KICK IT OUT chair Sanjay Bhandari, who has been a leading voice in football’s strategy to tackle online abuse, believes the game must act now act to tackle British South Asian under-representation.
Despite British South Asians making up around eight per cent of the population, footballers from the community make up less than 0.5 per cent of all professional players- a figure that Bhandari calls “the single biggest statistical anomaly in English football".
“We know what the data is telling us. The data is telling us there aren't enough British South Asians making it into the elite game,” Bhandari said famously last year, calling for more action in this space.
Bhandari is an active and recognised thought leader in equality, diversity and inclusion. He was a member of the Premier League’s Equality Standard Independent Panel for four years and is part of the Government-sponsored Parker review into the ethnic diversity of UK boards.
He has a portfolio career and is also a Board Member at a law firm and a number of charities. Prior to this, he had spent three decades in law, compliance and technology including 12 years as a partner of EY where he also served as a Chief Innovation Officer.
At EY, he was also a founding member and led their involvement in the Parker Review on ethnicity on UK Boards which encouraged FTSE 100 companies to have at least one British born director of colour by 2021 (which achieved over 90 per cent compliance).
Since 2019, he has pursued a portfolio career and has seven to eight different roles that he performs part-time. He is Chair of the Satellite Applications Catapult which is an innovation incubator in the UK space technology industry that is partially funded by the UK government.
In sports, he is the Chair of Kick It Out, English football’s leading equality charity; bringing in new partnerships, including a £3 million investment package from Sky, as the broadcaster onboarded.
He is also on the Board of the Lawn Tennis Association (the governing body of British tennis) and in that role also join some committees for the Wimbledon Championships.
He still does some work in law as he is on the Board of the law firm Travers Smith and the Serious Fraud Office (which is the UK’s main law enforcement agency for serious and complex fraud cases).
Bhandari has drafted a series of written evidence on tackling online abuse to parliament on behalf of the football community and twice appeared to give oral evidence to public committees.
In the Space technology sector, Bhandari’s main role at the Satellite Applications Catapult has been to support the team in particular in better telling the story of how it contributes to the UK space economy.
Bhandari was born in Wolverhampton in May 1968, one month after the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell, who was his local MP whose words echoed through his childhood. He moved to London in 1990 and has been there ever since.
