England's cricket board drops routine use of Rooney Rule in national coaching hires

When Clare Connor named Charlotte Edwards as England women’s head coach in April 2025, she did so without an open recruitment process or the Rooney Rule. Connor was then director of women’s cricket.

The appointment is one example of a wider change at the England and Wales Cricket Board, which has abandoned routine use of the Rooney Rule when hiring coaches for its national teams.

In 2018, the ECB committed to interview at least one applicant from an ethnic minority background for every coaching role across the national men’s, women’s and disabled teams.

The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket concluded that discrimination was “widespread” in cricket in England and Wales.

The policy came from American football. Introduced in the NFL in 2003 and named after the league’s diversity committee chairman Dan Rooney, it requires clubs to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for every head coach or senior football operation vacancy.

The ECB used the rule routinely in national-team coaching recruitment for several years. Yet, when BBC Sport examined 16 roles linked to England’s men’s and women’s teams filled since 2024, the board confirmed that the rule had not been applied to every appointment.

There was a different process in July, when Stephen Fleming became Test head coach. The ECB said at least one ethnic minority candidate was involved in that selection.

Fleming and Brendon McCullum are England’s men’s head coaches. On Monday, Richard Dawson, James Foster and Eric Simons joined the men’s Test coaching staff, while Michael Yardy was named elite national batting lead.

An ECB spokesperson said: “Coach recruitment processes are tailored to the requirements of each role. Some appointments involve open recruitment processes, while others involve targeted searches for specialist skillsets, experience and leadership qualities. At times we recruit an individual, and at others we recruit a team.”

The board said its recruitment methods had changed over the past eight years. It also pointed to the limited number of candidates available for high-level coaching jobs in elite sport.

The ECB has repeatedly said it wants cricket to become “the most inclusive sport in the country”. It said a longer-term route to better representation lies in building a coaching and management pipeline, including more ethnic-minority and women coaches in the system, rather than routinely applying the Rooney Rule.

In 2025, the board funded over 1,000 coaching scholarships, with 22% going to coaches from ethnically diverse communities. Since 2021, ethnic-minority professionals have made up 21% of senior coaching course participants and 19% of professional course participants.