Jason Roberts
Most large organisations talk about inclusion in the abstract while the operating systems underneath stay the same. The harder question is what a senior leader actually does when the existing institutions are not delivering and going public carries personal cost. Reform takes someone willing to break ranks and then build the replacement.
Jason Roberts MBE is the former Premier League footballer turned CONCACAF Chief Football Development Officer who led the player protest that forced English football to adopt structural race equality reforms.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jason Roberts
- He is the named architect of the 2012 player boycott of the Kick It Out campaign, which produced the PFA’s six-point plan and a UK Rooney Rule for coaching appointments. He can speak to inclusion as institutional reform, not as awareness work.
- He runs football development across CONCACAF’s forty-one member associations, including the Coaching Convention and the Pro Licence, which gives him a working operator’s view of talent pathways and governance at scale.
- He built and still leads the Jason Roberts Foundation, active since 2007 across the UK and Grenada, with a documented record of programme delivery rather than badge philanthropy.
- His MBE was awarded for services to sport in both Grenada and London, recognition of cross-jurisdiction social impact, not single-country celebrity endorsement.
- He has a long broadcast track record (BBC 5 Live 606, Match of the Day 2, Sky Sports), so he handles audience and conversation with the fluency of a working presenter.
Biography highlights
- Chief Football Development Officer, CONCACAF, leading coaching education and grassroots infrastructure across forty-one member associations.
- MBE, 2010 New Year Honours, for services to sport in Grenada and London.
- Founder and chair, Jason Roberts Foundation, established 2007, operating in the UK and Grenada.
- Premier League career across West Bromwich Albion, Wigan Athletic, Blackburn Rovers and Reading; full Grenada international.
- Director, West Bromwich Albion Football Club Limited (board appointment, April 2026).
- Broadcaster for BBC Radio 5 Live (606), Match of the Day 2 and Sky Sports.
Biography
In October 2012, a group of Premier League players refused to wear the Kick It Out t-shirt at the weekend’s fixtures. The protest had a named leader. Roberts, then at Reading, had written publicly that the campaign was under-resourced and that the league’s anti-racism work was failing the players it was meant to protect.
The fallout produced concrete reform. The PFA published a six-point plan that included tougher sanctions for racial abuse and an English version of the NFL’s Rooney Rule for coaching interview opportunities. Inclusion in English football moved, however briefly, from communications campaign to procedural change. That is the through-line of his career: refusing the symbolic version of an institutional problem and pushing for the operating version.
That instinct now runs at confederation scale. As Chief Football Development Officer at CONCACAF, he leads coaching education, the Pro Licence, and grassroots infrastructure across forty-one member associations from Canada to Caribbean micro-states. The work is structural. It is about who gets coached, by whom, to what standard, in which country.
The credentials on paper, MBE for services to sport in Grenada and London, a Premier League career of nearly five hundred appearances, broadcast roles at BBC 5 Live and Sky, and the foundation running since 2007, are real. They matter most as evidence that the inclusion argument and the development work are not separate tracks. They are the same job done from different positions.
Key speaking topics
- Inclusive leadership and institutional reform
- Race equality in elite sport and corporate parallels
- Talent pathways and development systems
- Governance and culture change in high-performance organisations
- Social impact through sport
- Leadership and resilience in competitive environments
Ideal for
- CHROs, DEI leads and culture transformation executives examining the gap between inclusion narrative and operating change.
- Board and executive committees responsible for governance reform in legacy institutions.
- Talent and learning leaders rebuilding development pathways and progression systems.
- Sport, broadcast and entertainment organisations facing reputational and structural inclusion pressure.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer picture of what it takes to convert an inclusion problem into a procedural reform with measurable obligations.
- A working view of how confederation-scale development systems are structured, useful by analogy for any federated organisation.
- Honest assessment of the personal and reputational cost of leading reform from inside a powerful institution.
- A grounded perspective on social impact programmes that survive past the initial press cycle.