Sunderland's first black player recalls racist abuse after debut

Roly Gregoire’s story is a correction to the record as much as a personal recollection. Sunderland’s first black player has said the racist abuse that followed his debut in 1978 was so painful he kept quiet for 46 years, a silence that reflects how little protection Black footballers were given when abuse was commonplace and often tolerated.

Gregoire signed for Sunderland from Halifax Town in January 1978 for £5,000 after impressing by scoring a hat-trick for Halifax reserves against Sunderland reserves. He made his debut on 2 January 1978 in a 2-0 home win over Hull City, and he later said the racial abuse began almost immediately after that match. It was the kind of hostility the Football Association has acknowledged was associated with football in the 1960s and 1970s, when Black players faced overt racism from fans at matches.

His time at Sunderland was short but significant. Gregoire made nine league appearances for the club and scored once, his only goal coming in a 3-1 win at Luton on 8 April 1978. He spent two seasons at the club before retiring in 1980 because of injury, but the damage from what he experienced reached far beyond the pitch. Gregoire has described how the abuse affected his family as well as himself, and said he sometimes wished he had never played football because of it.

Bill Hearn’s book Football’s Black Pioneers places Gregoire among 92 first Black players for Football League clubs, a reminder that Sunderland’s experience was part of a wider pattern across English football. Hearn said Gregoire was not only Sunderland’s only Black player at the time but probably the only Black person in the town. Gregoire was also one of the few living players featured in the project who did not reply to Hearn’s contact attempts, something Hearn attributed to bitterness about his time at the club.

The era was one in which Black trailblazers were finally breaking through but still had almost no institutional support. Viv Anderson became the first Black player to represent England in 1978, the same year Gregoire was dealing with abuse in Sunderland. His testimony adds a blunt human cost to a period too often softened in memory: Black players were present, visible and pioneering, but the game around them was still defined by denial, silence and hostility.