ECB steps away from Rooney Rule for England coaching jobs
The England and Wales Cricket Board has stopped routinely using the Rooney Rule when appointing coaches for England teams. The Board says its recruitment has "evolved".
Put simply, the Rooney Rule is an interview guarantee. In American football, it requires clubs to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for each head coach or senior football operation vacancy. The NFL introduced it in 2003, and it is named after diversity committee chairman Dan Rooney.
The ECB announced its own version in May 2018. It 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. That pledge has now gone.
The ECB confirmed that not all of 16 roles connected to the England men's and women's teams since 2024 were appointed under the rule, according to BBC Sport. It added that it no longer uses the rule as a routine step. The shift covers the senior England set-up and the pathway roles that feed it.
Recent appointments include Richard Dawson, James Foster and Eric Simons on the England men's Test staff, while Michael Yardy was named elite national batting lead. In April 2025, then director of women's cricket Clare Connor named Charlotte Edwards as England women's head coach without an open recruitment process or use of the rule.
This is not the first question over the policy. In 2021, the ECB was accused of ignoring the rule in an elite coaching appointment, when Richard Dawson, then head coach at Gloucestershire, was named Elite Performance Pathway Coach, as reported by ESPN. The Board defended its processes at the time. The episode left the rule under close watch.
Other sports have kept their own versions. English soccer adopted a Rooney Rule in January 2018 for future national-team management jobs. In the United States, the NFL expanded its resolution in May 2020 to require at least two minority interviews for head-coach vacancies.
Cricket's wider equity review also forms part of the background. The Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket was announced in March 2021 and later concluded that discrimination was "widespread" in cricket in England and Wales. At the top of the current England structure, Brendon McCullum will continue as head coach across all three formats, the five-day Tests, one-day internationals and T20s, the ECB said in March 2026, according to Reuters.
For fans picking this story up, the issue is simple process. Who gets interviewed shapes who gets the job. The ECB says it has moved on, and the next hires will test that claim.
