was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
“They’re talking about how they want to break down barriers but this is not breaking down barriers.”
Farooq also claimed that the club refused to cooperate when he sought its diversity statistics.
The only figures that are publicly available are in the FA’s 2022-23 Football Leadership Diversity Code report, which wants 15 per cent of new recruits in senior leadership and in team operations roles to be black, Asian or mixed-heritage.
Liverpool’s results for new hires were zero and nine per cent respectively, compared with 9.1 per cent and 11.2 per cent across all 54 signed up clubs.
Among the candidates shortlisted in interviews at Liverpool, 82 per cent had at least one male black, Asian or mixed-heritage candidate and 68 per cent had at least one female black, Asian or mixed-heritage candidate, the Guardian report added.
According to Liverpool’s website, it is “striving to lead the way when it comes to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)” and the club holds the Premier League’s highest honour for EDI.
While the club chose not to make any remark on Farooq’s case, it is likely that it will try to get the case thrown out at an employment tribunal hearing in March next year.
Lunat said when he approached the club on Farooq’s behalf, it said his high salary demand was the reason for his application getting rejected.
Farooq also said that the individual picked for the position he applied for was only a temporary one and had been subsequently replaced. The person was, however, retained in a different role within the club.
The British Asian, who has over 500 hours of volunteering with the FA as a team liaison officer, asked, “If you’ve got an issue with diversity, how can you give somebody a position on a temporary basis when they clearly don’t meet the job description and then give them a full-time role afterwards?
Lunat, who is also a partner at Ison Harrison in Leeds, was quoted as saying by the Guardian, “Remember, we’ve always been told that there are no Asian footballers because Asian parents have focused on education. It seems that despite being educated and qualified, Asians do not get opportunities in sports administration.
“It is a sad indictment of the football workforce that there has been little if any improvement in its race demographics in the last 20 years and I am still churning out the same comments and statements.”
