Football is rife with a shocking level of “institutional discrimination,” a think tank founded by a group of former Premier League players said yesterday.

The Sports People’s Think Tank (SPTT) will release a report in Parliament today exposing the prejudices faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people looking to take up positions of authority in the game.

Figures published by the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) earlier this month showed BAME people currently fill just under four per cent of backroom staff positions in the Football League.

“Football has failed to complete the promise of true equality,” said Jason Roberts, a former Blackburn striker and a founding member of the think tank.

“The numbers point to a problem that any right-minded individual would be shocked at.

“Most disappointing is the game’s overall refusal, up to this point, to engage in some dialogue which challenges the decision-makers and leadership of the game, rather than focusing on the victims of these practices — prospective BME coaches and managers.”

Daily Mirror chief sports writer Ollie Holt said that part of the problem is that black players are trusted to use their feet but not their brains, which is why there is a lack of black managers.

Speaking yesterday morning he said: “Over the last couple of decades ex-players have not been trusted to become coaches and they were not trusted in the thinking positions.

“People say ‘of course there’s no discrimination, look at all the black players in the game.’ Yeah that’s fine, they’re trusted because of their athletic ability. But if you want to extend it even further, how many black players do you talk about do we trust to play central midfield as playmakers? Not many.

“Yaya Toure perhaps. Patrick Viera in his pomp. But we laud these players, we laud black players for their steel, their athletic ability. We talk about them in terms of their power, we don’t talk about them in terms of their brain and that kind of attitude persists through to management.

“We trust them to be players, we don’t trust them to be managers.”

Holt went on to reveal that the PFA have black coaches with the badges needed to manage at the highest level but are constantly not given the chance.

“The PFA has a ready list of black coaches who are ready to manage and are still frankly being overlooked,” he said.

The research was funded by Football Against Racism in Europe and may prompt renewed calls for ‘the Rooney Rule,’ a regulation used in the NFL that makes it compulsory for employers to interview minority candidates for vacancies.

The SPTT is backed by PFA chief executive Gordon Taylor and also includes West Brom Under-21s development coach Darren Moore and former Birmingham defender Michael Johnson.